Jump to content

2021 year in review

Our 2021 year in review

We're so happy to release our 2021 Year in Review! Scroll down to read all of our accomplishments thanks to your generous support, our partners, and most of all our amazing volunteers.

We explored and grew so much this year

This year, we refined our goals and built projects that focused primarily on filling existing gaps in our movement. We grew more meaningful partnerships and we greatly improved our branding, design team, and services offered. We're excited to show you what we've done below!

We launched 8 new projects for the movement

Four of which were in-house projects. We were also lucky enough to work on projects with Sehati Animal Sanctuary, Animal Alliance Asia, Vegan Japan Consulting, and many more.

We expanded our advisory team of vegan experts

We're so thankful to have more advisors to lean on such as Katie from Animal Equality, Chris from APEX Advocacy, Tessa from the Pollination Project, and Casey from Faunalytics. To browse more of our advisors, click here.

We expanded with 5 new teams in just 6 months

More teams, more impact! We're so happy to announce the growth of our community with five new amazing teams. Please welcome Team Avocado, Team Mango, Team Watermelon, and Team Sweet Potato.

/_next/static/media/icon-avo.2bba0c76.png
/_next/static/media/icon-peach.42033ced.png
/_next/static/media/icon-mango.75b0ba3a.png
/_next/static/media/icon-wmelon.afc328be.png
/_next/static/media/icon-spotato.ba08e17e.png

Feedback and testing

To be more effective and meet the needs of our movement, we not only expanded our advisory team, but we expanded how we receive feedback. We used a combination of internal polls, newsletters, advisors, and testers to determine next steps for both our projects in development and our own growth.

Together we were able to launch several surveys for before, during, and after projects in order to collect better data on requested features and issues. We are extremely pleased to say that we made meaningful changes based on over 80% of the individual feedback received from testers.

Encouraging community growth

Documentation

Growth doesn't just come in numbers, it comes in structure. We combined our organization documentation from four different platforms into one user-friendly section of our new website.

Technology

We've embraced new technologies to improve the overall quality and robustness of our projects, as well as meet our developers where they're at.

Safety

We now have a Code of Conduct for our growing community, and ask all volunteers to complete our Effective Communication, Unconscious Bias, and Consent training courses in order to foster a healthy and inclusive environment.

Our new animated videos

We've partnered with Expanded Circle Collective in order to produce two animated introductory videos for Activist Hub and Vegan Bootcamp! These videos are fantastic resources for viewers to quickly get familiar with our work. We look forward to collaborating with them in the new year.

Minor changes with a big impact

šŸŽ
Created guidelines around brand, design, and content
šŸ„
Incorporated new technologies including Docker, LaravelShift, Vue, Tailwind, React, Svelte, and more
šŸŒ½
Introduced a system to collect regular feedback from our advisory board
šŸ„”
Added three new courses to Vegan Bootcamp
šŸŒ¶ļø
Streamlined our volunteer application process
šŸ„’
Presented Vegan Linguists at 2021 Animal Advocacy Conference Asia
šŸŠ
Launched a community voting channel on our Discord server
šŸ‹
Leveraged external platforms, such as Reddit and Twitter, to promote our services
šŸ
Added localization to projects for more accurate and clearer translations
šŸ
Started hosting weekly office hours for our team to chat, work, and play

Designs for Vegan Orgs

We had the chance to provide on-the-house design support to vegan organizations that needed to create their brand and identity, as well as stand out in the competitive digital landscape.
Vegan Consulting Japan design
International Vegan Film Festival design
Solutionary Vegan design

Featured blog posts

We've been having fun with our blog! We launched our ā€œMeet The Teamā€ series so we could feature the incredible work done by our team and spotlight the dedicated volunteers behind the scenes. We plan to deliver more amazing content in 2022. Stay tuned!

Featured projects

Activist Hub
Activist Hub logo
Vegan Linguists
Vegan Linguists logo
3 Movies
3 Movies logo
Watch Dominion
Watch Dominion logo

Activist Hub

We surveyed over 1,100 animal rights activists to understand what tools would best support their advocacy. The number one request was a method of monitoring our effectiveness in order to make informed decisions about our strategy and future efforts. So, we created Activist Hub!

Activist Hub is an online tool that allows activists to see how many people they have inspired to watch documentaries, to take a vegan challenge, and have gone vegan!

Activist Hub also acts as the worldā€™s first animal rights social network! Add friends, join groups, share or create posts, strategize and talk with other activists. Our hub is 100% free to use for any individual or organization advocating on behalf of animals.

Brand Guide

Our rebrand

This year, we decided to professionally rebrand both the organization and our website from the ground up. We wanted our branding to still deeply represent our tech background, but also be far more inviting and fun to better represent our work and our community.

We saw an immediate increase in applications on both our website and social platforms from interested volunteers for those who found us on either platform.

Our branding was done by our newest Team Lead, Kate Rodman, who's been at the heart of transforming the way we work and look at design here at VH.

Building meaningful partnerships

This year we looked back at our previous partnerships and brainstormed together on how our future partnerships could lead to more effective and long-lasting relationships. We wanted our partnerships to extend with more complexity and with more impact for both them, and us.
Partnership with The Pollination Project

We were very happy to announce a partnership in where we're able to offer up to $1000 USD in seed funding grants for outstanding, and effective, animal rights activism! Specifically we're looking for individual or grassroots groups whose primary purpose is to help reduce suffering for non-human farmed animals.

In our first month alone, we averaged one grant request per day received by various activists and organizations. Grant requests were for a wide variety of forms of activism, including: Singing, Virtual Reality, Drawing, Photography, Videography, Baking, Fundraising, Welfare Awareness, Child Education, Youth Skills, Capacity Building, Farming, Campaigning, Printing, Litigation, Animal Rescue, Wild Animal Advocacy and more!

We're excited to see where this partnership leads us in the future as we work together with The Pollination Project to get these activists funded as much as possible.

Partnership with Anonymous for the Voiceless

Anonymous for the Voiceless (AV) is a not-for-profit animal rights organisation specializing in using conversation and standard practice footage to edify the public about animal exploitation. They hold street activism events worldwide to edify the public towards supporting animal rights, living vegan and speaking up for the animals.

Traditionally, it's been very hard to track the effectiveness of street outreach. We're excited to have partnered up with AV in order to be able to provide them the tools they need to monitor and track the effectiveness of each group with Activist Hub.

Other Partnerships

Vegan OutreachWe partnered with Vegan Outreach's Vegan Mentorship Program in order to provide completely free mentorship access to all Vegan Bootcamp and 3Movies.org participants.

Legal Impact for ChickensWe partnered with Legal Impact for Chickens for our upcoming project, Start Pressuring! We'll be able to provide successful pressure campaigns launched on our platform with free legal support!

Newsletter Launch

Much has been happening in the vegan movement, and we are excited to be part of those changes. To keep you up-to-date with our progress, we have launched a monthly newsletter to showcase our projects and general happenings. We've accumulated over 15,000 emails from our community to date. Sign up for our newsletter today!
Sign up for our newsletter!

Our new advisory service

We launched our newest service to connect people with our team of experts who have a wide range of experience and skills. We welcome vegan activists and organizations to count us as a resource for their tech, org structure, strategy, marketing, grant requests, and more.

We've been very happy with this launch and we've received over 100+ requests for advice! We have been able to assist organizations such as Sinergia Animal, The Humane League, Vegan Tokyo, Mercy for Animals, PETA, Animal Rights Advocates, among many others.

By the numbers

0~
Total unique page views for all projects
0~
Tweets by our 5 Minutes 5 Vegans support bot
0~
Clicks directing activists to orgs veganactivism.org
0~
Unique page visits for Vegan Bootcamp
0~
Total sign ups for Vegan Bootcamp
0~
New grassroots groups on Activist Hub
0~
New resources added to Vegan Cheat Sheet
0~
Groups added to Animal Rights Map
0~
New comments made by our Reddit Bot
0~
New team members have joined us
0~
New blog posts from our content team
0~
Grants requested of us within the first 45 days

VH: Playground launched

We launched an open-source community available to the public called VH: Playground! Playground allows developers who don't have the time or specific skills to join the core Vegan Hacktivists team to still contribute to the movement, whether that be on our open source projects or their own!

In short, we wanted to build and foster a community of vegan developers in order to support folks outside of our networkā€”so far we've attracted over 400 members, and counting!

Moving forward

What a year! We wanted to focus on data-based efforts while staying true to our spirit of experimental projects, and we were able to achieve those goals through Activist Hub and Vegan Linguists. This has truly been the best year for creating connections and partnerships in the animal protection movement, and we are extremely pleased with the work we've accomplished.

This year, we have also prioritized organizing and optimizing internal processes. This was crucial for us since a core focus of 2022 is to expand our volunteer network to meet the demand of our services. We want to continue being able to serve the multifaceted needs of the vegan movement and empower people to become activists.

We're really excited to hear your thoughts in our 2021 year in review, and if you like what we do, please consider supporting us by clicking the button below. Your donation ensures that all of our work and projects remain free and accessible to everyone, and we can't begin to thank you enough for the support!