Hello! Congratulations on your effort thus far! Keep at it and you will make things happen.
My name is Humberto Valle, I'm a marketing strategist with almost 10 years experience and currently head the development at www.Unthink.me.

One of the first things I want to share is that Newman's Own charity angle is just that, an angle. Yes, they do good but at the end of the day is a marketing tactic to gain an edge with a possible under-targetted population. Having this approach is not wrong at all, but it is important to realize that marketing it needs to rely on the core value and features of its utility to the right persona who will care about the cherry on top being the charitable donations.

Anyway, my main suggestion for you to answer your question was that you should try a crowdfunding approach, something like kickstarter.com or indiegogo.com. If anything, simply to measure people's interest and to get feedback from real life conversations. Try leveraging email marketing as much as possible to get exposure, get yourself a simple landing page (s) to test different messaging for different people and redirect attention to fund pages as well as your story - what makes yo likeable, believable as the one heading this effort and why you want to help animals and how.