Hive, formerly Impactful Animal Advocacy, is a global community dedicated to amplifying the effectiveness of animal advocacy efforts. Founded in 2023, we have grown to over 2,000 members worldwide. We host a vibrant Slack community, curate a monthly newsletter, and incubate impactful projects.
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Our mission is to improve coordination and collaboration in the farmed animal movement through cultivating impact-focused communities.
In 2024, we have only sponsored AVA D.C. at a lower sponsorship level and we currently don’t plan to sponsor any further events, as we believe that we are unlikely to benefit from them in a cost-effective way anymore. We sponsored a few more events in 2023 as we were getting started and needed to reach our audience faster. All event sponsorships were expensed by our co-founder Constance, which was lucky for us, as she would have planned to support these events either way and we were able to benefit from the exposure.
In case you are referring to our (co-)organized events, such as those outlined in the post—in this year, event organizing took ~8-9% of our staff costs. We started running more events in late 2023 as informed by our community user interviews and have seen good traction with them in terms of attendance and satisfaction. We think these lead metrics are somewhat promising, but this is one of our program points we are re-evaluating more thoroughly, especially with our end of year community survey, as we don’t yet have a clear understanding of how they translate into impact. Currently, running (as many or more) events is relatively lower on our priority list.
Hey there! Thank you for your questions!
Question on this, I think it wasn’t very clear what is the actual total budget for Hive for 2025? how much is already covered? Do you have any outstanding grants on the table?
Happy to clear this up!
So far, we have raised ~$162k for 2025.
The Budget we need to maintain our current capacity is ~$260k. Therefore, technically, we are still fundraising to maintain our capacity as opposed to actually growing Hive.
However, to be transparent about our funding situation, plans and expectations, we are currently being evaluated for a renewal grant with Open Philanthropy. It is quite difficult for us to estimate whether and how much they are going to grant us; but we are moderately confident/hopeful that we will at least secure a grant of similar size as we did in 2024 ($100k). Considering that there are likely other grant opportunities throughout 2024 that we would apply for as well (although these would be a bit more complicated to lay out and predict), we believe that additional funding raised from our end of year giving campaign would likely (hopefully) marginally contribute beyond this ~$260k and thus (hopefully) contribute to our growth. Securing our basic budget before the end of 2024 would be beneficial for us because this would allow us to hire new team members (currently their contracts run out at the end of 2024 because we haven’t raised the money for the salaries yet).
In that scenario, our “Total Budget” in terms of “What we hope to raise and believe we can cost-effectively scale up to) is ~$420k for 2025.
How do you currently value your cost-effectiveness on how much $ you are adding to the movement vs. spending.
We currently only use $ added to the movement as internal estimates and decided not to include them in the post, because we are still collecting data, working out uncertainties and refining some key aspects. I’ll gladly outline our current thinking/plans, but do take them with a grain of salt, as they may change as we mature as an organization:
As quite common with community-building efforts, we find that a large portion of the value we are hoping to bring to the movement is hard to measure objectively. This includes value from keeping advocates up-to-date, providing them with knowledge to help their advocacy or being engaged in the community. Of course, this would also include impact we don’t learn about (which we estimate at about 20-30%).
However, we believe that our “High Impact Outcomes” (which include job and volunteer placements, new projects started and instances in which advocates received funding as a result of Hive) might be somewhat reasonably put into monetary value (thus, the special attention to it).
In order to translate these High Impact Outcomes to $ added, we currently use AAC’s ICAP measurement as outlined here. This includes various subjective judgment calls on our end, which he hope to get more external views on once we refine some key aspects further, such as:
How analogous is our work in terms of base placement to ICAP ratio?
What is the relative value of non-job High Impact Outcomes to job placements? (e.g., how many volunteer role placements can be equated to job placements?)
How do non-job High Impact Outcomes behave in their counterfactuality compared to job placements?
Our plan is to cover our costs in manually logged High Impact Outcomes alone; such that any additional “difficult to measure” form of impact can be considered “for free”. We have thus managed to succeed with this under our best guess estimates for the above judgment calls. We believe this to be a reasonable goal for 2025 as well.
As we are expecting longer timelines for the impact of our work (note that we have only been a registered organization since 2023), we plan to slowly raise our goals in this domain; e.g., covering our costs with our lower-bound estimates → exceeding our costs with lower-bound estimates by 2x, etc.
In the meantime, as we gather more data and a deeper understanding of the various types of impact we may carry, we hope to be able to outline the other areas of impact of our work in terms of $ added, make better estimates of the relative proportion of High Impact Outcomes to the rest of our work, etc. to help concretize the value of community building efforts.
I hope this makes sense! Let us know if you have any questions regarding this!
You’re welcome! Reasoning transparency is a strong part of our org culture, if it wasn’t obvious enough :) We’ll add Manifund to our tasks list, thanks for the flag!
Hi Rafael! Glad you were able to attend the first day. And we appreciate the feedback, thank you! You aren’t the first mention the post-EAG overwhelm; we’ll be taking this into consideration for future conferences.
Thank you for your comment, you are raising an important point! You’re absolutely right that having Constance volunteer full-time has been an extraordinary help, and we haven’t explicitly accounted for this in our internal cost-effectiveness (CE) estimates yet. This would pose an interesting challenge when thinking about marginal cost-effectiveness, as her contribution isn’t something that additional funds could replicate directly.
For now, we’ve only used our historical CE estimates as a “sanity check” while designing our 2025 goals and budget, ensuring they align broadly with our plans—so we didn’t strongly anchor on this data. For now, our numbers seem to check out nevertheless, because other shifts in our team and budget (e.g., changes in staffing and salaries) have kept our average costs per FTE relatively stable (e.g., in 2024 we operated on ~$240k with 4.5 FTE, including Constance, and for 2025, we expect to hold 4.5 FTE at ~$260k). Additionally, we’ve introduced more automations, outsourced tasks to volunteers where appropriate, and focused our resources on programs that have shown the most promise. We expect that these steps have helped ensure we’re using our funds more effectively, and hopefully counteract this limitation.
That said, we see the need to revisit these estimates in greater detail, especially as we evaluate our end-of-year community survey results. Funders haven’t raised this specific concern with us so far—perhaps because they’re more focused on our theory of change, specific projects, and broader impact metrics. However, your point is a valuable reminder to incorporate these nuances more explicitly in our future planning.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective and for your support of the community. We deeply appreciate it!