"I think if EA's on the forum feel uncomfortable about this, the general public is likely to take it even worse than us" -- I really disagree with this. EA's values and sensibilities are very different to the average person. Things that EAs consider horrifically callous are normal to the average person and vice versa.

Examples of the former: eating meat, keeping all your wealth for yourself, 'charity begins at home'

Examples of the latter: measuring impact and saying we shouldn't give resources to organizations that don't perform well against these measurements, donating to help shrimp rather than people, donating to help strangers overseas rather than your local community, expressing support for billionaires who give away some of their wealth

There hasn't been backlash to this campaign from average people, only EAs and animal advocates. 

Haha kayfabe is exactly right. Let's not spoil it for the fans

Veganuary seeming against it is part of the bit. These media outlets hate Veganuary and wouldn’t cover it if they thought it was what they wanted. We (FarmKind) have an announcement coming tomorrow explaining the context behind this campaign but the TL;DR is that it is not encouraging meat eating, it’s encouraging donating as another option for people who aren’t willing to change their diet, and generating coverage for Veganuary who have a harder time getting in the media each year without a new hook 

Strong agree from FarmKind’s perspective. An equal bugbear for me is that to the extent EA orgs focus on comms, they’re insufficiently focused on how to communicate to non-EAs. There seems to be a resistance to confront the fact that to grow we need to appeal to normal people and that means speaking to them the way that works for them, rather than what would work for us

One very important problem (that I don't have the solution to) is that being "an EA funder" is not binary -- all sorts of funders make grants to charities that would be considered EA (and "EA charity" is a fraught definition itself but let's bracket that). It seems entirely plausible to me, nay perhaps probable (given that the Randomstas and evidence-based GHD predates EA) that the majority of "EA funding" is coming from grantmakers that aren't being counted here. This would render any trends we see in the data in this post not reflective of what's actgually happening with "EA funding".

A bottom-up charity (or specific project or even grant) based method would probably be a lot better (although very hard and not your responsibility to create).

Anyway, meta is hard. Good work for creating this resource!

For those excited about Shrimp Welfare Project, FarmKind is hosting a fundraiser for them from International Shrimpact Day™ (25th November, 2025) through until Giving Tuesday (2nd December, 2025). 

There will be ~25 blog posts on Substack making the case for donating to shrimp, as well as a live debate between Jeff Sebo and Lyman Stone (moderated by Peter Singer) on whether donating to shrimp is a good idea, and a light-hearted debate between Bentham's Bulldog and Jeff Maurer (moderated by Josh Szeps) on whether donating to SWP or GiveDirectly is a the better idea.

You can follow the fundraiser here :)

We hope to raise $100k (and redeem $50k in contingent matching funding from a generous Anthropic employee) 🦐📈

Thanks for writing this! It seems all the more important to get this right given the trend that the beings on the edge of our moral circle tend to be the most numerous, meaning that if we take the possibility of their sentience seriously, we may spend quite large amounts of resources trying to help them. Seems worth trying to figure out whether beings on the edge of our moral circles are basically all that matters or don't matter at all!

Agreed! We're trying to find people with audiences who are sympathetic the cause but unwilling or unable to change their diet (e.g. Sam Harris) and provide them with a non-diet-related solution that they can speak to their audience about without having to fear backlash due to perceived moralising about people's diets

I have no idea about that. I’m not talking about whether cage free or broiler work is a better idea for a new organization — I’m answering your question about whether an org that started off doing caged free might expand to broiler :)

No, not to many animal advocates and vegans. I’ve had plenty reach out to check my “vegan credentials” to determine whether (in their view) I’m “on their side”