15 Learnings from Community Building in Farmed Animal Welfare

Written By Kevin Xia

What Worked and What Didn’t

As 2024 is coming to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on our work. It has been an incredibly eventful year, full of significant growth and impact. At the same time, we have learned a ton about the intricacies and challenges of our work - and we look forward to another impactful and insightful year. We want to be transparent and share some of our learnings and what we consider to be achievements, in case other advocates find them interesting and/or useful. 

An Active Slack Community Can Drive Meaningful Impact

(warning, this one is number-heavy)

In 2024, we grew our Slack space from 1,631 to 3,268 members, making us one of the largest Slack groups in our ecosystem! We reached a peak of 946 weekly active users and an average of 568 weekly active users (compared to a peak of 547 in 2023). Our members posted almost 100,000 messages across 100+ public channels and countless direct chats. We have seen incredibly consistent growth in active members and cultivated 16 highly engaged topic-specific channels, many of which target important talents and neglected topics such as #fundraising, #aquatic-animals, and #invertebrates.

Our Monthly Active User Growth in 2024

These numbers reflect an active Slack space that not only drives engagement, but also enables meaningful connections. The way we facilitated this community—through thoughtful moderation, targeted channels, and an emphasis on collaboration—has clearly worked well for us, allowing us to reach unmatched activity levels in the broader EA ecosystem, both in absolute and relative terms. It is an enormous achievement in our books, especially because we just started this Slack space less than two years ago. However, these numbers on their own aren’t concrete outcomes. They are what we call “lead indicators”. 

A key goal of our work is to meet advocates where they are and enable or provide personalized support, advice, connections, and opportunities. This can be a job placement, necessary support for a project, or any other type of impact that may reach only a small group of advocates but aims to benefit them in a more meaningful way. This year, we came up with a new impact metric called “High Impact Outcomes”, which is our new way to measure how Hive is making an impact on the movement.

  • 70 manually logged “High Impact Outcomes”, consisting of

    • 11 Job Placements in Freelance/Short-term Positions

    • 13 Job Placements in Roles

    • 9 New Projects/Initiatives started

    • 6 Volunteer Placements for Projects

    • 22 Volunteer Placements for Roles

    • 9 Instances in which Funding was received

However, this is not solely the result of a popular and active Slack space - which brings us to our next learning.

The Value of Personal Prompts: Understanding When an Engaged Community Isn’t Enough

Early this year, we learned about the Fogg Behavior Model (also known as “B=MAP”). The model states that Behavior occurs if you have Motivation, Ability, and, crucially, a Prompt. Often, community-building efforts seem to focus on providing the ability for community members to do what they are motivated to do. For example, someone may join the community to connect with advocates in a given region, so we set up a channel for said region. Or, someone joins a community to get advice on a certain topic, so we ask community members to introduce themselves and highlight what they can offer and what they hope to receive from the community - enabling our community members to reach out to one another.

While we’ve seen great results from community members helping others, throughout the year, we are noticing more and more that setting the mere infrastructure for something to happen will often not suffice. Instead, it requires prompts - more specifically, personal prompts- to nudge people to write their help request or reach out to a specific person. This also means that community building is a very active, involved, and continuous process. Thus, we have been moving more and more into a position in which we act as personal “connectors” for the movement. We also are starting to suspect that one of the most commonly reported challenges to our movement - coordination and collaboration - may simply be a “prompting” problem - an insight that we hope to turn into a specific project or program next year.

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) in Meta is Hard

The deeper we dive into MEL for meta-level work, the clearer it becomes just how challenging it really is. Commonly known challenges include issues around accurately assessing counterfactuality and indirect and long-term impacts; but, we would like to share a few very specific challenges we have learned from in our experience: 

  1. Reporting: On the whole, community members don’t typically tell us about the impactful actions they take as a result of being engaged with Hive. Often, we only learn about these actions through spontaneous conversations, where they naturally come up. This means that much of the impact we are logging comes from serendipitous chats we have with people. We estimate that we are missing ~30% of the impact due to a lack of reporting.

  2. Self-Reports: Even if people tell us, we have found self-reports - such as 'I did X because of Hive' - to not be extremely reliable either. It has happened, both, that people attributed impact to Hive which, upon inspection, proved to not be counterfactual, and vice versa. At the moment, we don’t believe that self-reports bias towards one side in particular, so we remain with using it as a proxy, but this may turn out to be quite false. 

  3. Counterfactuality and attribution size: We have noticed that many organizations, including ourselves, tend to frame impact in terms of 'how big of a role' our involvement played in achieving a specific outcome. While a good proxy, this is not what we are after. We ultimately care about making a counterfactual impact: whether or not our contribution was necessary. We have found cases in which we played a big role for something to happen, but not a necessary one, and vice versa. At the moment, it is unclear how common this really is and whether “attribution size” may actually suffice as a proxy at the end of the day.  Nonetheless, this experience has taught us to be more wary of it. Especially, if we assume that attribution size correlates with effort, we may want to seek the smallest possible necessary contributions to our movement.

We will continue to learn more about how we can more accurately measure our work, but it will always be a challenge for us. It will be hard to know just how cost-effective we are, and the predictions that we make will always rely on reporting, which can be inaccurate as explained above. At the moment High Impact Outcomes are at the core of our cost-effectiveness estimates, but because they are new, exploratory and not the only impact we believe we produce, we are always exploring more ways to measure our impact. We promise to keep you posted on what worked and what didn’t work for us in and around monitoring, evaluation and learning. 

Reaching 3,000 Subscribers: A Well-Curated Newsletter Can Keep the Movement Connected

As some of you may already know, Hive initially started as a side project led by our co-founder, Sofia Balderson. Back in 2022, when we were still called “Impactful Animal Advocacy”, Sofia started sending out a monthly newsletter, covering the most important news and updates around… well… impactful animal advocacy! Nowadays, we send our newsletter out twice a week (under its new name “Hive Highlights”) and have grown to over 3,000 subscribers! To put this number into perspective, that’s roughly the amount of people we have working (professionally) on farmed animal advocacy!

The newsletter itself doesn’t cost much to produce - we estimate it at about $5,000 for 24 editions a year (roughly $200 per edition) [1]. While the impact of the newsletter is harder to measure, our high open and click-through rates, as well as the qualitative feedback we regularly get, show us that it’s likely worth continuing. More importantly, the newsletters are an easily scalable program, since they don’t take more effort to reach more people! This approach has worked well for us—demonstrating that a well-curated, consistent newsletter can be both impactful and efficient.

Partnerships with Other Capacity Builders Can Amplify Impact with Greater Efficiency

We believe that part of Hive’s role is to connect advocates with resources that already exist rather than create them ourselves. Thanks to the reputation and the broad global audience we have built, the community is keen to listen to our recommendations and relies on us to be aware of impactful opportunities and resources. Community members often tell us that what they really love about our Slack space is that they have all the information they need in one place. Serving as a funnel of information, we see it as our duty to amplify other organizations. Throughout the year, in addition to the partnerships mentioned above, we have set up integrations in our Slack space to keep people up-to-date with the EA Forum and the Fast Forum, Faunalytics’ Research Library, various job boards, as well as online and local events.

We also partner with various programs and grantmakers to help onboard their alumni and grantees onto our Slack space and offer personalized guidance on how they can get the most out of Hive. Talking to these people is always a pleasure, and brings us another step closer to building a community infrastructure for the entire farmed animal movement.

More Than Just a Name: How Our Rebrand from IAA to Hive Changed our Game

Before our rebrand in May, we used to be known as Impactful Animal Advocacy (or, IAA for short). The rebrand came about for many reasons - for one, Impactful Animal Advocacy is a very long name. For us, the new name also carries the symbolic value of “becoming our own thing”. Hive is also more true to what we ultimately want to build: a collaborative and connected animal movement.

The rebrand exceeded our expectations and taught us the value of branding. The overwhelming majority of people we spoke to in the weeks following the rebrand already used our new name (and many of you were relieved that it was so much easier to remember!). Our bright colours made us both more recognizable and memorable, helping us to recruit and engage even more members.

While rebranding and creating a new website took us much longer than we originally thought it would, we believe it was a fantastic investment and all the efforts were worth it. 

Mental Well-Being Remains a Constant Need in the Community

Earlier this year, we had the privilege to partner with Overcome, a UK-based mental health charity providing 1-1 counselling to advocates for free. The challenges facing animal advocates have become increasingly salient in recent years, so we are proud of this partnership. What’s more, in less than 10 days (!!), we hit our goal of 100 sign-ups for this amazing program! While we are happy to see this partnership well-received, it also highlights a gap in these services within the movement. It also shows that advocates are more likely to take advantage of them when they are subsidised. The partnership is permanent (learn more here!) and we have now reached 150 sign-ups (98% positive feedback)!

But that’s not the only partnership we have launched in the domain of mental well-being. In October, we partnered with the Center for Effective Vegan Advocacy to help advocates access their course on “Sustainable Vegan Advocacy” for free! This partnership, too, is still running (learn more here!) and we have reached 44 sign-ups to date.

In addition, our mental well-being channel is one of our most popular ones. Tools like burnout and personality assessment, as well as tips from fellow community members, are regularly shared and discussed in the channel. 

Identifying Actionable Insights through Community Analysis is Hard

Throughout 2024, we had two amazing volunteers analyze various datasets around our Slack space. The goal was for us to find patterns and correlations that may potentially inform strategies to help make the Slack space easier to use and/or drive engagement. To date, three such analyses have been conducted: one on the Slack space as a whole, another on our onboarding approaches (including an experiment we ran), and a third on channel-specific engagement data. We were very optimistic about each of these - Slack already offers a ton of analytics and we were sure we’d find something valuable. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t find any game-changing insight (yet!) - these analyses usually didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know or strongly suspected, and wherever we learned something new, they didn’t provide any actionable insight that we wouldn’t have gone with anyway. We often found results were not statistically significant, correlations were not convincing signs of causations or the concluding next steps were exactly what we would have planned to do. We had a very positive outlook about optimizing our work with all our data (and we will not necessarily stop running experiments and analyses), but finding actionable insights turned out to be much harder than we thought. 

The Challenge of Working on Short Runways and its Effect on Organizational Performance

We initially set ourselves a goal to have 6 months of runway at all times during the year. However, due to three rejections and three postponed/lengthy application processes, in June we found ourselves with an unusually short runway. As a result, we had to prioritise our fundraising efforts more than we would have preferred. It became harder to focus on delivering strategic results while focusing on fundraising throughout the year. This made it very apparent that a 6-month runway is actually really short and can affect the productivity of an organization as a whole. Thankfully, we were still able to deliver on almost all of our goals, but we recognize that with greater funding security, we could have done more. We’ve since taken this learning to heart and turned it into action. We invested more time into our end-of-year fundraising campaign, set a new goal to maintain at least 12 months of runway, and updated our compensation policy to ensure we do not hire anyone whom we cannot afford for at least a year. What initially proved to be a challenge and didn’t work (i.e. a  6-month runway) has now turned into a more sustainable approach—allowing us to plan ahead, deliver on our goals, and keep amplifying impact within the movement. 

Knowing When to Let Go: Deprioritizing “Nice to Have Programs” to Focus on The Best Programs

Our community survey from January 2023 revealed that the Effective Animal Advocacy Facebook group we were moderating didn’t produce any meaningful, cost-effective impact. This is a program that we inherited from other community builders and that we were originally excited about. We decided to reduce our involvement to a minimum throughout the year to reflect this assessment. There certainly was some complacency in keeping a program that was “nice to have”, because it appeared to be fairly low-effort. However, we later decided to stop moderating the group altogether. We value the opportunity cost and our small team’s ability to focus on programs we are more confident about.

Plans to Become More Inclusive: Addressing  Limitations of Slack in Other Regions

As we seek to cultivate a global community and reach advocates in neglected regions, we are realizing that hosting our community on Slack may pose a significant barrier for advocates in regions where Slack is either not commonly used or is even blocked. To resolve this, we are working on making our workspace and the onboarding process simpler and more accessible for example, by translating them into Spanish and Portuguese. We are also looking for ways to bridge the tech-infrastructure gap and cultivate a community across platforms. One example is having a team member funnel the most important resources, opportunities, and help requests to localized groups on other platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat. This may become one of the biggest challenges moving forward in our effort to build a genuinely global community.

Community Support Could Surprise You - Members are Happy to Chip-in

Hive has always been free to join, but it is no longer free to run for us (we have roughly 3.5 FTE paid team members working on Hive + some volunteers). To reduce our reliance on large foundations and make Hive more sustainable, we launched our first fundraising campaign. Given that most Hivers work at non-profits, we were unsure whether community members would be willing to donate to Hive. It has been heart-warming to see how successful the campaign has been so far, having almost $15,000+ after just a month! Thanks to your support, we have secured several matches for a total of $21,000 after hitting our initial $10,000 target within two weeks! Now, we still have $6,000 left to raise for the remainder of the year - if you benefit from Hive and are excited about our mission, consider making a gift here.

Next year, we are hoping to launch a monthly giving program and slowly increase individual giving to 30% of our budget. That said, there are a few caveats. 

  • This year was most likely the first optimal time to run this campaign, as more Hivers were able to experience the impact of the community and thus, were more likely to donate.

  • We don’t believe individual giving will completely replace larger grants, and it will take us a while to grow it to 30% of our budget.

This experience has definitely taught us that it’s important to ask for support when we need it. If members find the service valuable, some will be open to supporting us. 

While Our Community Enjoys Events, We’re Still Figuring Out How Impactful They Are

In late 2023, we ran community member interviews to identify how we can further support our members. An overwhelming majority of suggestions centred around running events. So, in 2024, we hosted 60+ events! Some of our most popular events included:

Unlike other programs, event attendance doesn’t easily lead to neat outcomes like “volunteering” or “jobs”. Instead, we expect outputs like, “increased knowledge” or “engagement”, which may eventually lead to more concrete outcomes (which are much harder to track). Events take a long time to organise and it’s challenging and demanding to collect valuable feedback from event attendees. We will be assessing the impact of these events early next year with the insights of our end-of-year community survey. So far, we have received great feedback on most of the events we have hosted, and some very engaged community members have quoted events as something they truly value.

Leveraging Talent for Impact: AI for Animals’ Growth

At Hive, we believe in nurturing innovative initiatives that advance our mission. One such initiative is AI for Animals (AIA), a Hive project dedicated to exploring how AI can improve outcomes for farmed animals. What began as a few channels on Hive, spearheaded by our co-founder Constance, has grown into a thriving community with its own annual conference. Recognizing its potential, Constance transitioned from her leadership role at Hive to focus fully on leading the AI for Animals project. We’re thrilled to see AIA’s growth within Hive and are excited about the role it will play in leveraging AI to create a better future for animals. Supporting program development and witnessing such impactful progress has been both rewarding and inspiring for our team.

The Importance of Transparency in Daily Work: We Should Have Shared More About What Happens Behind-The-Scenes of Hive

This year, we realized we haven’t shared enough about what it takes to run Hive. Some feedback on our recent Marginal Funding EA Forum Post even revealed that people were surprised by the effort and funds involved, with some assuming Hive was mainly or entirely volunteer-run. While we did start as volunteers, after a year the community grew to the size that warranted focused team members looking after the space. Thankfully, our funders have largely focused on our results and trusted us to hire the team we needed—helping ensure we could operate in 2024. However, we missed an opportunity to bring our community closer to the day-to-day reality of the inner workings of Hive.

We could have shared posts highlighting what our team does, how we maintain an engaged and impactful community, and the decisions behind our programs—what we automate, what we prioritize, and why. Next year, we’re committed to being more transparent about Hive’s day-to-day, showing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into building a community and creating impact. By doing so, we hope to not only demystify our operations but also inspire trust and understanding of our approach.

We hope you enjoyed reading our learnings. 2024 has likely brought us even more learnings, but we tried our best to highlight areas that can be relevant/interesting to others. Feel free to ask us any questions.

Thank you so much for being a part of our journey! If you are excited about Hive’s mission to connect farmed animal advocates to increase their impact, consider donating to our end-of-year campaign. We only have $6,000 left to our goal and every donation until we reach our goal will be matched! You can make your donation here:

[1] This figure is our most recent estimate and lower than what you may find communicated elsewhere due to changes in both the time it takes us to compile the newsletter as well as the hourly compensation for it.

Kevin Xia
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Funding Community Building in Farmed Animal Advocacy