This summer, we organized our first animal welfare career event, and the response exceeded our expectations.
We brought together over 80 students and professionals for a half-day in-person event, all united by a single question: How can I make the biggest possible difference for animals through my career?
We designed the day to answer that question practically. At the event, speakers from research, nonprofits, and business shared concrete strategies for creating impact. A hands-on workshop also helped attendees translate these insights into personalized next steps for their own career paths.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive; attendees described the event as inspiring, motivating, and immediately valuable.
If you're passionate about animal welfare and want to help others turn that passion into a high-impact career, organizing a similar event could be highly valuable.
In this post, we'll share:
- Why you should consider organizing a similar event in your region
- What it actually takes to pull it off
- Key lessons learned from our first edition
You should do it too!
Low time investment
With five organizers, we held seven 90-minute meetings spread over several months, plus an estimated 15-20 hours per person for outside work and event logistics.
Strong untapped demand
Despite minimal promotion, we attracted 80 attendees. Participants demonstrated serious commitment, with many traveling several hours to attend.
Effective outreach framing
Positioning the event around animal welfare and alternative protein careers drew people who care about these issues, especially those who don’t already make much impact on these areas in their daily lives. This framing lowered barriers to entry compared to explicitly EA-branded events.
Planting seeds of effectiveness
Having speakers with an EA perspective introduced attendees to effectiveness as a key consideration in career choices. The event encouraged critical thinking about impact and provided practical tools for action, while also highlighting long-term and systemic approaches to helping animals beyond direct work.
Personal and professional benefits
Organizing the event offers valuable experience in event management, expands your professional network within the animal welfare space, builds your reputation in the space, and develops transferable skills relevant to career growth.
Impression of the event
How We Organized the Event
Build the right team
To organize this event, we brought together EAs focused on animal welfare and members of the local Vegan Student Association (VSA). This varied background was valuable in organizing the event because we had access to both the EA and vegan communities—our target audiences. Moreover, we had built-in reach to students across Dutch universities (VSA has chapters at most).
When assembling your team, prioritize finding members with event organizing experience and knowledge of the animal welfare space. Those with animal welfare backgrounds will be particularly valuable for identifying compelling speakers and understanding your audience's interests. If you don't have a team ready, post on Hive, EA Slack channels, animal welfare forums, or contact a local vegan group. You'll likely find interested people, as we found out; many want to help animals but don't know how. Once you have your team assembled, maintain momentum and cohesion through regular in-person meetings (ideally with dinner), which we found helped significantly with team building.
Let's get physical!
Doing this event in person made a huge difference, as it made it easier to connect with other attendees and the speakers. We also had many breaks to network (with speakers) and discuss learnings.
Event logistics
A substantial part of organizing such an event is logistics. Think of things like picking a strategic date, finding a venue, arranging catering, etc. Collaborating with a student organisation enabled us to get a free venue, which can be quite expensive otherwise.
Speaker curation
We recruited diverse, high-quality speakers representing different pathways to impact:
- Ministry of Agriculture representative
- Cultivated meat entrepreneur
- Animal-free testing innovator
- Earning-to-give professional
- Vegan restaurateur
- Keynote: Tobias Leenaert
Getting a well-known keynote speaker will likely boost the event's success. This can attract attendees through name recognition, provide the credibility needed to win over skeptical potential attendees and amplify your promotion reach when they share the event on their social media.
We deliberately avoided speakers from vegan activism (already well-known) and lobbying (limited job opportunities), focusing instead on concrete career paths. Once speakers were confirmed, we held prep meetings and provided expectation documents.
Promotion
We leveraged low-effort promotion channels aiming to reach groups potentially interested in such an event, this included: organizers' personal and organizational social media accounts and WhatsApp groups, speakers' social media platforms, vegan newsletters and websites.
Workshop
Near the end of the event, we held a workshop facilitated by Animal Advocacy Careers. This workshop encouraged participants to reflect on how to apply insights from the career day and provided a welcome shift from passive listening to active engagement.
What we would do differently
After the event, we sent out a feedback survey. Based on this, and our own experience of the event, there are a couple of things we would do differently next time:
Structured networking
We would introduce peer groups or facilitated networking sessions to help attendees make deeper connections, rather than relying solely on organic mingling.
In-person workshop
We would host the workshop on-site rather than use a remote facilitator to maintain energy and engagement throughout the event.
Better pacing
We would build in more time between sessions and include proper breaks to prevent fatigue and give people space to process information and connect with each other. Also have a speaker clock so they don’t go over time.
World Vegan Career Day
Organizing an animal welfare career event is achievable for most people, addresses a clear need, and creates meaningful impact. Wouldn’t it be nice to not only have one local but a true World Vegan Career Day? You can make this possible!
If you have questions, want our promo/event playbook, or are organizing an event like this, please send us a private message via the forum. We're happy to help or think along!
This event was a true team effort. We therefore want to express a huge thanks to the rest of the team (Leon, Aiko, and Laura) for their contribution, and to the VSA board members for their support.