Love that you wrote this up and shared Emre! I definitely think we need more people having this kind of discourse publicly so appreciate you contributing.

I wanted to share some mostly anecdotal things from my experience in AR and XR in what seems to have worked for building deep/committed engagement from volunteers & activists:

• I definitely resonate with the importance of social connections for building engagement. I thought XR and AR did this very well with things like: spending time together in an office, hanging out after work, shared housing^[1], encouraging people to get to know each other more deeply (e.g. via check-ins, emotional sharing, etc) and more. I think this really builds the commitment of activists to not just the mission but also to not letting their friends in the movement down. We're doing more in-person things with UK Voters for Animals and definitely think focusing on in-person organising is where you build the greatest depth (and lots of people crave it now!).
  • Some useful books on the importance of social activities for organising
    • How Organisations develop activists by Hahrie Hahn - also a very good review on the EA Forum here.
    • The Making of Pro-life activists by Ziad Munson. There are some especially interesting things from the pro-life movement e.g. apparently 50% of people who join initially don't believe in pro-life as an issue but they attend social events and essentially become conditioned over time via social norms. Similar to the NRA, the key thing is making fun, enjoyable events which bring people and the advocacy follows on from that naturally once they develop a stronger view on the issue.
• It's touched on by the book by Hahrie Han but something that I think XR was also really good at was building commitment & empowering people by giving them significant responsibility. For example, when I first joined XR, my first role was to help build XR in 4 countries, which is an insane responsibility to give someone who just joined and is 22 years old. But I found this very inspiring and tried to step up to the plate to deliver. Lots of other people did similar things and it really is inspiring when people believe in you.
  • I think this is a huge difference from the very understandable method of activism which says "we need to make it as easy as possible for people to engage" and only sends people 1-click campaigns to contact companies, etc, without giving them any meaningful responsibility.
  • I really do think the animal movement could do with a bit more of this "empowerment" mindset rather than just giving people very small discrete tasks.
• On your point of single-issue organisations: I actually don't perceive this as an issue and think it might be more damaging if we try to take a position on all things. If we do, I think we could risk becoming very politically homogenous (even more so than we already are!). When I think of some other successful movement organisations (e.g. XR, ActUp!, SNCC), there wasn't necessarily a coherent worldview shared by all members and these organisations didn't (I think) discuss lots of issues outside of their core focus. 

1. ^{^}

   Which also has a bunch of downsides but more on that another time.. 

Seems important, thanks for raising! Your first suggestion seems very plausible to me, your second seems somewhat plausible but less likely/important.

My first reaction is that animal advocacy orgs should consider optimising for community building and mobilisation (as an interim goal). My impression (which may be wrong) from my involvement with the movement was roughly that orgs were usually optimising for mobilisation around specific objectives rather than actually trying to set up a long-term community and strong activist base. I expect a simple mindset shift from "my job is to generate progress on our campaigns" to "my job is to grow a community of sustained and dedicated activists" would unlock a bunch of options. E.g. it probably means more things like meetups, reading groups, etc. 

Second reaction: I believe there's a rich academic literature on mobilising supporters and sustaining engagement in social movements. So I asked Claude for a summary which I'll post as a reply to this comment. There's some empirical support for your suggestions!

Appreciate you thinking about and giving this thought publicly Emre.

A colleague shared a model of three concentric circles representing engagement, attributed to M. Bauman, but I've yet to see the original source. The model categorises engagement as follows:

• External Partners: "How can I benefit?"
• Members: "How can I contribute?"
• Core: "How can I serve?"

If I understand correctly, your concern is that the core segment isn't expanding sufficiently within EA-supported animal organizations. My interpretation of this model is that there should always be an invitation to engage more deeply. The changes you are considering for yourself seem to align with this principle, and I would be very interested to hear about your experiences if you implement them.

Some actions I’m considering:

-Switching to a physical office and using it as a community space. Maybe even sharing space with a vegan restaurant.

-Spending more time in-person with our supporters myself.

I'm not sure whether the issue lies in the prevalence of single-issue communication or in the belief that organisations must embody people power to drive change. If our focus is on achieving quick wins in animal welfare, there might be less emphasis on harnessing people power. Similarly, if an organisation is predominantly funded by a small group of major donors, it may not feel the need to cultivate a large supporter base.

I think growing people power is important and perhaps the strongest tool to do this is local volunteer groups. An example comes to mind of an org that has their flagship campaigns as a cage-free, broiler work and had a local volunteer group run their own campaign to ban pony rides at a local fair. The volunteer campaign used generally the same approach of a pressure campaign that would be used on cage-free and broiler work and gave the volunteer group an up close look at the strategies  and allowed them to see and create change that was more tangible and personal to them. I saw this have the effect of deepening the engagement of many of the volunteers to do more of their own work and also engage on bigger asks on the organisations flagship campaigns. 

What you propose as your actions on single issue campaigns, I think can happen at local group gatherings where people have space to discuss, and see the variety and nuance in others thinking and importantly take action that drives work forward which I think helps with that engagement. In person informal discussions can also feel like lower stakes in expressing a dissenting view vs sharing on a public forum.