Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors
Our room for more funding is bigger and more urgent than ever before. Our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, so smaller donors will have an especially high impact this year.
Good Ventures recently decided to phase out funding for several areas (GV blog, EA Forum post), including wild animal welfare. That’s a pretty big shock to our movement. We don’t know what exactly the impact will be, except that it’s complicated. The purpose of this post is to share what we know and how we’re thinking about things — primarily to encourage people to donate to Wild Animal Initiative this year, but also for anyone else who might be interested in the state of the wild animal welfare movement more broadly.
Summary
Track record
Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.
Wild animal welfare science is still a small field, but we’re really happy with the momentum it’s been building. Some highlights of the highlights:
We generally get a positive response from researchers (particularly in animal behavior science and ecology), who tend to see wild animal welfare as a natural extension of their interest in conservation (unlike EAs, who tend to see those two as conflicting with each other).
Wild animal welfare is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion at scientific conferences, and was recently the subject of the keynote presentation at one.
Registration for our first online course filled to capacity (50 people) within a few hours, and just as many people joined the waitlist over the next few days.
Room for more funding
This is the first year in which our primary question is not how much more we can do, but whether we can avoid major budget cuts over the next few years.
We raised less in 2023 than we did in 2022, so we need to make up for that gap.
We’re also going to lose our biggest donor because Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy to phase out their funding for wild animal welfare. Open Phil was responsible for about half of our overall budget.
The funding from their last grant to us will last halfway through 2026, but we need to decide soon how we’re going to adapt.
To avoid putting ourselves back in the position of relying on a single funder, our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend on not only how much money we raise, but also how diversified our funding is. That means gifts from smaller donors will have an unusually large impact. (The less you normally donate, the more disproportionate your impact will be, but the case still applies to basically everyone who isn’t a multi-million-dollar foundation.)
Specifically, our goal is to raise $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving $10k or less.
Impact of marginal donations
We’re evaluating whether we need to reduce our budget to a level we can sustain without Open Philanthropy. The more we raise this year — and the more donors who pitch in to make that happen — the less we’ll need to cut.
Research grants and staff-associated costs make up the vast majority of our budget, so we’d need to make cuts in one or both of those areas. Donations would help us avoid layoffs and keep funding external researchers.
What we’ve accomplished so far
Background
If you’re not familiar with Wild Animal Initiative, we’re working to accelerate the growth of wild animal welfare science. We do that through three interconnected programs: We make grants to scientists who take on relevant projects, we conduct our own research on high-priority questions, and we do outreach through conferences and virtual events.
Strategy
A common misconception I encounter is that we’re trying to identify and scale up one intervention as soon as possible. Some of our work is oriented toward finding near-term interventions, but our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community. We think that’s a slower way to get to one good intervention, but a faster way to get to many great interventions, because investing in foundational research (e.g., methods for measuring welfare) will unlock a wide range of possibilities.
In particular, we want to ensure that as the field grows, it stays focused on the research topics that will help as many animals as possible, as much as possible, as soon as possible. This is non-trivial, because most wildlife science today tends to focus on rare or charismatic animals. Even for these animals, there is almost no research on how to protect them from naturally occurring harms. We think wild animal welfare science will be better positioned to do the most good if it focuses on things like:
Numerous and neglected animals (e.g., fish, invertebrates, pest species, juveniles).
The most prevalent causes of harm, whether they are caused by humans or not).
Network effects (i.e., indirect effects of interventions), so that we can estimate the net impact of an intervention on all affected animals.
Progress
I’m happy to be able to report that we’ve been getting a lot of traction. When we first started, almost no one had heard of wild animal welfare science (at least, beyond the idea of studying the welfare of zoo animals). If people had heard of “welfare biology” at all, it was something they associated with weird philosophers, not serious researchers.
Today, five years later, Wild Animal Initiative’s team has the largest concentration of scientists focusing on wild animal welfare anywhere in the world — eight PhD scientists with degrees in ecology, physiology, animal welfare science, and related fields. When we go to conferences, people have heard of us; conferences that previously rejected our symposia proposals are now accepting them. The keynote address at this year’s Universities Federation for Animal Welfare conference was about wild animal welfare.[1] Many folks (particularly in animal behavior science and ecology) are really interested in the ideas behind wild animal welfare, and are getting involved.
Here are some highlights of our progress to date:
Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by:
Helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established.
Running training and education events, such as our Methods Workshop, which filled to capacity in a few hours.
Publishing papers illustrating key priorities in the field, such as “The importance of considering age when quantifying wild animals’ welfare.”
Attending conferences where we present work that illustrates key concepts in wild animal welfare science.
There were seven presentations about welfare at the Animal Behavior Society conference this year (all about wild animals), after only being mentioned three times in titles/abstracts from the previous several years. That’s not entirely due to us, but I think we were a significant contributor to the microzeitgeist.
Identifying that a key barrier to the field is the lack of tools to measure wild animal welfare, and making strides in addressing that gap.
Our staff scientists published several pieces identifying potential metrics to be tested and validated, including oxidative status, a range of potential physiological markers, and telomere length.
We’ve encouraged our grantees and other researchers in our network to use this validation framework to improve the accuracy and interpretability of their findings.
By advising our grantees and hosting workshops at conferences, we’ve encouraged scientists to utilize multiple metrics of welfare from multiple domains (such as behavior, physiology, and an upstream indicator) to increase scientific accuracy in the absence of single “gold-standard” metrics.
We have a major publication in press analyzing which animal welfare metrics from the captive context are most feasible to apply in the wild. The paper scores 29 metrics across 11 criteria.
Identifying the replacement of pesticides with fertility control as a promising potential near-term intervention that could eventually improve the welfare of huge numbers of animals, and designing projects that could confirm the welfare effects of that approach.
Designing a field study (currently underway) to test the influence of a variety of factors on the welfare of house sparrows, one of the most numerous bird species in the world (but much maligned and very neglected).
Supporting over 60 research projects through our Grants Program, focusing on themes like wild fish welfare, near-term interventions, validating welfare indicators, and modeling network effects.
Most critically, we are starting to get evidence that our investments through grants are paying off. My biggest fear when we launched our Grants Program was that we would spend a lot of money on science that was supposed to be about welfare, but didn’t end up getting published or presented with any mention of welfare. Recent evidence (such as the papers our grantees are starting to put out, or the presentations they’re giving at conferences like the Animal Behavior Society conference) suggest that this isn’t the case.
We also know that we’re filling a niche in scientific funding. 69% of our grants focus on species of least concern. The only other funder we know of that is willing to fund research on welfare-related concepts in wild animals is Morris Animal Foundation. Our analysis of their grants suggests that over two thirds of their grants focus on animals of conservation concern — research that is less likely to benefit large numbers of individuals.
Many of our grantees have said that working with us has changed the projects they pursue or how they think about wild animals. Here are a few such testimonials:
“WAI has allowed me to develop and apply understanding and interests of animal welfare to the funded project, alongside giving me the necessary skills to apply welfare aspects to my other areas of research. Because of this … I also feel more confident approaching senior academics with welfare-related research projects/elements in research projects.”
“I was interested in animal welfare since the start of my career, but mostly focused on captive animals. The WAI funding allowed me to start a new and very exciting chapter of my career focused on the welfare of wild animals. I have since started new collaborations and projects that before seemed out of reach.”
“Prior to becoming a grantee, I was only peripherally aware of the concept of animal welfare, mostly within the context of zoos. Having delved much deeper into the literature on welfare due to WAI has been wonderfully stimulating. It has led me to examine the philosophical underpinnings of many of the concepts I think about on a regular basis. Thinking about what [“quality” and “fitness”] mean to wild animals in the context of welfare has given me a very fresh perspective, and caused me to re-examine things such as life-history trade-offs. Further, it leads to very interesting questions about what managers should be maximizing … It’s all very fascinating to me and has genuinely renewed my interest in biology and ecology generally.”
Why we need more funding, especially from smaller donors
We always have room to grow, but now we need to make sure we don’t shrink.
One of the things I like about working in a highly neglected field is that funding is almost always our main constraint. The work itself presents so many opportunities — questions to research, projects to fund, resources to develop, collaborations to explore — that no one obstacle can bottleneck the overall progress. Our potential impact is mostly a function of how much funding we have to employ our staff, run our programs, and regrant to other researchers.
In previous years, we’ve explained our funding needs mostly in terms of the extra things a bigger budget would allow us to do. Although we’ve never been able to fund the fullest version of our plans, we raised successively more money in each of our first four years, so assuming growth seemed reasonable.
This is the first year in which our primary question is not how much more we’ll be able to do, but whether we can avoid making major budget cuts over the next few years. I’ll explain the two main reasons for that, and why our strategy depends both on how much we raise and on how many people contribute.
We raised less last year than we did the year before.
The trend of growing revenue reversed for the first time in 2023, when we raised $1.3 million, down from $1.7 million in 2022. (These numbers exclude the grants we got from Open Philanthropy, which came in big, trend-obscuring chunks.)
That was concerning, but the causes seemed largely identifiable and fixable.[2] So when it came time to set the 2024 budget, we decided not to cut back yet. Instead, we used our reserves to invest in modest growth, adding a few new staff positions to address long-standing pain points. I still think that was the right bet given what we knew at the time, but it did raise the stakes for fundraising in 2024.
We’re losing our biggest donor.
The board of Good Ventures (the foundation behind Open Philanthropy) decided to exit grantmaking in several areas, including wild animal welfare. We’ve been assured by multiple sources that Open Philanthropy still thinks we’re doing effective work in an important cause area, and that this change solely reflects a strategic decision by the board to focus on fewer cause areas (those the organization has been working on longer and the board is more bought into).
That’s a big hit. Open Philanthropy currently gives us about $2M per year, which is roughly half our total budget. We’ve also benefited from other things they’ve done to support the wild animal welfare movement. For example, they funded New York University’s Wild Animal Welfare Program (NYU WAWP), with whom we’ve co-hosted events that led to ongoing collaborations with researchers at several different universities.
The impact is even bigger when you take into account the growth trajectory we had predicted for the movement over the next few years. We had substantial uncertainty about what the future of Open Philanthropy funding for wild animal welfare would look like, but our best guess was that they would keep donating to WAI at similar or slightly higher levels, they would increase their support for the NYU WAWP, and they would start funding a few new wild animal welfare projects, perhaps including an applied project, like a field trial of fertility control for urban rat populations.
Our funding won’t dry up right away. Open Philanthropy has confirmed they’ll pay out the rest of the grant they had already committed to WAI: $6 million to cover a period of three years (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2026). They won’t be making any grants to us after that, and they won’t fund any new wild animal welfare projects from now on.
That buys us just enough time to not panic, but we still need to act soon. If we have enough funding to sustain our current budget into 2026, but we believe we’ll only have half as much funding coming in afterward, it would be reckless to not make any changes until we’ve burned through the last of our reserves. Cutting some of our spending soon would buy us more time to increase our fundraising enough to balance revenue and expenses — smoothing the budgetary cliff to a slope and raising the altitude of the plain we land on. Our current plan is to see how much we can raise from other sources over the remainder of 2024, then use that to inform whether/how to cut our budget in 2025 and beyond. (See the next section for more detail.)
Another donor could make up the funds, but not the security.
There’s a good chance that another big funder will step in at a similar level to Open Philanthropy. I can’t say anything more than that now, because nothing is for sure and these conversations are obviously very sensitive.
That would be a big help. If something like that happens, I’ll update this post as soon as I appropriately can. Similar to how the departure of Open Philanthropy is a reason to give more to WAI, the arrival of a new seven-figure funder would be a reason to give less to WAI. But I’m not sure how much less because relying on that new funder alone would be risky.
When making major funding-dependent changes, we have to consider both the funding we have available and the probability of continuing to raise enough to sustain that budget. When Open Philanthropy first started funding our Grants Program, we were comfortable growing accordingly because (a) we felt we had a good understanding of Open Philanthropy’s decision making, (b) Open Philanthropy had a track record of thoughtfully expanding into new areas, and (c) we could discontinue the Grants Program without having to cut staff or change our other programs. For any new seven-figure funder, we would have high uncertainty about whether they would continue their support, because (a) we would be developing a new relationship with that funder and (b) no one else has a history of funding wild animal welfare at that level, so they might stop shortly after starting. We would also have to consider that (c) all of our programs are now quite interconnected (e.g., decreasing our grant-making would make it harder to expand our research network).
Therefore, a funder effectively taking Open Philanthropy’s place would be a dream come true for WAI, but it still wouldn’t get us all the way back to where we were.
Smaller donors have a bigger role to play.
Our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend not only on how much money we raise, but also on how diversified our funding is. Funding is more diversified insofar as it comes from a higher number of donors or a higher proportion comes from smaller donors. We’re using “smaller” in its simple literal sense: if Donor A gives less than Donor B, then a marginal dollar diversifies our funding more if it comes from Donor A than if it comes from Donor B. Or, in more practical terms: If you’re not a multi-million-dollar foundation, then this post is for you. That means that giving anything at all is more helpful than usual, and giving more than you otherwise would have is more helpful than usual.
Diversification is a major contributor to sustainability. Beyond just the additional revenue from additional donors, the more evenly our income is spread across donors, the less vulnerable we are to the loss of any one of our biggest donors (currently: Open Philanthropy, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Animal Charity Evaluators, and a few individual donors).
Specifically, we’ve set the goal of raising $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving between $1 and $10,000. That would represent about a 12% increase over what donors at this level contributed in 2022. Twelve percent is significant because our projections show that if we can grow our revenue by 12% year-over-year for the next five years, that will be enough to rebalance our budget without having to make layoffs (though we’d still be making major cuts to our Grants Program).
What we’ll do with your donation
We’re evaluating whether we need to cut our budget down to a level we can sustain without Open Philanthropy. The more we raise this year — and the more donors who pitch in to make that happen — the less we’ll need to cut.
The question of what to cut interacts with the question of how much to cut. That’s partly because each of our programs uses inputs from the others — e.g., our Outreach Program presents the results of our Research Program at conferences, which in turn increases the number of relevant researchers applying to our Grants Program (and helps those researchers tailor their proposals to our priorities). It’s also because many tactics are only worthwhile — or possible — at or above some minimum level of investment. Therefore, we’ve decided to wait until the first quarter of 2025 to pick the best path forward, because the amount raised in 2024 is key to forecasting what kind of budget we’ll be able to support going forward.
But to illustrate how various amounts of funding could help, here are some concrete numbers for expenses in our two biggest buckets:
Grants. Most of the grants we’ve made to external researchers have fallen into one of two buckets: $10,000–$30,000 each for Seed Grants (more exploratory, less direct connection to our top priorities) and $100,000–$200,000 each for Challenge Grants (high-confidence bets in projects tailored to our top priorities). In total, our grantmaking has amounted to $1 million to $2 million per year. This is the area where we have the most flexibility to quickly scale down our funding without limiting future opportunities, but we think it’s very important that we continue to fund at least enough projects that people see us as a resource and engage with our work. We think we could achieve that with a total of something like $300,000 per year spread across 3–10 projects.
Staff. Each employee costs roughly $75,000 to $135,000 per year including salaries, benefits, and taxes. When all the costs associated with each marginal employee are included (e.g., training and professional development, conference travel and lodging, staff retreat travel and lodging), the range is more like $83,000 to $140,000. What does a year of a staff member get you? It depends on the role, but it might be things like:
WAI presence at 3–6 scientific conferences per year.
1–2 scientific papers published and around 3 non-academic research notes.
1–2 grant rounds run, funding approximately $1M worth of research.
Unless you’re already familiar with budgets for academic science, that probably looks like a lot of money for not a lot of output. It’s true: Science is expensive. But we don’t think the most important measure of our work is our production — it’s what that production goes on to do. Even though our oldest paper was published only four years ago, our papers have been cited on average 7 times per article, in journals with an average impact factor of 7.3. Scientific papers accrue citations over time, so having more than a few in the first couple of years is pretty great.
Basically, every scientist who reads our work is someone who might go on to pursue a wild animal welfare science project themselves. Every journal that publishes us or our grantees contributes to the growing awareness of wild animal welfare science as a credible scientific field. Each grantee we support who goes on to work on wild animal welfare science in the future will mentor graduate students who might become interested in the topic themselves. We think we’ve made pretty significant progress toward getting wild animal welfare science to be a thing, putting wild animal welfare advocacy on a pathway to have a serious evidence base for figuring out how we can help wild animals. We hope we can keep that progress going and see wild animal welfare science lead to large gains in wild animal welfare within the next ten years.
Conclusion
Losing our biggest funder isn’t an existential threat to Wild Animal Initiative, but if we can’t find alternative funding sources, it will have massive consequences for the rate at which we can make change for wild animals. We’re pursuing every option to fill that gap. The quickest way would be if we could find another massive funder, but that still wouldn’t get us to where we need to be in terms of sustainability. We have a distinct need for building support among a wider range of individual donors, so if you’re considering donating to Wild Animal Initiative this year, I think recent events should update you in favor of giving.
- ^
@matthes (unaffiliated with WAI) also went to the UFAW conference, and they wrote a great overview of it here: animal welfare outside of EA—numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024. It’s particularly useful to get a sense of the context we’re operating in: one where wild animal welfare is on the rise, but otherwise pretty shockingly neglected, even by many of the people working in animal welfare science.
- ^
Most of the difference (~$400k) seemed due to a change in one grantmaker’s calendar which meant a grant decision we were expecting in 2023 was pushed back to 2024. We also had fewer individual donors than the year before, which I guess was largely due to the fact that I spent less time fundraising (partly because I was spending time on hiring a development director, and partly because I was out sick for a frustratingly long time).
Ok, I donated 10k
That’s incredibly generous! Thank you so much, James!!
You could seed fund an entire organisation for the cost for you to hire one member of staff. Why wouldn’t that be more cost-effective?
With the severe cut back in funding for this area, I think one would need to make an affirmative case that creating new organizations is good for the WAW ecosystem as a whole at this time. I think you’d need an unusually strong new org candidate + evidence of significant donor interest.
I’d agree if this seemed like an
especiallyextremely promising organisation [edited this sentence to better reflect my beliefs]. To a layperson looking into the field from the outside, it isn’t clear from the post.1. The theory of change is suspect
- People rarely listen to academics even where there is consensus.
- Most academic papers do not replicate
- We’re learning that data fabrication is common even in top journals
- It’s not clear that this research is any different or will prove to be any different
- It’s going to take decades to find out if they’re successful because the feedback loops are weak—it’s going to cost tens of millions to find out if their plan is viable.
2. Their average staff members have higher salaries than the founders / CEOs of most other EA animal charities, so their cost is probably high
I think AIM is a good example of a field-leading charity that it doesn’t make sense to try and compete with much. They spend ~$2M per year, paying their senior staff <$40k. WAI is spending double that, paying their average staff almost triple. They’ve been incubating charities for ~5 years, and WAI has been around for 5 years. AIM incubated ~30 charities in the time WAI published 4-12 papers (for ~10 total citations) and attended some conferences.
They seem several orders of magnitude less cost-effective than a field leading charity, but are sucking up about the same amount of money. Maybe WAW is just a really difficult area for making progress, but that isn’t really a strong case for putting more money into WAI.
It strikes me that either:
1 - WAW isn’t tractable yet and isn’t worthy of much spending
2 - WAI ought be disrupted by hungrier EAs willing to work harder, for less, via a stronger theory of change.
(obviously I have a bias here, but didn’t talk to anyone at WAI before leaving this comment, nor do I have any formal affiliation with them except via marriage).
I feel confused by most of this critique. To be clear, I think founding new charities is incredibly impactful, and there are great funding opportunities there, and that funding AIM charities at launch is a great opportunity for EA donors focused on GHD and animal welfare. But to address your concerns:
1. This critique just sounds like you wouldn’t accept any scientific results, and presumably this is also an issue for all AIM charities / animal welfare charities. If you’re worried about the replication crisis (obviously an issue, but much less so in bio/ecology than social sciences), then presumably every AIM-intervention based on scientific research should be viewed with a ton of skepticism too? Why should I think Shrimp Welfare Project, for example, has good reason for thinking their interventions are good except for through scientific research, which by your lights looks like should be dismissed? AIM’s work is backed by tons of science which presumably would also fail this test. It seems like if you want to make this critique, you’d need special reasons for thinking that WAI funded work is less likely to replicate than other animal welfare science work. I think the opposite is likely to be true, given that WAI seems highly focused on enforcing good scientific practice compared to the average funder?
I also think that this misunderstands what I take WAI’s theory of change to be — I don’t think the idea is that people will listen to scientists—it’s that there will be more scientific evidence so future interventions can have a bigger body of evidence behind them.
Finally, I think the timelines for WAW interventions are a lot shorter than you expect—I’ve been writing something up about this, but when WAI launched, I expected it to take decades to get to a place where we could be highly confident about the sign of WAW interventions. Now, I’d guess that we are under a decade away for some.
Finally, I’ll note that this critique has a common failure mode for discussing WAW — if you acknowledge that WAW is an issue, but are worried about the tractability due to flowthrough effects of interventions, than this should make you think basically all charitable interventions are less tractable, because they’ll all have unknown flowthrough effects on WAW. I think this is a bad line of reasoning, but at its core “WAW is a problem but intractable” seems like just as big a problem for other cause areas as WAW.
2. I don’t think this is accurate. I think it is true that AIM founded charities pay much less, and so do many startups. But WAI has been around several more years than the oldest AIM animal charities and is significantly more established. I think I’d expect most AIM charities that survive to having 20+ staff, etc to raise their salaries significantly, with AIM itself being an exception to this due to a particular ideological commitment.
Also, WAI’s salaries appear to be well below or competitive with many other EA animal charities, like THL or GFI.
But, I also think that this could just be a strategic disagreement — clearly outside the animal space, many EA charities believe people should be paid much more than AIM pays. I suspect many people do not apply to AIM roles due to the pay. That could be a worthwhile tradeoff, but paying lower salaries isn’t something that is all upside—it makes the talent pool smaller, and in many spaces, that could be directly bad for impact.
This seems like it intentionally left off WAI’s main program and activity / the source of the vast majority of their impact? A little confused about why you didn’t include it and it makes me unclear how much to update on this comment or to take your critique overall. For reasons outlined below, I also think the AIM statistic is also misleading, because not all those charities were successful or impactful — very few of them were/are (which is still great, and I think on net, donating to the right new charity could be better than donating to WAI).
Could you share the calculations you did for this or was this just a guess/made up figure? I’d be interested to see it since you seem confident and gave a pretty specific figure here, and this outcome is very different from other rigorous estimates I’ve seen in the space by independent parties.
***
Finally, as a high-level point, comparing founding a charity with an established charity is not as straightforward as looking at the dollars to each. If you think WAI does cost-effective work (which clearly many EA-aligned evaluators think, like EA Funds, OpenPhil, ACE), then you’re comparing a risky bet against a reliable outcome. Say AIM has a 1 in 5 success rate for founding impactful charities, but it’s hard to tell which of the new charities at founding will be successful. I think this would be incredibly successful and is way above where they currently are. But that means if each one needed $100k to start, you spend $500k overall to get the $100k in value from the good charity. The charity would need to generate 5x the value of WAI in this scenario to make funding a new charity from the pot over WAI the right choice.
Founding new charities is obviously a great way to have impact. But lots of new charities are bad, and by your lights donations to them will be wasted when the charity tries their intervention and it doesn’t work, or otherwise fails and shuts down. The comparison you should be making is more like: donate X to WAI with a known impact (Z progress on some issue), or donate X to a risky bet with a lot of upside, and a high likelihood (in my view >80% for AIM charities—still incredibly impressive and a testament to AIM) of going to $0. That’s much less obviously a clear bet one way or another in the abstract.
Time is precious, so I’m just going to commit to ending my involvement after this comment.
BLUF: I’m not trying to convey “AIM good, WAI bad”. Just that “WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding” AIM was just an example of a charity which would be very hard.
I didn’t claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that’s clearly false.
Quotes from the post
“Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.”
“Here are some highlights of our progress to date… Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by… helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established.”
If that doesn’t make it sufficiently clear, view their grants page; Almost all of their grants went to academics.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they’re working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn’t require academics. It doesn’t depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
The rest of your writing here seems to assume that I accept that wild animal welfare considerations dominate all others. I don’t come close to believing that.
I don’t think that every AIM charity is field-leading. I’m trying to communicate that for Jason’s case to hold true, crudely paraphrased, that when fields funding is scarce we should rally around its incumbents), the incumbent charities need to be hard to beat. AIM is one example of a charity I think is field leading in it’s area. I’m trying to show that WAI is not nearly as hard to beat because the TOC seems a lot weaker and the cost is a lot higher.
Based on the post, I haven’t read much further into their work, it seems that most their value cashes out in published research papers, either of them or their grantees. I included both in the statistics cited above, even preprints. AIM could equally complain that I’ve left off their research, for-profit incubation program, and researcher incubation program.
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I’d still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I’d appreciate a more critical lens on WAI’s theory of change than I’ve seen before.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don’t have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can’t tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia—they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn’t know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you’re uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you’d have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn’t important.
Final comment—I’ve edited by initial comment to better reflect what I wanted to convey, but left the original text so the context of your reply remains for later readers.
Relatedly: People who have the skill set to found new EA orgs well, plus the ability and willingness to accept AIM-level pay, are not in unlimited supply. There’s a significant opportunity cost to putting the hypothetical WAW-startup founder in a WAW startup vs. (e.g.) an AIM startup. Conditioned on them being skilled enough to do well in a serious WAW funding downturn, they probably would have been top-tier talent elsewhere.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! I’ll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didn’t want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesn’t respond to this comment, don’t take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didn’t find it compelling. Here’s my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we don’t know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theory—there’s stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because it’s unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: You’re right that for many social movements, more academic research isn’t what will change people’s minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think that’s outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So it’s worth working harder to help them.
Staff salaries
Actual salaries: Our salaries currently range from $60,000 to $104,000. Here’s how we set salaries.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but that’s typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because that’s where there’s the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. They’re also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if they’re really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world aren’t like that, and our day-to-day work doesn’t offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we don’t want to limit ourselves to those. (We’d also rather not take advantage of those people’s lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. That’s what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they don’t have to provide for others in their family and they don’t have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So it’s more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then it’s still cost-effective.
* Edit: “Currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers” sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Final comment—thank you for your gracious reply. I appreciate it is difficult to engage productively with the type of criticism I delivered.
Wow, that is a beautiful salary source of truth doc. I’m impressed! Thanks for sharing.
On mobile while on train, but I don’t see the math fully working here. Per the post, all-in cost per employee “range is more like $83,000 to $140,000,” which covers salary, benefits, taxes, and various smaller things. That does imply a median all-in of roughly $111.5K...but I think you are comparing that figure to AIM base salary alone. If you added in other costs, I suspect it would be considerably closer (although you’re very likely right that WAI is significantly higher cost than AIM).
The other thing to note is that AIM pays considerably lower than most EA orgs (or even most non-EA profits in the US at least.) I think it is particularly unusual in keeping low salaries after it becomes successful, so wouldnt assume the hypothetical startup would follow suit. So I think a fair bit of your critique applies to most EA orgs having the possibility of lower-cost upstarts in their area, rather than to WAI especially.
+1 to the idea that AIM has idiosyncratically low senior staff costs that I think are pretty strongly influenced by Joey Savoie’s personal attitude to cost minimization and sacrifice; I think the main scarce resource that AIM staff spends is not exactly “amount of money” but more like “number of Joeys”, and that if you wanted to start a second AIM you wouldn’t get it nearly as cheaply.
I think this is partially correct. I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason. I would argue that more EA organizations should and could adopt this approach. The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays—see some numbers I looked up (although these figures are now somewhat higher as they are based on older data).
I get the sense that your and/or AIM’s views on pay localization explain a fair amount of the variance.[1] I’m not sure if that is counting in the less-than-50% or not.
For example, the median US full-time worker salary in 2022 was about twice the figure you linked for the UK in that year. I get the sense that many other orgs have chosen to pay at US rates (even Bay rates) as a baseline, with a desire to avoid huge US/non-US disparities minimizing the degree of downward adjustment applied to other locations. But it seems that could explain a good bit of the variance.
I am attempting to use a more favorable characterization than “cost-of-living adjustments” because untangling cost of similar lifestyles vs. differences in quality of lifestyle across areas can be challenging.
I do think localization has some effect but not a huge one. A quick Google search gave me a sum of $60,000 or £47,000 for the US in 2022 (if you only include full-time workers), so it’s a bit higher, but not enough to radically change the picture. My soft sense is that US vs. UK EA organizations would not have large pay differences. Also, I do not think AIM historically has had fewer US employees than other organizations that are based in the UK.
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it’s really hard to do well, because (a) it’s really hard to know when you’re comparing apples to apples and (b) there’s strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn’t end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).
Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/
Thanks for correcting the numbers and sorry for my sloppiness with them. I think 2 → 2.5x would be a more sensible multiplier based on what you wrote. I think the conclusion still holds.
Regarding paragraph 2, a charity must hit an exceptionally high standard for me to deem it unworthy of competition, even in a downturn. I accept it’s not realistic for the median charity to do that well.
Why do you say WAI is paying average staff almost $120k? I’m no longer an insider, but I am almost certain that isn’t true, or remotely close to true.
I wrote that line poorly. Thank you for the correction and sorry for being sloppy. I should have said more like 2 to 2.5x based on what Jason’s wrote. However, I’m not sure this changes the conclusion much.
[I respect your desire to conclude participation in this thread, so what follows is an attempt to identify potential cruxes rather than persuade anyone.]
I think we may have different implicit models of what is likely to happen when there are too many orgs / projects in an area are chasing too few dollars.
The following types of statements would update me toward a more pro-disruption position:
At least in the medium-run, relatively more impactful organizations will be able to return to healthy operating status despite the funding famine. Less impactful organizations will die off.
There is a relatively strong correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donors are fairly good at measuring impact and willing to move their funding around accordingly.
The funding famine will be of relatively short duration. This not only gives a quality upstart a greater upside, it also reduces the odds that the famine will stunt its natural growth pattern.
The leading organization (or most organizations) in the subfield are not that compelling, and it is likely that the disruptor will pull funding from those organizations and/or grow the subfield’s pie.
In contrast, I mostly have assumptions that make me less excited about disruption:
Rather than a dichotomy between healthy organizations/projects and collapsing ones, the ecosystem is likely to remain above its healthy carrying capacity with many organizations/projects in a weakened or even semi-starved state.
There is only a moderate correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donor relationships are fairly sticky, or because some organizations are more famine-resistant in a way that is loosely correlated with their impact.
The funding famine will be of relatively longer duration. A quality upstart org is at high risk of losing momentum because the famine will prevent it from getting the resources it needs. And the limited funding caps its upside.
This one I have no clear opinion on:
It is likely that the disruptor will pull significant funding away from organizations in adjacent subfields that are pretty effective (e.g., you might think more speculative farmed animal welfare [like shrimp] and wild animal welfare compete for some of the same dollars).