Blog

This is a short periodic newsletter with the latest from Active for Animals.

A warm welcome to the 4 new organisations who've started using the Engagement Tracker since our last newsletter. 🎉

A quick note on our thesis behind everything we build: AfA tools are designed as shared infrastructure for the movement. One tool, built once, usable by any organisation, in any country, working on any campaign — and the more organisations use them, the better they get for everyone.

New Tools

Volunteer Matching Tool — now live

Built in collaboration with Vegan Outreach.

The Volunteer Matching Tool connects organisations running events, webinars, or campaigns with volunteers whose skills, location, and availability fit. The tool is built for any organisation that needs to match people to opportunities at scale. If volunteer coordination eats up your week, get in touch and we'll show you how it works.

Government Consultation Tool — in build

With UKVFA.

Public consultations are one of the most underused levers in animal advocacy — mainly because submitting a meaningful response can take hours of an advocate's time.

The coordinating team sets the strategic line and key arguments based on their own expertise, while volunteers receive suggestions they can adapt or ignore, so every submitted response stays genuinely their own. This tool does not use AI. The architecture is in place to extend to national consultation processes in any country. If your organisation engages with public consultations and this is of interest, we'd be happy to hear from you. Book a call.

Animal Infrastructure Map — in build

With Green REV Institute.

This is an open mapping platform for factory farms, starting in Poland.

It plots factory farms alongside contextual layers of environmental data (water catchments, air quality, etc.) and planning and permitting records. If you're working on factory farming exposure, corporate accountability, or location-based campaigning, this tool is built explicitly to put validated, campaign-ready data in the hands of campaigners and legal advocates. Get in touch — we want to know which countries to prioritise next and what other data could empower campaigns.

Engagement Tracker Updates

HubSpot Integration

The Engagement Tracker now syncs with HubSpot across both Gmail and Outlook. If your organisation uses HubSpot as its CRM, your engagement data flows in automatically, so your contact records stay current.

Dashboard Detail View

There's now a detail view on the Engagement Tracker dashboard. Select any combination of senders and opportunities and you'll get a granular breakdown of activity. Useful for reviewing individual campaigns, team members, or specific corporate targets.

Delayed Mailmerge

Sending a large batch of emails in one go is the fastest way to land in spam folders. The new delayed mailmerge feature spaces sends out automatically over a window you set. Try sending a mailmerge and you'll notice a new option to space out large batches of emails.

Outlook: Follow-up Overview, Faster Tracking, Scheduled Email Support

Outlook users now have a Follow-up Overview showing all pending automated follow-ups in one place. Email tracking is significantly faster, and scheduled emails are now properly tracked from the moment they send.

Custom Identifiers

You can now add your own identifiers and onboard more team members without needing to request this from us.

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That's it from us. If anything here sparks a conversation, an idea, or a need we haven't anticipated yet, that's exactly the kind of input that shapes what we build next. Reply directly or book time with us.

Peter & Hereward
Active for Animals

This is a short periodic newsletter that contains all the recent updates from Active for Animals.

Welcome to the 9 new organisations that have started using the Engagement Tracker since the last newsletter. 🎉

Since Christmas, we've been steadily improving the Engagement Tracker based on requests from users.

For Gmail users: please be sure to update your extension to the latest version to experience all of these new features. (This happens automatically on browser start-up — but who does that anymore 😅).

Analytics Dashboard

The new Analytics Dashboard gives you a clear, simple view of your engagement. You can see activity across the organisations, campaigns and deals you work with, how your team is using the tool, and how things change over time — all in one place. Just log into your Active for Animals profile to view the dashboard.

Always-On Feature on Gmail

If you'd rather not think about turning tracking on and off, the new Always-On option is for you. Once enabled in your settings, tracking will simply stay on in the background. It's a set-and-forget feature that makes sure nothing is missed, with no extra steps required. Click on Extension → Options → Enable email tracking by default.

Reply Tracking on Gmail & Outlook

Reply tracking is now available for Gmail users. Previously limited to Outlook, this feature now lets you see when and how your emails are responded to in Gmail. Great for checking your response rates.

Gmail Layouts

We've updated the Engagement Tracker to fully support Gmail layouts. This means you can now build email templates and run campaigns using Gmail's layout tools without any issues, while still maintaining full tracking across all messages.

Automated Follow-Ups for Outlook

Available on Outlook currently and soon on Gmail, you are now able to write and set automated follow-ups to your emails over time depending on the recipient's response.

GDPR Update

This is relevant to European organisations. We have updated our GDPR Terms & Conditions — navigate to your Organisation Profile page to agree to these terms. We've also created a "GDPR Mode" for users to switch on to ensure that they stay within GDPR guidelines when required. You can access this through your organisational admin panel on the website.

Coming Soon

A/B Templates

We are close to making A/B testing an available feature in your emails, allowing you to experiment with different approaches, tone, and messaging within your mail merges. If you'd be interested in being informed exactly when this feature is released, please send us a quick message.

Update on New Tools

We're developing a new tool shaped by conversations with partner organisations. It focuses on automating EU public consultation submissions, which can be incredibly time consuming for the average advocate to submit — and we're exploring whether similar government consultation processes in other countries would benefit from this kind of support. If public consultations are part of your advocacy work and you'd find automation valuable, we'd be keen to hear from you.

We're also exploring a collaboration with Campaigns Lab to bring their expertise directly into the Engagement Tracker, allowing you to enhance your corporate communications from within your email client. If you'd be interested in testing this new feature when it is complete, please reach out.

🤝 We're here to help

We're always here if you need a hand. Whether something isn't working as expected, you have an idea for a new feature, or you'd like to chat about how you're using the product, don't hesitate to get in touch — we'll do everything we can to help.

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Peter & Hereward
Active for Animals

What's coming from AfA.

We wanted to kick off the year with a short roundup of what's new in the Engagement Tracker, and to set the tone for these semi-occasional updates you'll receive whenever we ship improvements worth noting.

Please feel free to forward this email to others in your organisation who use our tools but may not yet be in direct contact with us, so they can subscribe as well.

Over the past quarter, we've been steadily improving the Engagement Tracker with a series of small but meaningful new features. At the same time, we've been speaking with organisations across the animal advocacy movement to better understand the challenges, bottlenecks, and ideas that could improve efficiency and impact. It's been a real pleasure meeting and onboarding so many of you along the way.

We look forward to releasing more features for the Engagement Tracker and more tools to support the movement in the near future.

✨ What's new

Custom Mail Merge Columns

We've made it much easier to further customise your mail merge emails by adding the option to create new columns, which allows you to include more information about your email list.

AI Feature with Mail Merge Columns

You can now include these new columns as context for the AI prompt within your mail merges, meaning you can send personalised, context-rich emails to your email lists. Further information here.

We see a lot of potential in this feature. Any feedback on how you are using it or how it can be improved would be welcome.

Stop "first-read" emails from being triggered

You may have noticed that occasionally, the first tracking event is your own view of your tracked email. We've released a lightweight Chrome extension that prevents this entirely for emails tracked with the Engagement Tracker. 👉 Get the extension.

🔍 Help us shape what's next

We are starting validation for our next tool and would love your input. We're pressure-testing a familiar post-event problem: volunteer interest is captured, but follow-up is delayed, and momentum is lost.

If you're able to spare 1 minute, your input via a short survey (5 multiple-choice questions) would be genuinely valuable and helps us understand how common and painful this is across the movement. 👉 Take the survey.

🤝 We're here to help

As always, we're here to support you. We aim to be a highly responsive and reactive team. Whether you've run into an issue, have a feature request, or want to talk through how you're using the tool, you can reach out to us at any point and we'll do our best to help.

We're excited to continue working alongside you throughout 2026.

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Peter & Hereward
Active for Animals