Perch: AI copilot for Animal Advocacy

Perch is an AI copilot built specifically for the animal advocacy movement. While general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT are useful for broad questions, they lack access to the movement-specific knowledge that makes advocacy actually work, like campaign histories, existing programs, tactical pitfalls, and community best practices that live in org websites, research databases, conference talks, and internal documents.

Perch addresses this gap by combining a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with a curated database of animal advocacy knowledge. When an advocate asks a question, Perch retrieves relevant information from a knowledge base built specifically for the movement, including sources from Faunalytics, the EA Forum, and advocacy org resources, with more being added over time.

The result is an AI tool that can tell you about the fly-fishing backlash that surprised fur campaign organizers in Denver, point you toward Food4Thought's Upgrade Dining program for campus plant-based advocacy, or surface lessons from past cage-free campaigns - things a general LLM simply wouldn't bring up.

Perch is built on a Next.js frontend, FastAPI backend, and Pinecone vector database, deployed on Vercel and Render, and designed to grow more valuable as the knowledge base expands.