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Thanks for posting! That sounds very promising. Could you maybe look into why the images are not displayed? And are the details of the study documented somewhere? Thanks!
A little over a year ago, a report was released by Faunalytics (then the Humane Research Council) which highlighted the extremely high recidivism rates among vegans and vegetarians (I will refer to both of these as “vegetarians” for simplicity). A staggering 80% of people who try veg eventually start eating meat again within a few years. This means that while the current population of vegetarians in the US is around 2%, the population of former veggies is x5 higher at roughly 10%.
Shortly after this report was released, I was talking with Alan Darer who runs the large-scale Facebook advertising program at Mercy For Animals (among other things). We were discussing the high percentage of former vegetarians and whether it might be easier to recruit from this group back to an animal free diet than the population at large. After all, they had already expressed interest in a veg diet in the past. Perhaps by tailoring the message appropriately, and by providing resources that they may not have had before (including a free Veg Starter Guide with simple recipes, health information, info on meat-less meats, and social tips like suggestions for dining out, eating with friends, etc.) they could be convinced to give it another try.
Working with Nick Cooney (also at MFA), Alan and I organized a small study to investigate this. Given the extremely high recidivism rate, we reasoned that most of the people who had “liked” a vegetarian Facebook page in the past would have gone back to eating meat. So by targeting people who had "liked" pages or terms like Vegetarianism, Flexitarianism, VegNews, Vegetarian Cuisine, etc, we would effectively be targeting a large number of former vegetarians. Alan put together a series of Facebook ads targeting these people with messaging specifically meant to encourage them to “give it another try” (see example ads below).
The study ran over a two month period late 2015, and the results were very promising. The average cost of getting a person in the former-vegetarian community to pledge to go veg (again) and order an MFA Vegetarian Starter Guide was about 2-3 times less ($2.65) than for the general population ($5-$8). The budget for this study was fairly small (~$2K), so while these results are tentative, they do provide motivation to continue to explore how this population can be effectively re-engaged.
Alan is interested in securing funding to run more of these campaigns in the US, and also to try them out in other countries that MFA advertises in, particularly Latin America where advertising is very cheap relative to the US. If you're interested in getting involved with this don't hesitate to reach out to him at [email protected].
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I think the difference in cost per pledge could also be from a large number of existing vegetarians who just wanted the additional information. Also the former vegetarians probably consumed fewer animal foods, which would make converting one to vegetarianism less impactful.
Also, even assuming that this did successfully target recidivists (rather than just getting vegetarians to download resources on vegetarianism) we should presumably expect recidivists to be more likely to relapse or be less than 100% vegetarian, thus further reducing the impact.
Yeah, recidivists reverted once, so it seems reasonable to expect they're more likely to again. That makes the net impact of re-converting a recidivists unclear. Targeting them may be less valuable even if they're much easier to convert.
It's definitely possible that some current vegetarians might have requested the the Vegetarian Starter Guide. A follow up study could probably parse out this variable by having a simple required question for obtaining the VSG (along with their email) asking if they are currently veg, former veg and interested in trying again, or never been vegetarian at all.
Of course, we know these sorts of things are not always reliable, but I agree that's a good idea.
I think this is especially likely given that they were targeted based on membership in Facebook groups. Belonging to a Facebook group indicates higher identity formation, and the people who are in more groups and hence are more likely to be currently vegetarian are more likely to be picked up.
I think I follow you here. Facebook's ad engine is more likely to target people that have liked several of our selected groups / terms. Liking multiple groups indicates stronger identification with being veg, so these people are more likely to still be veg, as opposed to people who liked one but not the others. Is that right?