The Tenth Anniversary Plan
Ten years. Ten rungs. One Midwest.
Project Animal Freedom · October 19, 2018 to October 19, 2028
Project Animal Freedom was founded on October 19, 2018.
On October 19, 2028, we turn ten.
Most organizations mark an anniversary by looking back at one. We are marking ours by telling you, two years early, exactly what we intend to be when it arrives.
Not a mood. Not a direction. Numbers, with definitions written down before the period they measure, published where anyone can hold them against what we actually deliver.
Here is the shape of it. Ten rungs, arranged on a powers-of-ten scale.
By October 19, 2028 · Project Animal Freedom will have at least
0 claims describing our work above the evidence we have for it
1 clear successor to our Executive Director
10 Established Chapters
100 Movement Builders giving $20.56 a month or more
1,000 active grassroots donors giving $20 a year or more
10,000 active mailing list subscribers
100,000 followers on our main Facebook page, $100,000 in annual grants, and $100,000 in annual grassroots giving
1,000,000 people reached across the St. Louis metro
10,000,000 people reached in a year, estimated and adjusted for cross-platform overlap
100,000,000 views across our history since 2018
That is the whole plan on one page. The rest of this article explains where each number comes from, where we stand today, and what it costs to climb.
Why powers of ten
The ladder is not decoration. The lower rungs are the rung below them multiplied by ten Established Chapters. The upper rungs hold the same powers-of-ten scale while changing scope and unit. We say below exactly where that switch happens, because a plan that blurs it is asking you to accept arithmetic it cannot do.
Project Animal Freedom is a chapter organization. We have six chapters today, [ESTABLISHED] of them Established Chapters, each one working to become the vegan hub for its own city. We capped expansion on purpose, because we would rather the chapters we have get strong than get numerous. Ten Established Chapters is the target for 2028, and the middle of the ladder falls straight out of it.
Ten Established Chapters with ten Movement Builders each is one hundred Movement Builders.
Ten with one hundred donors each is one thousand donors.
Ten with one thousand subscribers each is ten thousand subscribers.
Ten raising ten thousand dollars each is one hundred thousand dollars in grassroots giving.
That is where the literal multiplication stops, and we would rather tell you than let you find it. Above that point the rungs keep their scale but change what they measure. One hundred thousand followers is one page, not ten pages added together. One million people is a single metro, not the network. Ten million is people rather than views. One hundred million is ten years rather than one. The arithmetic changes. The scale does not.
The Chapter Ten
Written from a chapter’s side, the entire strategy fits on a card an organizer can keep in a pocket. An Established Chapter in the Project Animal Freedom network looks like this:
1 trained organizer, plus 1 named backup
10 Movement Builders
100 active grassroots donors
1,000 active subscribers in its city
10,000 followers
$10,000 raised locally each year
100,000 people reached in its metro each year
1,000,000 impressions each year
Build that ten times and the middle of the ladder is finished. The chapters that do it are also what make the upper rungs reachable, which is a different claim from saying they multiply into them.
One honest caveat, because it matters. Not every chapter will hit all eight lines by 2028. St. Louis, our oldest and largest chapter, will come closest. A chapter that launches next year will miss most of them. That is expected, and it is fine. We measure the network total. The card describes what an Established Chapter grows into, not a quota anyone gets graded against.
Zero: the rung below one
Every plan has numbers it wants to grow. Ours starts with the numbers that have to stay at zero, because those are the only ones capable of quietly destroying the other nine.
Zero claims describing our work at a stage above the evidence we have for it.
Zero chapters with a single point of failure.
Zero people carrying a full-time load without pay.
Zero lapsed filings, registrations, or insurance.
Zero numbers published without a written definition and a named source.
These cost nothing to hold and everything to lose. One inflated claim in one grant report does more damage than any rung above it gains.
One: the things that either exist or do not
Every other rung is a quantity. This one is a list of yes-or-no questions, and we would rather you ask them of us on the anniversary than take our word now.
Our Executive Director has never taken a salary. Not once in eight years. He says so publicly, and he means it as a commitment rather than a boast.
It is also a structural risk, and we would rather name it than have a funder find it.
A succession plan cannot be executed against an unpaid position. The number of people willing to take an unpaid executive directorship of a growing organization is roughly one, and he is the one who intends to hand it off. So the first rung of this plan contains a line that has never appeared in a Project Animal Freedom budget: a funded Executive Director role.
By the anniversary, these exist, or the rung is not met:
One clear Executive Director successor, identified and already shadowing the role, with the handoff itself planned for 2030.
One clear board chair successor, so that an accident does not become a crisis.
One funded Executive Director position.
One physical headquarters. The Midwest Animal Rights Center is planned to open in January 2028, which would make it nine months old on the anniversary.
One research arm producing work. The Animal Freedom Lab is planned to go live in January 2027, with the first full State of the Midwest Animal Rights Movement report following in 2028.
One alliance convened. The Midwest Animal Rights Alliance, with a founding cohort of organizations spread across at least four states.
One annual Midwest gathering, with two editions held by the anniversary, one in each year.
One operating reserve. The stretch is ten months of it.
The stretch on this rung is the one we care about most: ten trained leaders, one for every chapter, so that succession is a bench and not a person.
Ten: chapters
Six chapters today, [ESTABLISHED] of them Established Chapters. Ten Established Chapters by the anniversary.
Established is a specific stage on our chapter development ladder, not a compliment we pay ourselves. A chapter becomes Established when it has a trained organizer and a named backup, hosts ten or more events a year, runs at least one ticketed event of its own, and raises real money in its own city.
That last item is the part most people miss about how this network is built. Every ticketed event we run in St. Louis is designed so that any chapter can run it too. We are not asking organizers to fundraise for headquarters. We are handing them the means to fund themselves, because an organizer who can pay for their own work is an organizer who stays.
We will always publish the total chapter count and the Established Chapter count together, because one number invites exactly the kind of inflation the zero rung forbids.
The stretch: ten paid workers. What that means depends entirely on the funding rung below, and we take that up there rather than blur it here.
One hundred: Movement Builders at $20.56 a month
The number is odd on purpose.
2056 is the year we intend the Midwest to be vegan. One hundred people sending $20.56 every month is one hundred small monthly reminders of a deadline we set for ourselves and expect to be held to.
One hundred Movement Builders is $24,672 a year in committed, predictable revenue. Predictable is the operative word. It is the difference between an organization that can plan a year and one that reacts to a quarter.
The Chapter Ten benchmark is ten per chapter. Ninety percent annual retention or better, because recurring revenue that churns is not recurring revenue. And at least ten supporters at $205.60 a month, which is the same commitment one power of ten up.
The stretch: one thousand Movement Builders. That is $246,720 a year, and it would very nearly fund our entire staffing model by itself.
One thousand: active grassroots donors
Active means gave within the last twelve months.
We could tell you we have already cleared this rung. More than two thousand people have made a grassroots gift to Project Animal Freedom at some point in our history, and that is the figure a lot of nonprofit copy would quietly use here.
We are not going to count it that way. Someone who gave once in 2021 is a person we are grateful to. They are not a person currently funding the work, and pretending otherwise would make this scorecard useless to you and to us.
One thousand donors who gave in the last twelve months, at twenty dollars or more. The Chapter Ten benchmark is one hundred per chapter. Forty percent year-over-year retention or better.
The stretch: one thousand donors who gave in two consecutive years. That is a harder goal than ten thousand one-time gifts, and it is worth more.
Ten thousand: active subscribers
Eight thousand five hundred people are on our mailing list today, including more than 2,600 active subscribers in the St. Louis area.
Active here means opened or clicked in the last 180 days.
We run one database for the whole organization. Every chapter draws from it, filtered by distance, so a supporter near Springfield hears from Springfield and a supporter in St. Louis hears from St. Louis. That is what lets a new chapter start with an audience instead of a blank page.
It also means unsubscribing is all or nothing. One careless email from any chapter costs the entire network a supporter. We disclose that on our sign-up forms, and we hold deliverability above 99 percent because of it.
The stretch: ten thousand active where active means the last 90 days.
One hundred thousand: the rung that carries three
Three goals share this rung, and they are the ones a funder should look at hardest.
One hundred thousand followers
Our main Facebook page passed 50,000 followers this year. We are halfway up this rung already, which makes doubling it in two years a budgeted program rather than a wish. Across every Project Animal Freedom asset, chapter pages and Instagram and LinkedIn included, we are north of 140,000.
We report followers per named account and never add accounts together without saying so, which is why you will also see us cite roughly 23,000 followers across our St. Louis-focused platforms. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions.
One hundred thousand in grants, and one hundred thousand in grassroots giving
Here is our financial position, stated plainly, because you should not have to dig for it.
Project Animal Freedom reported $113,875 in revenue for 2025. That was a temporary peak. 2026 has been a rebuilding year and will land closer to $70,000. Several grants are expected in the first half of 2027, and those are what fund both the recovery and the climb past it.
Two hundred thousand dollars a year at the core rung. Three hundred thousand with the ticket and sponsorship stretch. The Chapter Ten benchmark is ten thousand dollars in grassroots revenue from an Established Chapter.
This is the rung everything else depends on. Chapters, staff, the mailing list, paid reach, the headquarters, and the funded Executive Director position all sit downstream of it. No other rung on this ladder can outrun it, and we would rather say so than let the plan read as if each goal floats free of the others.
What ten paid workers actually costs
The chapter rung carries a stretch goal of ten paid workers, and that phrase means two very different things at two very different budgets.
At two to three hundred thousand a year, ten paid people means ten part-time chapter organizer stipends. That alone would transform this network, and we will not dress it up as something larger.
Ten full-time people is a different order of cost entirely. We will publish that figure when it has been derived from our staffing model rather than estimated in a sentence, because a number that size should come from the model or not be printed at all.
One million: St. Louisans reached
In 2025 we reached an estimated 860,000 St. Louisans. More than one in four people in the metro.
That is a legacy estimate, and we label it as one. It was overlap-adjusted under our earlier working practice rather than produced by the methodology described above, which needs an exposure survey fielded inside the window being measured. We cannot retrofit that survey onto 2025, so we will not dress a legacy figure up as an output of the new method. The full disclosure rule governs windows that begin under the frozen methodology.
2026 has been leaner. But 860,000 is not a hypothetical ceiling we are hoping to approach. It is a thing that already happened, with fewer resources than 2027 will have.
One million people in a metro of roughly 2.8 million is about one in three. We have already done one in four once.
One hundred thousand people reached in a chapter metro is the network version of this rung. Sustaining seventy or more St. Louis events a year is how the St. Louis share of it gets built.
The stretch, dated honestly past the anniversary: ten million people reached across the Midwest by our eleventh.
Ten million: people, not views
We have already had years above ten million views. 2024 was above twenty million.
So the honest version of this rung is not views. It is people.
An estimated ten million unique people reached in a year, adjusted for cross-platform overlap under a published methodology.
The word estimated is doing real work in that sentence. A platform reports unique reach within one named account and its own surfaces. Joining accounts together, and joining platforms together, is modelled rather than measured, unless a platform is verified to deduplicate across them and we can cite where it says so. We publish the measured part, the modelled part, the adjustment we applied, and how uncertain it is. What we will not do is quietly present a sum as a headcount.
We are careful here in a way that costs us headline size. A view is a piece of content served. A person is a person. Adding up the reach figures from six platforms does not produce a count of human beings, it produces a count of overlaps, and any organization that presents one as the other is telling you something it cannot support.
Ten million people a year is a far harder target than ten million views a year. That is exactly why it is the rung, and why the views figure is the floor underneath it rather than the goal on top.
Two stretches, each stated in its own unit: ten million views in St. Louis alone every year, which would be roughly triple our 2025 St. Louis pace, and ten million people reached across the Midwest by our eleventh anniversary.
One hundred million: our whole history
One hundred million views across the life of Project Animal Freedom, counted from our founding in October 2018 to our tenth anniversary in October 2028.
It is the largest number on the ladder, and one of the closest to already being true.
Where we actually are
2018 to 2019: Founding years, not separately tracked.
2020 to 2023: 10+ million. Running total: 10+ million.
2024: 20+ million. Running total: 30+ million.
2025: 10+ million. Running total: 40+ million.
2026: On pace with 2025. Running total: Approximately 50 million.
We are halfway. On current pace, roughly fifty million views will stand behind us going into 2027, and roughly fifty million will stand between us and the anniversary. The 2026 component of that total is a forecast, not a count, until the year closes.
These are organization-wide figures across every Project Animal Freedom asset. They are a different scope from the St. Louis numbers elsewhere in this article, and we keep the two separate on purpose, the same way we separate 50,000 followers on our main page from 23,000 across our St. Louis platforms.
How the second half gets built
Two years of organic work at the pace we have already demonstrated does most of it. Advertising closes whatever is left, and it closes it for less than most people expect.
2027, organic: 15 to 20 million. Running total: 65 to 70 million.
2028 through October, organic: 15 to 20 million. Running total: 80 to 90 million.
Paid, global: 10 to 20 million. Running total: 100 million.
Cost of that paid portion: Roughly $1,400 to $2,900.
Two hundred dollars has generated as much as 1.4 million views for us when the audience is global rather than restricted to the United States or the Midwest. That works out to about seven thousand views per dollar, or roughly fourteen cents per thousand.
At that rate the ten to twenty million views the table anticipates cost between fourteen hundred and twenty-nine hundred dollars, and buying the entire remaining fifty million outright would cost about seven thousand.
Assume we are wrong by a factor of five. The paid portion then costs between seven and fourteen thousand dollars, and the whole second half of our history costs about thirty-six thousand. Those are real numbers against a two hundred thousand dollar budget, and they are the reason this rung is the one we worry about least.
We are not proposing to manufacture this number with advertising. We are pointing out that the rung is not fragile. The organic trajectory gets us most of the way there, and a modest advertising line closes the remaining gap while protecting against a slow quarter or a platform algorithm change.
Why this number is global, and what that means
A view in St. Louis and a view in São Paulo both count as a view. They are not worth the same thing to a campaign for a vegan Midwest, and we are not going to pretend they are.
That is precisely why this rung is counted separately from the one million rung. One million St. Louisans reached is an estimate of unique people, overlap-adjusted, in one metro. One hundred million views is the reach of the argument, worldwide, over ten years. The first measures the reach of the organization. The second measures the reach of the case.
Counting globally is honest for us specifically, because animal liberation was never a regional cause and because our own campaign work stops being regional in 2029. Whether the organization itself expands beyond the Midwest is a decision we have dated to 2030 and have not yet made. A view in São Paulo is not a St. Louis vote. It is still someone who saw the argument.
And one rung above the finish line
One billion views. Undated, deliberately.
At global rates a billion views is not a fantasy, it is a line item, and we say that carefully. Cheap views are cheap for a reason and volume is not the same as persuasion. But the number sits past every plan we currently have and it points at 2056.
A ladder that stops at its own finish line is a plan. A ladder with one rung above the finish line is a mission.
How this fits our four-year plan
The Tenth Anniversary Plan does not stand alone.
The Animal Freedom Renaissance is our four-year plan for 2027 through 2030, and it runs in four movements. 2027, Project Animal Freedom as institution. 2028, as infrastructure. 2029, as inspiration to the broader animal rights movement. 2030, as ideology. The Midwestern Moonshot is the campaign that pays for it.
October 19, 2028 falls at month twenty-two of a forty-eight month arc. Approaching the midpoint, late in the infrastructure year.
That placement is deliberate. The anniversary is the audit. What we can show on it is what determines whether the back half of the plan deserves to be funded, and we would rather be measured in the middle than graded at the end.
2027, Institution
What the ladder is doing: Zero and One. Movement Builders. Grant revenue arrives.
What is being built: Animal Freedom Lab goes live; the Alliance seats its founding cohort; the first Midwest research baseline publishes; grants are expected in the first half of the year.
2028, Infrastructure
What the ladder is doing: Nearly every countable rung: chapters, donors, subscribers, followers, funding, St. Louis reach, ten million people a year, and the hundred-million view mark.
What is being built: The Midwest Animal Rights Center opens; the first State of the Midwest report publishes; the anniversary audit on October 19.
2029, Inspiration
What the ladder is doing: The Midwest stretch: ten million people reached across the Midwest by our eleventh anniversary.
What is being built: Movement-facing work broadens; national and global campaign activity resumes.
2030, Ideology
What the ladder is doing: The road to one billion views.
What is being built: The Executive Director handoff completes; expansion beyond the Midwest becomes a decision rather than a hope.
The Renaissance says what we build. The Moonshot says how we pay for it. The Tenth Anniversary Plan says whether it worked.
How we count
A scorecard is only worth the definitions underneath it. Here are ours.
Impression or view: a piece of content served. Not unique.
Reach: an estimate of unique people, adjusted for cross-platform overlap under a published methodology. Never produced by adding platform numbers together. For windows beginning under the frozen methodology, every reach figure is published with its modelled portion and its uncertainty stated. Figures from windows that closed earlier are labelled legacy estimates and are not presented as outputs of that method.
Active subscriber: opened or clicked in the last 180 days.
Active donor: gave in the last twelve months.
Established Chapter: the top rung of our published chapter development ladder, measured against that ladder rather than our own enthusiasm.
Followers: stated per named account. We do not sum accounts without saying so.
Scope: every geographic reach or view figure is labelled St. Louis, Midwest, or global. Every other figure is labelled by the organizational scope it belongs to: the whole network, one chapter, or one named account. A number at one scope is never quoted as if it belonged to another, which is why our St. Louis figures and our organization-wide figures differ by an order of magnitude and both are correct.
And three commitments about all of it.
We publish definitions before the period they govern, not after the numbers come in. We apply them identically to every chapter, St. Louis included. And we publish the misses, because a scorecard that only reports wins is not a scorecard, it is a newsletter.
What your gift builds
Every gift to Project Animal Freedom has a place on this ladder. Here is where yours would sit.
Gift · Where it lands
$20.56 a month One of the hundred. The most useful gift in this plan, because it is the one we can build a budget on.
$240 a year One grassroots donor at twelve times our floor, and one hundredth of an Established Chapter’s donor rung.
$2,056 The 2056 gift. One hundred times the monthly Movement Builder commitment, given at once.
$10,000 An Established Chapter’s entire grassroots year. One full line of the Chapter Ten.
$100,000 One full financial target on the 100,000 rung.
If you fund grants at institutional scale, the rung we would point you at is the funded Executive Director position. It is the least glamorous line in this plan and the one that determines whether Project Animal Freedom outlives the person who founded it.
The scorecard
Hold us to this. On October 19, 2028, ask us for it line by line. The two reach figures are estimates and will be published with their methodology and their uncertainty; everything else is a directly observed count or a financial total.
0 claims above our evidence
1 clear successor
10 Established Chapters
100 Movement Builders
1,000 active grassroots donors
10,000 active subscribers
100,000 followers, $100,000 in grants, $100,000 grassroots
1,000,000 St. Louisans reached
10,000,000 people reached in a year
100,000,000 views since 2018
Ten years. Ten rungs. Ten chapters carrying the system.
A fully vegan Midwest by 2056 is not a slogan we picked because it rhymed with a fundraising tier. It is a deadline. This is the first ten years of it.
Project Animal Freedom is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in St. Louis, Missouri. Figures current as of September 2026.
