Our overheads (i.e. salaries, travel/âconferences), and program costs for our work in India are currently covered by grants until the end of 2026. This means that any additional funds are put towards our Humane Slaughter Initiative. (For context, our secured grants also cover the cost of some stunners, but HSI as a program is still able to absorb more funding.)
Each stunner costs us $55k and we ask the producers we work with to commit to stunning a minimum of 120 million shrimps per annum. This results in a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped /â $ /â year (i.e. our marginal impact of additional dollars is higher than our historical cost-effectiveness).
Although weâre very excited by how cost-effective it is in its own right, ultimately we want to catalyse industry-wide adoption by deploying stunners to the early adopters in order to build towards a tipping point that achieves critical mass. In other words, over the next few years we want to take the HSI program from Growth to Scale.
Weâve had some good indications recently that HSI does contribute to âlocking-inâ industry adoption, with Tesco and Sainsburyâs recently publishing welfare policies, building on similar wins in the past (such as M&S and Albert Heijn).
One nit: SWPâs cost effectiveness numbers donât seem to include any operational overhead in the denominator (see the CEA, where youâre only counting the cost of the stunners).
I understand youâve fundraised for overhead separately, but IMO it should be best practice to include overhead costs in your denominator â obviously someone would have to cover those costs! Thought came from this thread with Vasco.
Iâd be curious for the overhead inclusive costs if that was quick â maybe as a proxy, you can multiply by [total org costs] /â [non operational costs]? :)
Thanks Angelina :) In our Guesstimate model, the overhead costs to date are included in the bottom right (something like cell L15 if it were a spreadsheet) - between the total cost of the stunners, and the final overall cost titled SWP Total Expenses.
So the cost-effectiveness we report on our website factors in this cost, but when weâre fundraising for marginal dollars, we often try to highlight the fact that marginal dollars are more cost-effective than the average dollar (which is unusual for an animal charity). But I agree that this is something of a judgement call, and the complex reality of marginal dollars is somewhere between those two numbers.
Our current estimate is that weâll buy 50 stunners, but Iâd take that number with a huge pinch of salt, as there are a number of factors that could influence how many stunners we ultimately need to buy (probably the most important one is that we want to focus on getting retailer commitments as our goal going forward (rather than a specific number of stunners), and itâs not super clear to us what the adoption curve will look like for retail commitments as we work with retailers outside of the UK).
We regularly evaluate our HSI program, and update our estimates if we think itâs appropriate. It could turn out we need fewer than 50, it could turn out that we need more. I guess a message I would like to emphasise is that we will use marginal funding in the most cost-effective way we can, whether or not the marginal funding goes towards a specific stunner, or towards more general corporate engagment work to reach commitments.
Something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars.
This is a slightly tricky question to answer as:
We donât have a specific funding gap for 2025
i.e. our overheads are covered, as well as the costs for our target number of stunners
However, it could be the case that we get unexpected momentum next year, and can give away more stunners than weâd planned for
Weâve run into this situation before, where we had an unexpected string of wins, and had to rapidly fundraise in order to pay for them
So effectively weâre trying to build up our war chest so that weâre able to deploy it when the opportunities present themselves
So all of that doesnât lead me to be confident in saying any specific number, but I think something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars seems reasonable
Answering on behalf of Shrimp Welfare Project :)
Our overheads (i.e. salaries, travel/âconferences), and program costs for our work in India are currently covered by grants until the end of 2026. This means that any additional funds are put towards our Humane Slaughter Initiative. (For context, our secured grants also cover the cost of some stunners, but HSI as a program is still able to absorb more funding.)
Each stunner costs us $55k and we ask the producers we work with to commit to stunning a minimum of 120 million shrimps per annum. This results in a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped /â $ /â year (i.e. our marginal impact of additional dollars is higher than our historical cost-effectiveness).
Although weâre very excited by how cost-effective it is in its own right, ultimately we want to catalyse industry-wide adoption by deploying stunners to the early adopters in order to build towards a tipping point that achieves critical mass. In other words, over the next few years we want to take the HSI program from Growth to Scale.
Weâve had some good indications recently that HSI does contribute to âlocking-inâ industry adoption, with Tesco and Sainsburyâs recently publishing welfare policies, building on similar wins in the past (such as M&S and Albert Heijn).
If anyone wants to reach out to me directly, you can contact me at aaron@shrimpwelfareproject.org. You can also donate to SWP through our website, or book a meeting with me via this link.
Good luck with fundraising! :)
One nit: SWPâs cost effectiveness numbers donât seem to include any operational overhead in the denominator (see the CEA, where youâre only counting the cost of the stunners).
I understand youâve fundraised for overhead separately, but IMO it should be best practice to include overhead costs in your denominator â obviously someone would have to cover those costs! Thought came from this thread with Vasco.
Iâd be curious for the overhead inclusive costs if that was quick â maybe as a proxy, you can multiply by [total org costs] /â [non operational costs]? :)
Thanks Angelina :)
In our Guesstimate model, the overhead costs to date are included in the bottom right (something like cell L15 if it were a spreadsheet) - between the total cost of the stunners, and the final overall cost titled SWP Total Expenses.
So the cost-effectiveness we report on our website factors in this cost, but when weâre fundraising for marginal dollars, we often try to highlight the fact that marginal dollars are more cost-effective than the average dollar (which is unusual for an animal charity). But I agree that this is something of a judgement call, and the complex reality of marginal dollars is somewhere between those two numbers.
Hope thatâs helpful!
Oh! Well Iâm sorry for spreading misinformation :) Thanks for the correction!
How much room for more funding do you have? Or, say, how many more stunners do you expect to be worth buying?
Good question Michael!
Our current estimate is that weâll buy 50 stunners, but Iâd take that number with a huge pinch of salt, as there are a number of factors that could influence how many stunners we ultimately need to buy (probably the most important one is that we want to focus on getting retailer commitments as our goal going forward (rather than a specific number of stunners), and itâs not super clear to us what the adoption curve will look like for retail commitments as we work with retailers outside of the UK).
We regularly evaluate our HSI program, and update our estimates if we think itâs appropriate. It could turn out we need fewer than 50, it could turn out that we need more. I guess a message I would like to emphasise is that we will use marginal funding in the most cost-effective way we can, whether or not the marginal funding goes towards a specific stunner, or towards more general corporate engagment work to reach commitments.
How much room for more funding do you expect to have in general for work in 2025 (after including funding coming from ACE)?
Something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars.
This is a slightly tricky question to answer as:
We donât have a specific funding gap for 2025
i.e. our overheads are covered, as well as the costs for our target number of stunners
However, it could be the case that we get unexpected momentum next year, and can give away more stunners than weâd planned for
Weâve run into this situation before, where we had an unexpected string of wins, and had to rapidly fundraise in order to pay for them
So effectively weâre trying to build up our war chest so that weâre able to deploy it when the opportunities present themselves
So all of that doesnât lead me to be confident in saying any specific number, but I think something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars seems reasonable