On February 15, 2024, Impactful Animal Advocacy helped facilitate a Digital Platform Coordination call to start conversations between members of the animal advocacy movement and see where work might intersect. Several common themes arose with potential opportunities that will be followed up on. We invite anyone involved in digital platforms, either using existing solutions or building your own, to join the conversation on Slack.

Background

In the past year of managing a community on Slack, we have seen several cases where duplication was avoided by people posting questions in the #help-requests channel. As we started considering building our own custom digital solutions, we found that others were eager to share and coordinate. 

Goals

1. Conserve movement resources by resolving unintentional overlap & duplication
2. Address current tech challenges by finding common solutions

Themes

Diversity of projects: A wide variety of projects, platforms, and initiatives were discussed during the conversation, including customer relationship management (CRM) databases, matching solutions, event databases, job boards, directories, and more. 

Some seem similar but target different audience segments. There was no consensus about whether pure project duplication was good or bad for the movement – competition can sometimes increase innovation, but limited funding/nonprofit incentive structure may reduce our capacity to compete. We have updated the collaboration’s goal to avoid unintentional duplication.

Technical challenges and solutions: Much of the movement relies on digital tools in their animal advocacy efforts, and some individuals expressed having difficulties finding or bridging solutions for their projects. Some issues that came up include obtaining users, having/retaining technical expertise, and keeping updated on what others are working on. 

Sharing of digital tools: Many participants were open to sharing platforms, APIs, resources, or select data to help the movement having to reproduce it. Many were also open to collaborations and cross-promoting relevant platforms. We found that there is some overlap in several existing solutions, such as CRM-style databases (both to store/track information and for candidate matching), events, and existing audiences. In addition, many groups could benefit from future technologies, such as animal advocacy-trained AI models.

Next steps 

Share info about your platform use

If you are needing help or could offer help, feel free to add that info in this form.

Collaborate & participate 

If you are using digital platforms in your work, please join us in the #s-platforms IAA Slack channel. (If you aren’t yet a member, fill out the application form to join and then add the channel after) 

We’ll use the Slack channel to ask for questions with technical/platform bottlenecks, share experiences with different solutions, and offer/request collaborations. Several threads have been started to continue ongoing conversations from the meeting.  Any future collaboration calls will also be announced in the Slack channel.

Reach out with questions

Do you have a lot of experience with certain platforms? Or specific data that may help others? You can reach us in Slack, email, or FAST Forum DM.

Thank you to all participants from the following organizations (a→z)!

• Animal Advocacy Careers
• Animal Alliance Project
• Animal Rights Calendar
• Beyond Animal
• Connect For Animals
• Impactful Animal Advocacy
• New Roots Institute
• Open Paws
• Our Planet Theirs Too
• Sentience
• Tälist
• We Animals Media

The Impactful Animal Advocacy team are not platform experts, but rather see Slack as a space that can foster conversations and collaboration. While we kicked off this Digital Platform Coordination conversation, we do not see ourselves as the owners and would be excited to see the community own this important work.