Connect For Animals 2025 Strategic Plan

By Steven Rouk, Sage Max @ 2025-02-13T15:55 (+1)

Connect For Animals is a nonprofit platform for people who want to help end factory farming.

Our mission is to find, connect, and empower every person globally who wants to help end factory farming. By doing that, we believe we can accelerate the end of factory farming and work to bring about a better world for animals.

Table of Contents

*(SP = Strategic Priority)

Summary & How You Can Help

Connect For Animals is a platform connecting people who want to help end factory farming. By making it easier to find events, organizations, and advocacy opportunities, we aim to grow the movement and increase participation. Over the past year, we’ve expanded our platform features, improved user engagement, and grown our operations. We have over 1,700 registered users, strong engagement with our weekly Events Digest newsletter, inspiring testimonials from users who have gotten more involved in animal advocacy work, and a solid foundation on top of which to build.

Strategic Priorities

This year, we are especially focused on these priorities:

  1. Understand Users and Usage – Conduct user surveys and interviews, monitor key metrics, and turn understanding into feature ideas.
  2. Use Understanding to Meet User Needs – Develop features to increase engagement and facilitate user-to-user connection.
  3. Expand Fundraising Efforts – Build out our fundraising processes and systems.
  4. Increase Use of AI and Continue Developing Backend Infrastructure – Expand backend metrics infrastructure to monitor key metrics, and continue integrating AI into data processes where it can save time and energy.
  5. Be More Visible – Grow our user base and presence through marketing, PR, and outreach.
  6. Reduce Team Bottlenecks and Improve Processes – Make our processes clearer and more consistent, and reduce operational bottlenecks.

How You Can Help

If you're excited by our mission, here are ways you can support us this year:

Background

The Problem

Factory farming causes an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. We believe that ending factory farming is one of the most pressing issues of our time. But factory farming, and animal exploitation in general, is deeply entrenched in society, which makes it very difficult to address.

The Opportunity

Thanks to growing awareness, there are millions of people globally who already want to help end factory farming. But many of these people are disconnected from each other and don’t know how to take action in ways that are right for them. This leads to isolation, demotivation, recidivism, and lost impact. By connecting and empowering these millions of people, we can accelerate the end of factory farming.

The Solution

Connect For Animals exists to find, connect, and empower people who want to help end factory farming.

We work to help people find “right fit” connections, resources, and impact opportunities, and to make it easy and fulfilling for people to connect with each other and take action. And we aim to do this at a scale that will move the needle on these issues, helping get tens of thousands of people more engaged with animal advocacy.

To accomplish this, Connect For Animals has built an online platform to help pro-animal people find events, discover organizations, learn about advocacy opportunities, and connect with others. The platform is available as both a website and mobile app (Android and iOS), and our weekly Events Digest email newsletter provides users with a comprehensive list of upcoming virtual events, local events, and conferences relevant to ending factory farming.

We will work to become a go-to online platform for people who want to help end factory farming, focused on connection, education, and action. By empowering tens of thousands of people, we will grow the animal advocacy movement, accelerating the end of factory farming and bringing about a better world for animals.

Imagine that…

Connect For Animals is a go-to social network app for people who want to help end factory farming.

Anyone who cares about animals and wants to help end factory farming uses Connect For Animals for events, connecting with others, and finding ways to get active. Every organization posts their events and campaign actions on Connect For Animals, making it easy to take action and stay updated.

The movement grows and gains greater ability to create change through our increased people power.

“Oh you want to help end factory farming? (Oh, you’re veg*n?) Do you know about Connect For Animals?”

Present Results and Impact

Platform Development

We made significant improvements to the Connect For Animals platform to enhance usability, engagement, and functionality across web and mobile.

  1. Rebrand: We did a complete rebrand with the help of User-Friendly, with a new logo, new fonts, and improved color selection. We received very positive feedback on the rebrand, and the new logo and brand help us be perceived as trustworthy and professional by people who discover us.
  2. Events: We streamlined events functionality for users by enabling easy event duplication, refining event filters, and adding mobile bottom-menu functionality. We also improved our backend events management processes by developing new scripts to automatically detect duplicates, check events for relevance, and auto-publish relevant events.
  3. Mobile App: We released the first version of our mobile app for iOS and Android, enabling users to access events, connect with others, and stay updated on the go. (We’re currently planning a big press campaign to launch the app.)
  4. User Profiles: We added the ability for users to create profiles and discover other users. We also created an improved platform onboarding process that encourages users to create their profiles immediately after signing up, boosting profile creation rates from 12% before the change to 45% after the change.
  5. New Home Page: We design a new Home page as the default landing page for logged in users. The Home page shows users upcoming virtual and local events, local groups, and people who live nearby. This makes it easier for users to discover different types of relevant resources quickly when they first load Connect For Animals.
  6. Integrating Artificial Intelligence: AI tools now help with events data processing and event publishing, greatly improving their efficiency.

User Data

Stories of Success

Users have told us that Connect For Animals helps them find events, take action for animals, find other pro-animal people, and discover new resources. Users also appreciate the high-value nature of the Events Digest email newsletter, including the diverse learnings, resources, and inspirational messages shared in the opening text of each email. Organizations have also told us they have gotten new event attendees and volunteers through Connect For Animals.

Below are testimonials from users illustrating the impact of Connect For Animals.

“I found Connect for Animals on a Friday, and by Sunday, I was already attending my first event. It’s exactly what the animal advocacy movement needed, a space to find resources, events, and like-minded people all in one place. I’m excited to see this platform grow because it’s making it easier than ever to get involved and take action for animals.”

“Thanks for what you do and for connecting people to the Cube! We had someone new join us at the Cube today and she loved it. She mentioned she found us through Connect For Animals!”

“My local area doesn’t have one place with a comprehensive list of all the animal events going on, besides CFA. The CFA weekly digest let me know about a protest I had missed through other channels. I attended and met activists I didn’t know before. I had a great chat with the organizer, and we’ve opened up the possibility of collaborations between our organizations in the future.”

“I just signed up and already learned about vegan organizations and events in my city I had no idea about. I’m going to spread the word 💪”

“I actually met [two local animal advocates] through Connect for Animals. Having dinner with them was also the first time that I’d heard about Earning to Give as a potential pathway and set me on a deeper dive into the EA side of animal advocacy.”

5-Year Vision

By 2030, we aim for Connect For Animals to be a go-to platform globally for people who want to help end factory farming, with tens of thousands of monthly active users.

We anticipate strong user growth as we refine our platform, expand outreach and visibility, and improve retention. If current trends continue, we could see tens of thousands of new users over the next five years and improved functionality that helps users get maximally engaged in right-fit ways.

To ensure that our platform measurably increases advocacy participation, supports organizations, and strengthens movement-wide connection and collaboration, we will track and optimize for:

  1. Advocacy event sign-ups per month
  2. Users per week taking action via events, campaigns, or volunteering
  3. New connections per week through messages, resource or opportunity discovery, or collaboration
  4. Pro-animal organizations and local groups actively using CFA for outreach, events, campaigns, and mobilization

We will also expand our geographic reach, with a goal of localized platform support in key regions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

As a young and fast-evolving organization, our strategy and projections will adapt as we learn. However, our core mission will guide our steps—to grow the movement to end factory farming by ensuring that every pro-animal person anywhere in the world has the connections, resources, and support they need to take action.

2025 Strategic Priorities

This year, we have identified the following strategic priorities for us as an organization. These are actionable areas that we believe will have the largest impact on our growth and success this year, based on our organizational mission and understanding of our current situation.

We will review our progress on a monthly and quarterly basis, and will do a comprehensive review at six months to determine if we need any major changes.

SP #1: Understand Users and Usage

*(SP = Strategic Priority)

Why?

We have plenty of usage data and many success stories, but knowledge gaps still limit our ability to prioritize in the most effective way. We would like to increase our monitoring of key metrics—like conversion rates, churn rate, and monthly active users—that could directly influence our decisions, as well as proactively request feedback about user needs and impact on a more regular basis. We can become a more effective “learning organization” that tests, learns, and adapts based on information from users and the outcomes of experiments, staying curious about our users, our programs, and our impact.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

SP #2: Use Understanding to Meet User Needs

Why?

As we continue to understand what our users need and how they are using Connect For Animals (SP #1), we will develop product features and services to meet those needs, using experiments to test ideas (such as concierge tests or “person behind the curtain” tests) before fully committing.

As the product continues growing to better meet user needs, this will also impact our marketing and the rate of user sign-ups. Word of mouth marketing will continue to increase, and our marketing efforts will have greater ROI due to better product-market fit.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

(Continuous user research will lead to more detailed action items in an iterative process.)

SP #3: Expand Fundraising Efforts

Why?

Additional funding allows us to grow our team’s capacity and open up new opportunities for marketing, product development, etc.

In addition to deepening our relationships with our existing pro-animal foundations (THANK YOU!), we also want to build relationships with more foundations in order to continue expanding and diversifying our funding.

This year we also want to continue growing our base of individual donors in order to give individuals a way to support our growth.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

SP #4: Increase Use of AI and Continue Developing Backend Infrastructure

Why?

Strategic use of AI and backend infrastructure already saves us hundreds of hours of work per year (cost savings of thousands of dollars in labor). As one example, we automate much of the process of finding pro-animal events and adding them to CFA. Further investment could save us more time and effort on existing projects and expand what we’re able to do with our budget and team capacity, including providing our users with additional functionality.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

SP #5: Be More Visible

Why?

So far, the majority of our efforts have focused on product development, with comparatively little effort invested in marketing, advertising, and other ways of being visible to our target audience and the pro-animal movement. While this has allowed us to build a strong platform, our ability to attract and retain users is limited by awareness.

By investing in greater visibility of our product and our team, we can grow our user base and be seen by the movement as a valuable tool for animal advocates.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

SP #6: Reduce Team Bottlenecks and Improve Processes

Why?

A stronger organizational structure with well-documented workflows and more distributed responsibilities will allow Connect For Animals to scale more effectively. By developing clearer, consistently followed processes, we can empower all team members to pursue goals while maintaining strategic alignment through effective communication and review channels.

Targeted Metrics for 2025

Specific Actions

Appendices

Appendix A: Targeted Results

The Strategic Priorities above target the following primary results:

  1. Increase the number of active users: More users means more actions being taken, more events attended, and more connections made, which leads to increased impact for animals.
    1. Regular users
    2. Organizational users
  2. Improve user retention and engagement: Higher engagement translates to more advocacy participation and a stronger network effect, increasing platform value.
    1. Regular user needs
      1. Connection
      2. Learning / Education / Resources
      3. Action
    2. Organizational needs
      1. Engagement
      2. Action
      3. (future/speculative) Donations
  3. Expand team capacity: Greater team capacity means a greater ability to produce new and better features and services for users, as well as a greater ability to support the fundraising and operational needs of the organization.
  4. Grow funding: Increased funding gives us the ability to hire staff and contractors to expand our team capacity, pay for advertising and creative marketing campaigns, pay for technical products and services to expand our platform’s functionality and backend operations, and plan further ahead.

Appendix B: Targeted Impacts

We believe these are the primary impacts that our work has (or could have in the future), and that these impacts are what drive change for animals:

  1. Increased advocacy: More users actively engaging in advocacy events, campaigns, and volunteering.
  2. Decreased recidivism (diet change, movement engagement): Supporting users in maintaining long-term involvement in the movement and pro-animal/pro-veg lifestyles.
  3. Increased information and resource flow: Making it easier for pro-animal people to discover opportunities, organizations, and actions.
  4. (future/speculative) Increased movement funding: Encouraging a culture of donating throughout our user base, such as by nudging users towards the Giving for Animals 10% Pledge.

Appendix C: Visual Theory of Change