Leafleting Effectiveness

[Jamie in Chile]

I got an email newsletter from Vegan Outreach today with a study on booklet effectiveness.

They said that an average of one person adopted a mostly vegan diet for every 75 booklets read. They paid people a small amount to read a booklet and do a follow up questionnaire sometime later. I think these results are similar to their previous 2014 study and other results I've seen. I have already given them one donation, and might consider more in the future. It seems to me that giving money to Vegan Outreach could be one of the most effective ways to do the most goal in the world per dollar spent.

However, significant uncertainties remain. One of those is whether you trust an organization that is based largely around leafleting for veganism to design without bias a study that assesses the accuracy of leafleting for veganism. I didn't detect any bias in it but I do wonder if they would have promoted the results as much had they found a much weaker correlation in diet change (or none at all)?

Another point is that 1 mostly vegan per 75 booklets is based on actually reading the booklets. Which means that the number of booklets you would have to hand out if leafleting in the street to get 1 person to be mostly vegan would be higher, perhaps much higher.

Another doubt is how many of the people that change their diet would retain those changes years later. That is unknown. I saw two studies on the % of vegans/vegetarians that regress to meat eating, and one said they mostly do, and the other one said that they mostly don't.

I am also a little concerned that the people who were paid to read the booklets just had to answer two reading comprehension questions to confirm that they read the booklet. I am not sure exactly how it works but I did wonder if it would be possible to just look up the answers to the questions rather than actually read the booklet.

They put more details here:
Effectiveness of Booklets | Vegan Outreach

Here is a related article (but quite long and involved calculations):
How Much Does It Cost to Buy a Vegetarian?

 

[Calliegirl]

I've done leafleting for them in the past at a couple of colleges. If I were able, I would love to do it again.
It was encouraging to see how many people were interested and sat down to read the booklet. A few came back to ask questions, and there were a couple who said they had gotten booklets in the past and stopped eating meat. One teacher asked for a few, she wanted to discuss it with one of her classes. I don't know what she taught.