How Connect For Animals Would Use Marginal Funding

By Steven Rouk @ 2024-11-15T21:06 (+6)

This post is part of Marginal Funding Week here on the EA Forum. I'm Steven Rouk, the Executive Director of Connect For Animals.

Our total budget for 2025 is estimated at $120,000, and we currently have a 2025 funding gap of $95,000. Below, I'll discuss:

1. What we do;
2. What we've accomplished so far;
3. How we spend money right now; and,
4. What we would invest in with more funding.

Overview

Connect For Animals is a free, nonprofit online platform for people who want to help end factory farming. We believe that by finding, connecting, and empowering pro-animal people, we can increase the amount of animal advocacy happening, increase the overall people power of our movement, increase retention of pro-animal interest, and increase retention of diet change behaviors. We think this could be one of the largest bottlenecks in the farmed animal advocacy space.

We have made significant progress with limited funding, utilizing funds efficiently on a lean budget. With additional funding, we could invest more into marketing and fundraising efforts, bringing on experienced contractors who could help us develop and execute strategies for growing our funding and our user base. Additional marketing investments would help us scale up our impact to thousands (or tens of thousands) more pro-animal people over the next 12 months. Additional fundraising expertise could help us establish a sustainable organizational fundraising model that supports our growth in the coming years, potentially without relying as heavily on the small number of farmed animal foundations that exist.

The rest of this post provides further details.

2024 Spending

We are currently spending about $7,000 per month, primarily on staff (Executive Director) and contractors (product dev contractor, bookkeeping and operations contractor). Most of the rest of our budget goes towards software expenses and web hosting costs.

We do not currently allocate funds towards ads, marketing contractors, or fundraising contractors.

2025 Budget and Funding Gap

Our total budget for 2025 is estimated at $120,000, and we currently have a 2025 funding gap of $95,000.

Our primary expenses in 2025 will remain staff and contractors, followed by software and web hosting costs. We would love to invest more in marketing and fundraising contractors to help us build expertise and expand capacity. These are two of our biggest gaps, and we are currently in conversation with some excellent contractors and consultants. Additional funding would allow us to make more significant investments in these areas.

If we were to receive additionally funding above this, we would likely invest in fundraising contractors, as well as potentially more into advertising and marketing expenses. We believe that funding and marketing are our two largest bottlenecks right now.

In the long run, we would like to hire additional full-time staff. For now, at our size and with our small budget, we think that expanding our capacity with expert contractors is probably a more cost-effective way to grow.

Our Accomplishments So Far

This year, we have helped hundreds of pro-animal individuals find events, organizations, action opportunities, and resources related to ending factory farming. We do this through (1) our online platform, connectforanimals.com, and (2) our weekly email newsletter.

In 2024, we achieved the following:

• Grew our user base to over 1,600 users and subscribers on the Connect For Animals platform.
• Delivered over 90,000 total emails (mostly the weekly email newsletter) with a 52% open rate and an 11% click rate. Emails contain featured actions, featured organizations, and upcoming events.
• Over 3,000 people discovered pro-animal events through Google.
• Over 200 people discovered pro-animal groups through Google.
• Facilitated at least 3 organizations (that we know of) getting new volunteers. (These were reported to us by the organizations themselves; we haven't yet run a survey to organizations asking for this information.)
• Served as a resource for at least 8 organizations (that we know of), who either use our events list or promote us as a resource to their audience.

How Additional Funding Would Help

Advertising and Marketing Expenses (Including Contractors) ($20,000)

This funding (currently planned for in our 2025 budget) would be dedicated to growing our reach and influence through advertising and marketing activities. Funds would support:

• Advertising and marketing contractors to execute creative campaigns
• Video content creation to amplify our message
• Social media ads to engage and attract more animal advocates

We think that we could grow our user base to 10,000 or more in the next 6-12 months with adequate marketing support.

Fundraising Contractor ($10,000 - $20,000)

Investing in a fundraising contractor/consultant (not currently planned for in our 2025 budget) would help us develop a more robust and sustainable fundraising model. This contractor would assist with:

• Identifying new funding sources beyond traditional foundations
• Establishing recurring donation programs to create a steady revenue stream

A dedicated fundraising contractor would help position us for long-term stability and growth.

Why Support Connect For Animals Now?

Currently, Connect For Animals operates on a very lean budget, and we have been able to accomplish a lot with the funds we do have. However, with a modest increase in funding, we believe we can meaningfully expand our impact. We think these are some of the main reasons why supporting Connect For Animals right now is a high-impact investment:

• Meta/movement building: Few organizations in the farmed animal advocacy space focus on capturing and activating our existing people power. Connect For Animals offers a unique, scalable approach to addressing this gap.
• Possibility for movement-wide data insights: Since we have a custom-built online platform, we have access to granular data and insights about the farmed animal advocacy space that we hope will valuable to the movement in the future.
• Providing a tool for other farmed animal advocacy organizations: Some organizations already use us as a tool for promoting events and campaigns, and we plan to become more useful to other organizations as time goes on. Our goal is to become a useful tool for the entire farmed animal advocacy space.
• Navigating critical early period for nonprofits: At a recent presentation on funding animal advocacy organizations, the presenter said that there seems to be a funding gap for young organizations that are past the initial seed/incubation phase, but not quite at the more stable mid/large size where they have established fundraising systems, consistent donors, and higher levels of support from foundations. We are now probably in that intermediate phase of organizational growth. Additional funding now would help move us through this phase successfully to establish a more solid foundation going forward.
• Track record: We already have a track record of accomplishing a lot on a lean budget, and we hope to continue to show this as our budget grows.

If you want to donate directly to our work, you can do so here: https://connectforanimals.com/donate.

For larger gifts, or if you have more questions about our approach that you want to ask directly, you can reach out to Steven Rouk at steven@connectforanimals.com.