MFA has made incredible strides in transforming people’s eating habits through vegan advocacy programs in the United States and Canada. Now MFA is expanding this work to a growing list of other countries. Our work in Latin America and India is taking off at an astounding rate, and we will soon launch programs in other parts of the world as well.
We chose to focus our initial international expansion on Latin America and India because both are regions with huge populations, high or rapidly increasing meat consumption, and an expanding factory farming industry. These are also regions in which non-governmental organizations are currently operating large-scale farmed animal advocacy or vegan advocacy efforts.
Latin America
In Latin America, MFA’s advertising campaign has performed absolutely phenomenally in 2015. The campaign will wrap up around the end of November, and at that point our ads will have generated just over half a million pledges to go vegetarian and vegetarian email series signups! In addition, our 2015 advertising campaign has generated nearly 7 million views of factory farming cruelty footage and 400 million impressions of pro-vegetarian online ads.
In just the past few months, more than 500,000 people have signed up for MFA’s Spanish-language email listserv. Each of these people will receive not only a 15-piece email series guiding them through the process of going and staying vegan, but also La Voz (“The Voice), our bi-monthly e-newsletter, which provides recipes, blog links, and video links to our Spanish-speaking subscribers. We currently have 430,000 active subscribers who live in Latin American countries.
MFA’s Spanish Facebook page publishes four updates a day—a mixture of photo memes, links to Spanish blog posts we have written, and Spanish viral videos. By the end of 2015, our Spanish Facebook page will have generated 200 million impressions of pro-vegetarian content, with nearly half of those impressions coming from non-followers. MFA’s Spanish Facebook page will have about 900,000 followers by year’s end. We are also in the process of launching Spanish Twitter and Pinterest accounts.
EligeVeg.com, our Spanish website and blog, provides helpful resources on vegan eating and has generated a large number of page views in 2015. By the end of 2015, it will have generated 1.75 million blog page views and 5.5 million regular page views, for a total of 7.25 million page views of Spanish vegan eating resources.
In addition to blog content and photo memes, we regularly produce and distribute original viral video content in Spanish, both through our own Facebook page and through the Facebook pages of supporting organizations. These videos include cruelty-based videos and uplifting farmed animal-focused videos. All have a clear call to action encouraging vegetarian eating and link to veg eating resources. By the end of 2015, our Spanish viral videos will have generated over 6 million video views.
As part of our veg eating email series, we now offer personal support and advice for those who are having problems eating vegetarian. In 2015 we fielded and replied to nearly 10,000 personal emails, the majority of which were from people seeking advice on a problem they were having with trying to go vegetarian.
Our Latin American staff currently consists of one full-time staffer, Blanka Alfaro Pola, who joined MFA in January 2015, and one part-time staffer, Mariana Issa, who joined MFA in August 2015. Both reside in Mexico.
India
MFA’s 2015 expansion into India has seen successes similar to those of our expansion into Latin America.
Our Indian advertising campaign has initially focused on building up MFA’s social media following in India so that we will have a sizeable following toward which to direct our social media content. As a result, we will have 1 million followers of our Indian Facebook page by the end of 2015. By the close of the year, our advertising campaign will have generated over 50 million impressions of pro-veg content.
We have just begun to run traditional advertising campaigns driving Indian viewers toward factory farming cruelty footage and pro-veg resources. This small end-of-year campaign will generate approximately 7,000 pledges to go vegetarian by the end of 2015. In 2016, our advertising campaign in India will focus on these traditional online ads and the number of pledges will be dramatically higher.
Our small end-of-year online advertising campaign has also resulted in the addition of 7,000 people to MFA’s Hindi-language email listserv. Like signups to our Spanish-language listserv, all signups to the Hindi-language listserv will receive not only a 15-piece email series guiding them through the process of going and staying vegan, but also The Voice, our bi-monthly e-newsletter, which provides recipes, blog links, and video links. In 2016, once we have more Indian email subscribers, we will create and begin to distribute an India-specific version of The Voice that directs viewers to India-specific content.
MFA’s Indian social media work launched in October and is off to a very strong start. As with Latin America, we are publishing four updates per day, a combination of photo memes and blog posts we have created. We will have 1 million followers of our Indian Facebook page by year’s end, and we are currently averaging approximately 1 million impressions of our pro-veg content each week. By the end of 2015, we will have generated over 20 million organic (unpaid) impressions of pro-veg social media content. This number will go up at least sixfold in 2016.
Our ChooseVeg.in and Shakahar.in websites and blogs, which provide helpful resources on vegan eating, have begun to generate traffic, currently averaging about 10,000 page views per month. This is far less traffic than we intend to generate. Our ChooseVeg.in blog launched in mid-October 2015, but has been generating extremely low traffic, which we aim to correct in the coming months. Our Shakahar.in blog will launch in November 2015, and we are optimistic that providing Hindi content will increase traffic to our Indian blog pages.
Although we are not yet directing much advertising toward them, our Masahari.in and MeatVideo.in webpages have begun generating organic traffic, with approximately 60,000 website visits and factory farm video views each month.
We have viral videos ready to release to our Indian audience; however, we are waiting to release them until we hit 1 million Facebook followers later this year so that the videos will reach a larger audience. Accordingly, our Indian viral video effort will not begin until January 2016.
In September 2015 we hired our first full-time staffer in India, Subru Santakumar, who resides in Bangalore.