“Thoughts on single issue vs. multi issue positioning” by emre kaplan🔸

This essay presents some of my thoughts on whether advocacy organisations should stay focused on a single issue and avoid commenting outside their focus areas.

When you lead an advocacy organisation, you frequently get questions on your stance on other social issues. Some organisations pick a focus area like “animal advocacy” and never comment on anything outside of that area. Some organisations make statements on multiple issues, like current affairs, global politics, environment and so on.

I don’t attempt to cover all arguments or even the strongest arguments here. This is rather a list of considerations that weren’t obvious to me from the start.

My overall tendencies on this question:

• Both single-issue and multi-issue positioning are legitimate options in some contexts.
• Effectiveness of creating a single issue or multi issue organisation depends on the context, and we should let people experiment to organically see which one performs [...]

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Outline:

(01:44) A general model for issue positioning

(06:00) Some arguments for single issue positioning

(06:05) Expertise is real

(08:39) Limited legitimacy

(09:46) Adopting a single issue policy provides a principled way to stay out of other issues

(10:14) Some arguments for multi issue positioning

(10:19) Being cooperative

(11:15) Smaller movements might have more to gain from a norm of we must fight against all the injustices. Animal advocacy is a small movement.

(12:06) Single-issue platforms might be unviable in low-trust societies.

(14:38) Better to be multi issue by choice than to be multi issue by coercion

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First published:
June 14th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AeqNocbAiCiKofT5w/thoughts-on-single-issue-vs-multi-issue-positioning

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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