This week we are pleased to have as a guest blogger Sharie Lesniak, an HRC board member and also the Vice President of Marketing for Born Free USA. Sharie highlights a wonderful example of collaborative research to produce a comprehensive table of vegetarian and vegan restaurants. The table is hosted on Factual.com, the data intelligence service I wrote about last week, and is available for animal groups to use, if they wish.
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From guest blogger Sharie Lesniak:
Yeah, we know we’re a little different. Those of us at HRC like charts and graphs, watching hours of focus groups from behind the one-way mirror, and crunching the data – especially crunching the data! You know, I think that’s why research makes us hungry! So when we saw this project table available from Factual, we knew we had to help! And you can too...
Help build the definitive vegetarian/vegan restaurant database
That’s right, not only will this be the place to find veg restaurants wherever you happen to be, but you can also take part in helping build it by adding in any restaurants that are missing. And instead of getting a bunch of websites you have to scroll through, you get one simple table that shows only the information you want it to show. Just want to view a list of restaurants by address and cost? No problem. But if you have a little time to read Yelp reviews, you can show that too. It’s all up to you.
This is data in action, my animal-loving friends.
The other unique part of this database is that every one of you who has a website can host it on your site too. And when someone adds a new listing from any one of our sites, it will show up on all the places hosting this definitive vegetarian/vegan restaurant database! How cool is that?! All working together to help animals one bite (or is it byte?) at a time.
You know one of the great misconceptions many non-vegetarians have about vegans and vegetarians is that we are a little skinny bunch who doesn’t like to eat. Not only are we hungry for a more compassionate world, but we’re hungry for good veggie food! So a tool that can help us find the nearest veg restaurant wherever we are seems like a good thing for animals, animal organizations, and vegetarian food makers everywhere.
As we’ve found with our study on vegetarianism and meat reduction, one of the best ways to get people to reduce their meat consumption is to feed them good veggie food – because a major barrier to going veg is that people don’t think there is any good-tasting veggie food to eat. And rather than doing all of the work ourselves, why not get some of the vegan, vegetarian, and veg-friendly restaurants in your area to help serve up plant-based options to those who might need a little convincing?
So while this table doesn’t house the data we usually post on HumaneSpot.org that helps you understand public opinion, craft the best message, and reach the right target audience to help the most animals – it does help animals. We hope to see more collaborative efforts like this in the future, on Factual and elsewhere.