Our chapter-building strategy
Given our limited resources, we must be rigorously strategic in determining where to launch our next chapter.
The animal industry is worth just over $1 trillion in the US alone. Yet the best funded animal rights organization in the movement—PETA—sits atop roughly $50 million in annual funding. For every dollar the animal rights movement has to fight animal cruelty, the animal abuse industry has at least $1,000 with which to daily oppress billions of the most innocent, defenseless, and vulnerable among us and suppress the activists fighting to free them.
Given this stark reality, we must be as strategic as possible in the deployment of our incredibly limited financial resources, including the metropolitan areas in which we plan to launch chapters. Each chapter will have associated expenses, from protest materials to renting venues for community-building events. We must therefore prioritize where, precisely, in the Midwest we will open our upcoming chapters.
To this end, we have formulated the Desirability Score Index, a tool that weights the following characteristics to determine just how “desirable” it is to open a chapter in a certain metropolitan area: 1) population size of the metropolitan area, 2) size of the online vegetarian/vegan (veg*an) population in and around that metropolitan area, 3) distance of that metropolitan area from St. Louis, and 4) presence (or absence) of a local animal rights organization in that metropolitan area.
Each of these criteria were handpicked as we believe they best predict a chapter’s ability to succeed. The larger the metropolitan area, the more people we are able to engage and thus the larger the overall impact we are likely to generate. The larger the online communities of veg*ans, the easier it will be to promote events, recruit leaders, and secure donors. The closer to St. Louis, the more easily we can attend their most crucial events and they can attend ours. And the lack of a local animal rights organization? All the more reason to prioritize expanding to that metropolitan area.
Our current strategy is even more fine-grained; for example, right now we are prioritizing opening chapters in metropolitan areas with human populations in excess of 100,000. Chapters built in such communities are more likely to succeed A) because we can more easily band together a sufficient number of people to sustain the chapter and B) because of the greater potential to reach thousands upon thousands of individuals through our advocacy efforts in such metropolitan areas.