Society for the Protection of Insects Review

Thank you for the post about our organization. We'd like to provide some additional context that may help clarify to those interested.

SPI is indeed a very young, all-volunteer organization. We spent $0 in our entire first fiscal year (2024-2025) and remain underfunded in 2025, still operating on a volunteer basis.

Regarding our work: Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation, which we keep confidential for operational reasons - sharing details publicly would compromise pending cases and policy advocacy strategies. This is not uncommon in certain arenas of legal and policy work. We are, however, happy to share information about our specific victories and interventions confidentially with interested funders who request it.

We understand VettedCauses' methodology of requiring more transparency before making recommendations, and we respect that approach. However, we'd note that:

1. The nature of legal and legislative work often requires confidentiality
2. As a volunteer organization with zero budget in our first year, our capacity for public communications and website maintenance has been limited
3. We prioritize direct impact work over public relations when resources are constrained

To Eevee: Thank you for your support. We're happy to provide you with updates; I’ve reached out on Slack. 

We're working to improve our public transparency as we grow, while balancing the operational security needs of our work. We welcome conversations with anyone who would like to learn more about our specific activities and impact. Thank you. 

I'd want to know more about the organization's history -- especially funding history -- before deciding what weight to assign to a lack of evidence of "specific actions taken by SPI (besides insubstantial actions such as posting on instagram)." It's a young organization -- the IRS approval letter was issued in April 2024. The rest of this comment takes at face value the absence of specific actions; I have no basis to weigh in on that either way.

For instance, if this were an all-volunteer organization that had raised minimal sums, then I'd be inclined to assess more softly -- more along the lines of too young / not enough information yet than a straight do-not-recommend. I would be more inclined toward a more categorical non-recommendation if the organization had raised significant funds long enough ago that it should should be able to identify some specific activities with a plausible theory of impact by now. Making serious fundraising attempts without a plausible public action plan might also trigger a straight do-not-recommend from me, but merely asking for donations on an organization website would not.^[1]

From an end-user perspective, the difference between the two evaluations is that the former is a short-term rating with a reasonable probability of being stale in 6-12 months, and it doesn't signal a lack of efficient utilization of donor resources.

1. ^{^}

   There are tax-law reasons that a small US non-profit with few donors should generally solicit donations on its website and undertake similar actions.

Disclosure: Possible conflict of interest here. I donated close to $900 to SPI in November 2024 based on information they shared with me privately about their work and confirmation of their activities from a mutual contact. This was a large portion of my giving last year, which may bias me towards wanting to believe they will have impact.

I appreciate that you folks did a review of SPI, but why publish this linkpost without a description?

Also, is there really no information you can share about SPI's work so far? This doesn't match my impression of the work they were up to. I'm happy to follow up with them about their progress and share what I find out here, provided that they don't object.