Funding Community Building in Farmed Animal Advocacy
TL;DR
Hive is a global community of farmed animal advocates, created to connect, support, and empower those driving change for animals. Building and sustaining Hive takes ongoing effort and funding—not only for infrastructure like our active Slack platform but for engaging and connecting advocates worldwide.
Since we started as a side project back in February 2023, we’ve quickly grown to the most active Slack community in the broader EA ecosystem, hosting 3,000+ farmed animal advocates, reaching 8,000+ monthly views on our newsletters and facilitating 60+ "High Impact Outcomes (including job placements, volunteer roles, and project funding) in 2024 alone.
For 2025, we hope to expand with an Ambassador Program to reach underrepresented regions in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, making Hive a truly global network.
Your support fuels this impact, enabling us to keep providing essential resources and connections that help advocates stay effective, motivated, and connected. It is particularly important now, as we are working to increase the share of individual donors to help diversify our funding base. To kickstart this effort, we’re asking for your support in our end-of-year campaign to raise $10,000 from individuals (to be matched by a generous anonymous donor! So if met, Hive will get $20,000). This contribution will enable us to make crucial steps toward a more sustainable funding base and allow Hive to grow with the needs of our community in mind.
Introduction
Hive is a global community of farmed animal advocates. It may not be immediately obvious how much work and money goes into building, maintaining and ensuring high value in a community. Similar to how many people may believe that people at non-profits should all be volunteers, it may often be assumed that a community is a passive, one-time installment, that requires minimal guidance or continuous effort.
And well, this is also how Hive started. In the early days, we were a side project and our first fundraising application was solely to cover the fees for our Slack space. However, we realized two things very quickly: 1) there is a ton of value in having a community and 2) there is a ton of work going into it.
In this blog post, I aim to expand on these points to explain why I believe that Hive poses a uniquely effective donation opportunity. I also cover how we think about and measure impact against direct work and outline various uncertainties and doubts one may have about funding community-building efforts such as ours in the appendices.
The Value of a Community
Our Theory of Change
We think of our community-building as the type of work that aims to help advocates help animals by connecting them with the right people, opportunities and resources - as opposed to helping animals directly or often even producing these resources and opportunities ourselves.
By cultivating online spaces, such as our Slack community, centralizing and enhancing access to key information, such as our Newsletter, and facilitating strategic connections, we will increase and improve knowledge exchange and create more and stronger connections between animal advocates and animal advocacy organizations. This in turn will lead to increased support (money, talent, and knowledge) for existing animal advocates and animal advocacy projects, and increased collaboration between animal advocates. These will lead to existing animal advocates and animal advocacy projects being more impactful and more impactful animal advocacy work being done, ultimately reducing more animal suffering or reducing animal suffering faster.
Our Theory of Change
A Bit of Research
It turns out that, as humans, we are much, much more influenced by the people and social settings around us - not only than we’d like to, but also than we’d like to believe. While often not ideal, this can also be great. There is a lot of value in being surrounded by people who share your ideas and values, whom you can discuss complex topics with, who support you in your efforts and who can get you the opportunities and resources needed to get the most out of your work. This value comes not only from the immediate effects of these discussions and opportunities but also from less tangible effects such as staying motivated and committed to the cause.
We have also seen the impact-value of personal connections play out in the EA community, where “[p]ersonal contact with EAs was the most commonly selected influence on EAs’ ability to have a positive impact (40.9%) [...]” and furthermore, personal connections were the second most cited source for making a new connection (34.1%), which further emphasizes the importance and ripple effects of such connections.
Relatedly, in Faunalytics’ and Good Growth’s International Study Of Advocates’ Strategies And Needs, “Collaboration/Networking” was considered a potent form of support with 93% of advocates considering it somewhat or very useful. This was only trumped by “Financial” support and “Support with Grant Applications” (both of which we can confirm as highly important).
Our impact to date
Hive started as a side project in May 2022 and became a proper organization in August 2023. With community building and our pathway to impact, we’d expect a lot of our impact to manifest after 1-5 years, if not longer. The indirect and longer-term nature of our work leads us to pay close attention to general engagement metrics and lead metrics, such as our # of active Slack users and the channels that are highly engaged. These are promising as they tell us that we have steadily grown into the most active Slack community in the broader EA ecosystem [1] and that our engagement across channels broadly aligns with our strategic priorities!
Hive’s Monthly Active User Growth over the past year
A few key metrics:
3,000+ members on our Slack space with 1,000+ monthly active users and 80,000+ messages sent in 2024 so far.
2,800+ subscribers to our bi-weekly Newsletter “Hive Highlights” at a 50% open rate and 10% click-through rate.
100+ strategic connections between advocates facilitated, based on their respective needs and experiences, leveraging the network we’ve built through Hive.
30+ events, often highlighting neglected issues, novel approaches to advocacy or pulling movement professionals together and facilitating collaborative learning.
This was achieved with a budget of $240,000 on 4.5 FTE. Notably, one of our co-founders volunteered with us full-time, so we only had staff payments of 3.5 FTE.
What do these lead metrics translate to?
We like to think about our impact in two categories: 1) The type that affects many advocates to a relatively smaller degree. This includes outcomes such as keeping the movement up-to-date more efficiently, making members feel more involved in the farmed animal community or sharing knowledge that makes advocates more effective in their work. This type of impact can be fairly well categorized in our analytics data but is harder to grasp beyond these numbers. 2) The other type of impact that we pay special attention to are those that affect a small number of advocates, but would do so for each to a significant degree - an example here are “High Impact Outcomes” - they include:
Job Placements (Role)
Job Placements (Freelance)
Volunteer Placements (Roles)
Volunteer Placements (Projects)
Funding received
New Projects/Initiatives started
To date in 2024, we have logged 60+ such High Impact Outcomes that happened as a result of our work. We put so much emphasis on these types of impact because they enable advocates to get the most out of their potential and organizations to improve their work through the right talent. This is fundamental to what we believe the value of a community is - we believe that a well-coordinated and collaborative movement can get so much more out of the limited resources that we have. We help with this by facilitating the connection necessary to get the right people together and bring them to the right opportunities and have seen that the nature of our work puts us in a very unique position, in which we maintain a high-level overview of the movement and can act as connectors.
In stories
It can be difficult to understand all the ways our work may help animal advocates. To get a better perspective, we often rely on testimonials so that advocates can tell their own stories. In 2024, we have received 40+ public testimonials about how our work has helped advocates - you can view them here. We ask for more in-depth stories from select people who we believe to either do impactful work or are representative of how advocates benefit from our community, which we have provided below in their own words [slight format changes and emphasize added by us for easier readability]. Here are some of our highlights:
What Hivers have to say about us!
“Hive has been the most impactful service (I can’t think of a better word in this context) I have taken advantage of for my journey in animal advocacy. I cannot emphasize this enough. Joining this community opened up a whole new world of potential for me. I knew about AAC and 80k Hours and other very useful tools/resources for getting into effective animal advocacy but none of them empowered me to truly pursue a career in this space like Hive. Since joining about 4 months ago, I have probably had at least 30 conversations with amazing, kind, knowledgeable, and extremely helpful people in the community. I have never left a call without learning something, changing my mind about something, or feeling more confident in my abilities and potential. I am dedicating a large chunk of my free time to building a network and skillset to help me find a high-impact career for animals. [...] I recently landed a fundraising volunteer position with a new organization, ICARE. This absolutely would not have been possible without Hive [...]”
“Through the various introductions that people have made as they join the Slack in which they describe their experience and what they can offer to the community, I have found about and subsequently reached out to a number of people who have ended up providing services for us or working for us directly. One key thing about this is that all of them have been good fits for our work since they are already aware of the importance of our cause and are passionate about it. For example, my current Head of Operations is someone I met on there and we also have a couple of researchers and designers on contract for various bits of work. This has saved us time preparing and advertising official job offers, screening applications, going through rounds of interviews, which means we have been able to spend that time focusing on our core mission. It also reduces the risk of hiring the wrong people let’s say. My Research Manager has also recruited volunteers from the Hive Slack who have helped us in reviewing a book we have been working on and advise us on publication, etc.”
“My organisation, Animal Law & Policy Network found amazing collaborators through Hive. We worked with Scarlet Spark it was an absolutely incredible experience for us. I really enjoyed working with Tania and Alyssa. We worked together on an organisational focus document and I couldn’t be happier with the output of our collaboration. I also worked with James and Amy from User Friendly and they were brilliant. Those interactions have shaped our communication strategy immensely. I also used Hive to connect with Jay from Culture Canopy. He’s helped us with designing our hiring process and continues to support our people and culture related work. I’m also working with The Mission Motor on our theory of change and developing MEL frameworks now. This is just yet another organisation that I found through Hive. As a young organisation, we found immense support through this amazing community that Sofia and Constance have built and for that I will forever be grateful.”
The Work Behind Building Communities
While Hive has grown substantially, creating and sustaining an active, valuable community isn’t easy. From recruiting members who align with our mission to ensuring continuous engagement, we work to maintain a vibrant community that benefits everyone involved. Our impact is not a side result of a one-time effort, in fact, we have only shifted Hive from a side project to a full-on organization because we saw not only the potential a community bears but also the work it requires to set the community up for success:
The difficulty of getting started: While anyone can technically launch a community by making an announcement and inviting everyone into a WhatsApp group or a Slack channel, the way the community is started and the first experience the new community members will have can make or break it. Building Hive required identifying the need for an online community for animal advocacy, a focused outreach, careful curation of content, moderation and feedback-driven development. Reaching into various networks, ensuring that many people, but only good-fit people join and engage with the community required a lot of work, a large network and the flexibility to shape the community to feedback in a fast-paced environment. Engagement upon joining is the biggest challenge new communities face because at the beginning a community doesn’t have any value, so people are likely to join and not return due to lack of high quality interactions (this is called a “cold start problem").
The difficulty of maintaining momentum: Once started, maintaining momentum and engagement is even more important. From curating content to onboarding new members, and finding new ways to improve our community members’ experience. We also worked hard to find our unique niche and focus, which is now impactful farmed animal advocacy. All of this requires careful planning and strict prioritization of value to the community, a good intuitive sense of our community and, importantly, a lot of time and effort.
The difficulty of activating a community: Setting up the infrastructure for connection and collaboration is only part of the equation - but in order to get the most out of a community, we need to activate it. We notice the importance of having numerous and personal touch-points for our community members. For example, we build a holistic community by integrating with our programs beyond Slack and collaborating with other organizations. We also find that prompting our community members and building personal relationships is important to nudge people to capitalize on opportunities.
So what does it take?
We direct most of our resources toward improving our infrastructure (Slack), community outreach/engagement/connection activities, and essential overhead to ensure we strategize, fundraise and accurately evaluate our work. This ensures that our core work is well planned and executed and that we are set up to do so. In addition, we spend substantial amounts on our events, communications and newsletters to help us build our community infrastructure beyond the Slack space.
Currently, we have a core team of 4 FTEs, 2 part-time operations contractors and ~ 10 phenomenal volunteers who help us in various areas around the Slack group. Most of our cost is staff pay, with a notable exception being the fees that we pay for Slack. Because of the engagement we have in our community, we are expected to pay $16,000 in fees ($1,07 per active user per month, that is after the 85% non-profit discount).
So what would you fund?
In 2025, we are broadly trying to continue and improve upon everything mentioned above. We continue to focus on our core program - the Hive Slack. However, we also want to put special emphasis on targeting neglected regions, such as Africa, Latin America and Asia, to scale into a truly global community. We will expand our strategic partnerships and continue to build on our other programs to integrate with one another, ultimately strengthening a holistic farmed animal movement-wide community infrastructure. Lastly, to ensure that we can robustly and reliably achieve our goals, we will expand our volunteer system and optimize our organizational structure and culture.
As such, the work we do will largely build on our previous work and be relatively similar, but just better. As per usual, innovating and trialing new projects is part of our strategy - but there is one entirely new program that we fundraise for and that I’d like to highlight:
Ambassadors for neglected regions
One of the programs we are particularly excited about is our ambassador program. We have so far successfully recruited members in the US and Western Europe, with ~70% of our community coming from these regions (~2,100 members). Our next step is to lean into LMICs (low and middle income countries) and neglected regions, where we still have a lot of potential for growth. While partially dependent on the fit of our ambassadors, we are primarily targeting Latin America, Asia and select countries in Africa. Expanding into these regions would make Hive a truly global community, extending our impact to areas where infrastructure for global collaboration is most needed. This would also benefit our existing community by connecting them to advocates and resources from underrepresented areas, helping maintain momentum.
The ambassador program is an attempt for us to bridge the language, cultural and tech-infrastructure gaps to neglected regions. We plan to hire part-time ambassadors in one or two target regions to overcome language and cultural barriers. These ambassadors will support localized community-building efforts and lead region-specific projects. Projects may include activities like translating our Hive Newsletter and curating it with locally relevant content, onboarding local community members and introducing them to Hive, or bridging infrastructural gaps posed by using Slack as a platform by utilizing other platforms like WeChat or WhatsApp.
In concrete numbers
Based on our previous numbers and projections, your donation can help[2]:
$50 can cover the Slack fees for 47 members for a month, helping us continue to provide our services for free.
$380 can fully fund a Hive Highlights newsletter edition, delivering impactful resources to thousands of advocates.
$1,000 can enable a committed advocate to find a volunteer role at an impactful organization, extending their contribution to animal advocacy.
We have also set up plans for our “dream budget” - i.e., the budget that we believe will be best to set up Hive for success to capitalize and build on the momentum we have seen this year. This budget would scale us to ~6 FTE and poses the upper limit of what we think we can grow into cost-effectively for 2025. We believe that funding beyond this level would likely be beneficial, but are simply not as confident in the specific programs we would develop and improve yet. Some key stretch goals we aim to achieve with our work on our dream budget:
110+ manually logged High Impact Outcomes
25 of which are job placements in roles
970+ weekly active users (on average throughout 2024)
7,000+ total claimed members on the Hive Slack
6,000+ subscribers for the Hive Highlights newsletter
Why You?
Importantly, we are currently mainly funded by larger foundations (How we are funded). While we’ve been fortunate to receive this support, we need a more diversified funding base, especially from individuals, to ensure long-term sustainability and resilience for Hive. We’re setting an ambitious but achievable goal: to increase the share of our funding from individual donors from 2% to 10% in 2025, with a long-term aim of reaching 25%.
To kickstart this effort, we’re asking for your support in our end-of-year campaign to raise $10,000 from individuals (to be matched by a generous anonymous donor! So if met, Hive will get $20,000). This contribution will enable us to make crucial steps toward a more sustainable funding mix and allow Hive to grow with the needs of our community in mind.
In Conclusion
At Hive, we believe in the power of community to create a more effective and resilient farmed animal advocacy movement. From the modest start of covering basic platform fees, we’ve grown into the most active Slack community in the effective animal advocacy space, providing resources, connections, and critical support that empower advocates worldwide. Our unique approach to community-building creates ripple effects that strengthen the movement and drive sustained impact, visible in our 60+ “High Impact Outcomes” logged this year alone.
As we move forward, we’re committed to expanding our reach to underserved regions and building a truly global network of advocates through initiatives like our Ambassador Program. By investing in Hive, supporters like you enable this work to continue, helping advocates reach their full potential and drive change for animals on a global scale. Your support is essential to realizing these goals and keeping the Hive community active, engaged, and effective.
Thank you for considering a donation to Hive. With your help, we can make 2025 our most impactful and resilient year yet.
Hive Community, Inc. currently has its 501(c)(3) application pending with the IRS. If approved, your donation will be tax-deductible in the US for this year. However, we cannot issue a tax-deductible receipt until we receive confirmation of our status. Once approved, we’ll follow up with a receipt confirming our tax status. For questions, please contact Sofia at sofia@joinhive.org.
If you prefer an immediate tax-deductible receipt, you can make a donation here through our fiscal sponsor, Humane America, a registered 501(c)(3) (we don’t pay any fees for their sponsorship). Please email sofia@joinhive.org if you'd like to donate via DAF, or if you’d like to donate a bigger amount and want to know more details about what your donation will fund
Any questions?
Feel free to reach out to me under kevin@joinhive.org or on Slack @Kevin Xia if you have any more questions about our work and impact. I am always happy to discuss the details and nuances in-depth.
[1]: As measured across metrics including daily, weekly and monthly active users, users who posted and messages posted. For example, compared to the EA Anywhere Slack on the day of writing (11/4/2024), we have 1,083 vs. 845 monthly active users and 545 vs. 283 members who posted in the last month. Our data is transparently visible to members of our Slack space here. and that our engagement across channels broadly aligns with our strategic priorities!
[2] : These are calculated as follows:
$50 for 47 members: Slack charges, after the 85% non-profit discount, $1,07 per active member per month.
$380 for a Hive Highlights newsletter edition: it takes us ~7h of staff time by two staff members to prepare, curate, write and share our newsletter
$1,000 for a volunteer placement: Ok, so this is a bit more complicated. Due to the nature of our work and the way our programs interconnect, it is difficult for us to link specific outcomes to specific costs. For the purposes of this calculation, we assumed that a) compared to our manually logged impact, we will get +20% HIOs reported to us through our community survey and in coming years b) we are missing out on 30% of our impact due to the constraints of our impact measurement systems and c) HIOs make up ~50% of our total impact (i.e., we calculate with 50% of our total budget as "input" in this calculation). Notably, these are our "best guess" estimates as opposed to our conservative estimates which we would normally prefer to use in our impact reporting. We used our best guess estimates to account for our personal experience that volunteer role placements are relatively low effort to achieve compared to other high impact outcomes.
Appendix: FAQ
How do you plan to sustain growth without losing community value, and have you reached a saturation point in membership?
We are working toward rapid growth until 2025-2026, aiming to reach the upper bounds of our capacity to scale - which we currently estimate to be around 7,500 members. We anticipate a steady momentum that may require less intensive effort to maintain as we grow and cultivate our community. We’re optimistic that as long as growth is managed carefully, the community will actually gain value with more members, as larger numbers often bring diverse insights and stronger networks. However, we are aware of the risks associated with too much growth, such as participant overwhelm and potential drops in engagement. Our strategy is to pause or slow down growth if we observe significant declines in community quality or member experience and potentially redefine our strategic focus.
Regarding saturation, we are seeing signs of diminishing returns in certain regions, particularly in Western Europe and North America, where we estimate that we’ve reached roughly 70% of our primary target audience. To keep expanding meaningfully, we’re focusing on Low and Middle-Income Countries, where we see opportunities to engage new members without overburdening existing community dynamics. This balanced approach should help us grow inclusively and sustainably, maintaining value for both new and long-standing members alike.
Don’t you just get all your funding from a large funder like Open Philanthropy?
While we have been successful in securing funding from large funders (Open Philanthropy, EA Animal Welfare Fund and the Navigation Fund), they have at most given us a third of our budget each. Also, foundations comprise 89% of our total funding and we want to increase the share of individual donors to Hive to make us more resilient to foundation priority shifts. For more information, see our post “How we are funded: Or why your donation matters” [link]
Isn’t Hive a US or Western-based community?
Hive is a global community. We acknowledge that US-/Western European members are currently relatively overrepresented in our community and our strategy involves further efforts to reach neglected regions. While most of Hive’s communication is in English, we have started channels where community members can use Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese Mandarin and Dutch and are open to adding more. Our current team members come from a variety of countries, with more than half coming from non-Western countries, and collectively, our team speaks 10 languages.
What differentiates Hive from other community-building efforts in farmed animal advocacy?
We believe that a key factor to determine the effectiveness of community-building efforts is the target audience and “beneficiaries”. In the context of our goals - to enable more people to pursue impactful advocacy and to help make existing advocacy more impactful - this means two things: 1) we want to connect advocates to particularly impactful resources and opportunities and 2) we try to target highly engaged, ambitious and talented advocates (however, we try to be accessible to any advocate who wants to increase their impact for farmed animals - so we try to balance our niche target audience with a widely open community through very targeted outreach). Many more details play into our work - from technical details such as using Slack as a platform to the background and network of our team members and our approach to always putting value first to our community and continuously learning and improving. However, we believe that this target audience and focus on effectiveness makes us unique in our goals and ability to strengthen the farmed animal movement.
Appendix: Our Uncertainties
Naturally, we wouldn’t pursue our work if we weren’t convinced that Hive is a uniquely promising opportunity. However, there are various uncertainties that may pose reasons not to fund us. These are our main areas of uncertainty and what we do to address them:
On Counterfactuality and Measuring Impact
Broadly speaking, it is very difficult for us to accurately assess the impact we are making. A lot of our impact may be indirect, long-term, or happening behind the scenes (e.g., through connections and conversations facilitated through our platform without our involvement). The largest part of the impact we track is a result of us actively reaching out to people and hearing their stories, as opposed to them reaching out to us, and is thus limited by our capacity.
On the other hand, of the impact we can record, we find it hard to assess how counterfactual it is. Internally, we try to make quantitative counterfactuality statements for our impact based on research done by other organizations - however, this relies on various subjective judgment calls about the comparability of our work to others and the relative value of different “types” of impact.
We currently largely rely on self-reports (i.e., we often log impact based on advocates telling us that it occurred as a result of our work). We are aware that this is not the most accurate form of assessment, because advocates may use proxies such as “final” or “largest” contributors to an outcome, rather than thorough reflections around counterfactuality. On the other hand, people who are sympathetic to us and our work may over-assign our contribution. We have seen both cases in which, upon reflection, our contribution seemed counterfactual even though it was initially not reported as such, and vice versa.
Overall, we believe that there are both reasons to believe that we overreport on some areas of our impact and underreport on others. We broadly believe that the nature of our work leans more towards advocates underassigning than overassigning impact to us and thus continue to rely on self-reports as a rough proxy. Our longer-term goal, however, is to improve our MEL efforts and assess our impact more accurately and efficiently - which may very well lead to the recognition that self-reported impact is overassigned to us.
On our approach
As outlined above, we believe that there is a really strong case to be made for funding community building in farmed animal advocacy and we believe that our lead metrics and track record of impact to date are promising early indicators to continue pursuing this type of work. However, there is no way of knowing whether the way we approach community building is the most impactful way to move forward. Community building as a whole is such a complex project with countless strategies and potential focus areas that it is a continuous effort to optimize our work.
We thus continuously self-assess, experiment, and put a lot of effort into our MEL, trying to ensure that we maximize our impact in the long term. We control and base our work on research and try to set ourselves up for success wherever we can. While it would be naive to claim that we have it all figured out, I believe we have learned a lot already and are very keen on improving more.
Appendix: What things cost
The interaction between different programs and our aim to continuously reassess, optimize and innovate our work makes it hard to directly link (financial) inputs to outcomes. For the sake of transparency and to illustrate and approximate what we would do with different amounts of marginal funding, we want to outline some of the major costs that we currently carry and the way we currently prioritize them.
Slack Fees (covered)
Our costs for most of our technical tools are relatively low. However, we need a substantial amount of money to cover our Slack fees. Slack charges $1.08 per active member per month (that is, with the 85% nonprofit discount, usually it’s $7.25 per user). Given the activity on our space, we expect to pay $12567 in Slack fees for 2024 and ~$16,000 for 2025. We find it key to our engagement to remain open and accessible for everyone and therefore don’t charge our members. For more information on this, see here. Keeping our Slack space for free is one of our biggest priorities so we can consider these costs as covered.
Very Basic Core Staff (covered)
For 2025, we currently have the costs covered for 2.5 FTE whom we consider our very basic core team. This is considerably lower than what we had available for 2024 (4.5 FTE), so it would mean reduced capacity and likely some loss of momentum and output on most of our programs. It is, roughly, what we consider the minimum for Hive to continue existing in our core, but may still carry some risk of losing too much momentum such that it will be significantly more costly to revive the community.
Newsletters
Costs: $7,668
Our Newsletter, Hive Highlights, is one of our core programs. We send it out on a bi-weekly basis and it reaches 2,800+ with a ~50% open rate. It currently costs us ~$380 in paid staff time per newsletter edition (=$9,120 per year, minus $1,452 which we have already raised for this program). We are very keen on continuing to send out our newsletter on a bi-weekly basis because we have seen that this benefits advocates on time-sensitive opportunities and resources and helps us make any single newsletter edition less overwhelming. We could potentially reduce costs for this by sending the newsletter less frequently or spending less time curating and writing it.
Additional Staff
Costs: $25,000 - $150,000
Our largest cost is our staff cost. We currently have enough runway for 2.5 FTE to continue with Hive until the end of 2025. However, in 2024 we worked with 4.5 FTE, meaning that we have a funding gap of $222,000 to maintain our performance. Here is our plan to hire extra staff:
+$25,000: Part-time communications staff to manage web content, social media, and our conference presence.
+$25,000: Part-time program generalist to assist the Managing Director with various tasks, from MEL to community relationships. Scouting and taking advantage of new opportunities and help managing volunteers.
+$25,000 = increase part-time communications staff to full-time to additionally work on events and individual fundraising
This would put us at roughly the budget that we worked with in 2024. We think that we will be able to roughly mirror our output and impact from 2024 for this budget and sufficiently maintain our momentum through the year. We have not yet raised this funding, but are moderately confident (~70%) that we will be able to raise this amount throughout 2025 with a few upcoming grant decisions and applications. However, we will likely need to work on a tight runway and focus considerable time and effort on fundraising.
Any funding beyond that would actually grow Hive. If we raise additional money, we plan the following:
+$40,000 = hire up to three part-time ambassadors to engage communities in neglected regions (see below)
+$25,000 = increase part-time program generalist to additionally take on new projects, support in grant writing and free up more of the managing directors capacity
+$10,000 = increase the Managing Director’s salary with their promotion (if we don’t raise this budget, their salary will stay the same)
This is the budget that we believe will be best to set up Hive for success. It would provide us with what we roughly consider to be the most we can cost-effectively scale up. We believe that this gives us the best chance to build on top of and capitalize on the momentum that we’ve seen this year.
Appendix: Meta works vs. Direct work
Earlier, we mentioned that we achieved 60+ “High Impact Outcomes” in 2024 so far. But how does this compare to direct work and how do these outcomes ultimately affect animals? There are several ways to approach these comparisons, and many people may decide not to attempt to compare meta and direct work in the first place. For example, one could try to find the “best in class” for each and fund these according to one's own general consideration of their relative importance. We, on the other hand, do try to make such a comparison - not only because we are a bit nerdy in this regard, but because we believe it to be important to try our best to compare our work to other options we could pursue otherwise to ensure that we spend our resources as effectively as possible. In fact, I am contemplating writing a separate post about this comparison! I’ll try to roughly summarize my thoughts here. The way we think about this is technically simple but slightly abstract. Bear with us.
The conceptual case for Meta
Consider Meta work (in farmed animal advocacy) to be any work that does not involve directly helping animals, but rather helps advocates help animals, ultimately 1) enabling more advocates to help animals or 2) improving the work that is being done to help animals. Conceptually, this implies that any work done in meta is more impactful than direct work if (and only if) the meta work can leverage the resources being spent on it enough to provide more value to the movement (i.e., by enabling more resources to come into the movement through funding or talent or by enabling existing resources to be spent more effectively) than it costs to pursue said meta work. However effective direct work is, building the capacity and the community to enable and improve such work bears the potential to have more impact. However impactful a project is, counterfactually causing more than one such project would be more impactful - all things considered. In this way, meta-work can be considered an amplifier or a multiplier of direct work and we only need to ensure that the resources spent is lass than the value added through such a multiplying effect.
Quantitative Comparison of Meta vs. Direct Work
All of this is fairly theoretical, but how do we put the value of meta-work vs direct work in practice? One common way to think through this is in terms of the monetary value provided to the movement. For example, Animal Advocacy Careers estimates the value of one impact-adjusted counterfactual job placement (ICAP) as $37,500 provided to the movement. The calculation is fairly simple:
Assume the average salary in the movement is $50,000/year
Assume the placement is on average 10% better than the next best person (i.e., provides ~$5,000 of value to the movement/year)
Assume that the average person will work in the movement for 7.5 years
The value provided to the movement is thus $5,000 x 7.5 years = $37,500
This means that, in comparison to direct work, we can expect any investment of less than $37,500 to ensure a counterfactual job placement to be more effective than the work affected. We think in fairly similar terms. For example, if we enable more than 10 full-time people to do their work 10% more effectively, we think that that is worth the full-time effort of one person - all things considered.
We also use such monetary estimates, but only internally, as a form of sanity check. There are many details that complicate converting our “High Impact Outcomes” to “value added to the movement”. We draw from existing research, such as Animal Advocacy Careers’ Base Placement -> ICAP conversion rates, and make some best guess estimates about which of their programs we are comparable to and how to assess the value of each High Impact Outcome compared to a Job Placement (e.g., we consider a volunteer role placement as 0.3 of a job placement in terms of value added). With our best guesses, we (so far, successfully) aim to cover our costs with the value these high-impact outcomes provide to the movement. This way, we can consider the additional, less tractable value we provide (such as keeping the movement up to date, facilitating other forms of collaboration, or helping organizations save time) as well as the impact we don’t track as “free”.
