Hive: 2024 Achievements, Current Funding Situation, and Plans

By Hive, Kevin Xia 🔸, SofiaBalderson @ 2024-11-13T16:02 (+39)

TL;DR:

In this post, we cover Hive's achievements, plans for 2025, and how we would allocate additional funding to maximize our impact.

Hive is a global community focused on empowering farmed animal advocates by fostering connections, resources, and collaboration. We are most well known for our Slack community and bi-weekly newsletter with movement updates, "Hive Highlights".

2024 Achievements:

2025 Focus & goals:

We currently still seek funding to maintain our 2024 capacity at 4.5 FTE. We are moderately confident that we would raise this throughout 2025, so marginal funding during this giving season would (hopefully) contribute to our growth.  Individual donations may be particularly important and helpful to diversify our funding base. We would greatly appreciate it if you would consider supporting Hive. You can do so here.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Koen van Pelt and Johannes Pichler for reviewing this post. All mistakes are our own. 

Briefly, who we are:

Hive is a global community for farmed animal advocates. Our mission is to connect advocates across regions to amplify their impact, working towards a vision of ending animal suffering. We aim to build a movement rooted in strong relationships, informed decisions, and effective tools. We achieve this by cultivating global communities and connecting advocates with resources, opportunities, and each other.

Our programs include:

What we have been up to:

In Key Metrics (2024)

This was achieved with a budget of $240,000 on 4.5 FTE. Notably, one of our co-founders volunteered with us full-time, so we only had staff payments of 3.5 FTE.

In Testimonials (2024)

It can be difficult to understand all the ways our work may help animal advocates. To get a better perspective, we often rely on testimonials so that advocates can tell their own stories. In 2024, we have received 40+ public testimonials about how our work has helped advocates - you can view them here. We ask for more in-depth stories from select people who we believe to either do uniquely impactful work or are representative of how advocates benefit from our community, which we have provided below in their own words [slight format changes and emphasis added by us for easier readability]. Here are some of our highlights:

Aidan Alexander (Co-founder - FarmKind) - found various people through our personal network, recommendations and the Hive Slack to help his newly-founded organization

“We launched our organization this year, and the support of the Hive team and community have been incredibly helpful in accelerating our progress. For example they informed me about a local conference (VARC UK) and convinced me to attend. This led to connections with other members of the movement who shared relevant learnings from their work (e.g. marketing tactics), saving us time learning those things ourselves and making our programs more effective by building off the collective learnings of the movement. This conference also led to a partnership to provide graphic and website design support for our new giving platform, helping us move faster and achieve a better online presence, at lower cost. The Hive team have also helped us find many promising web developers to potentially build our platform on a volunteer or contract basis. They did this both by encouraging me to post our needs on the Slack community, which garnered some useful responses, and by passing on our request for proposals to people in their vast network. Finally, the Slack community has made connecting with people I need to speak to for our work far faster and easier than it would be otherwise. For example, I was able to message a specific researcher whose work I had questions about, and they responded within minutes, helping remove a blocker to building an 'impact estimator' for donations on our platform.”

 

Hayden Kessinger - leverages the resources and opportunities to connect with advocates on Hive to find a high-impact career for animals

“Hive has been the most impactful service (I can't think of a better word in this context) I have taken advantage of for my journey in animal advocacy. I cannot emphasize this enough. Joining this community opened up a whole new world of potential for me. I knew about AAC and 80k Hours and other very useful tools/resources for getting into effective animal advocacy but none of them empowered me to truly pursue a career in this space like Hive. Since joining about 4 months ago, I have probably had at least 30 conversations with amazing, kind, knowledgeable, and extremely helpful people in the community. I have never left a call without learning something, changing my mind about something, or feeling more confident in my abilities and potential. I am dedicating a large chunk of my free time to building a network and skillset to help me find a high-impact career for animals. This would not be possible without Hive. [...] I recently landed a fundraising volunteer position with a new organization, ICARE. [...]. I also have tentative plans to join another organization as a volunteer at the end of November. Even if I never end up working in animal advocacy, I have made friends from all over the world thanks to Hive, and to me, that alone is invaluable. I still have a lot to learn but rather than feel intimidated by that, I feel excited because I can log on to Hive and message experts who 99/100 times are thrilled to speak with and help me grow.” [...] 

 

Wasseem Emam (Founder, Director & Head of Research - Ethical Seafood Research / University of Stirling) - found various employees, freelancers and volunteers through Hive

“Through the various introductions that people have made as they join the Slack [...] I have found about and subsequently reached out to a number of people who have ended up providing services for us or working for us directly. One key thing about this is that all of them have been good fits for our work since they are already aware of the importance of our cause and are passionate about it. For example, my current Head of Operations is someone I met on there [...]. My Research Manager has also recruited volunteers from the Hive Slack who have helped us in reviewing a book we have been working on and advise us on publication, etc.”

 

Collin Walter (Managing Partner - Pistole Labs) - found how he can best contribute to effective animal advocacy with his background in Finance

“Hive has been fundamental in helping me understand how I can personally have the greatest impact on animal welfare. I came to the community with a high-level understanding of the issues and a desire to make a difference, but didn't know how or where I could affect change in this space. Through conversations with Hive members — and the experts they've generously introduced me to — I now have a much clearer picture of where the problems lie, who is working to solve them, and concrete ways that someone with my background can contribute. Perhaps equally important, this community has given me renewed hope that, collectively, our efforts can and are making a dent”.

 

Liz Wheeler (Philanthropy Manager - Faunalytics) - started a monthly series of community fundraising calls.

“I can’t imagine the animal protection movement without Hive. It’s been instrumental in facilitating introductions and establishing connections. The #fundraising channel has created a sense of community amongst fundraisers, removing the old notion that we're in competition with one another. We're greater together, and it's only been possible thanks to the Hive Slack Community”.

Strategic Focus 2025:

In 2025, we continue to focus on our core program - the Hive Slack. We want to put special emphasis on targeting neglected regions, such as Africa, Latin America and Asia, to scale into a truly global community. We will expand our strategic partnerships and continue to build on our other programs to integrate with one another, ultimately strengthening a holistic farmed animal movement-wide community infrastructure. Lastly, to ensure that we can robustly and reliably and cost-effectively achieve our goals, we will expand our volunteer system and optimize our organizational structure and culture.

Objective 1: Grow Hive’s reputation as a global hub for highly engaged farmed animal advocates who want to increase their impact

We estimate that we have now successfully engaged ~60-70% of our target audience in Western Europe and North America, we plan to put special emphasis on reaching neglected regions, namely Asia, Africa and Latin America. This will extend our impact to areas where infrastructure for global collaboration is likely most needed. It will also benefit our existing community by connecting them to advocates and resources from underrepresented areas. For example, Apoorva (Founder and Director of the Animal Law & Policy Network) found four pro-bono services to grow her organization:

“My organisation, Animal Law & Policy Network found amazing collaborators through Hive. We worked with Scarlet Spark it was an absolutely incredible experience for us. I really enjoyed working with Tania and Alyssa. We worked together on an organisational focus document and I couldn’t be happier with the output of our collaboration. I also worked with James and Amy from User Friendly and they were brilliant. Those interactions have shaped our communication strategy immensely. I also used Hive to connect with Jay from Culture Canopy. He’s helped us with designing our hiring process and continues to support our people and culture related work. I’m also working with The Mission Motor on our theory of change and developing MEL frameworks now. This is just yet another organisation that I found through Hive. As a young organisation, we found immense support through this amazing community that Sofia and Constance have built and for that I will forever be grateful”.

One of the programs that we expect to fund with marginal funding is our ambassador program (see below). We plan to hire up to three part-time local advocates to bridge cultural and language gaps and connect advocates to Hive and a more global community. 

Objective 2: Provide high-value programs that increase the impact of our community members

As we grow our reputation and reach, we remain committed to delivering impactful programs and continuously improving them. As we are now in our second year, we’ve gathered significant data and plan to more thoroughly evaluate our programs early next year to refine our focus, enhance high-impact initiatives, and identify our unique strengths. For example, we believe we’re well-positioned to connect early-stage advocates with skilled volunteer roles in new organizations, providing essential support and skill-building opportunities. If this turns out to be a comparative advantage, we may double down on providing such connections.

Additionally, we aim to drive innovation by piloting new projects, such as an AI-driven Community Relationship Management system, designed to streamline and enhance strategic connections within our community.

Objective 3: The team has the support and resources  they need to execute Objectives 1 and 2

To support these efforts, we want to focus on optimizing our organizational structure, culture and funding situation to ensure that we set ourselves up for success. A major component of this objective is managing major internal staff changes which we believe, while challenging, will be very beneficial to the larger movement.[3] Another focus point is to increase our runway to 12 months and build up our base of individual donors.

Some key stretch goals we aim to achieve with our work on our dream budget (see below)

How our funding situation currently looks like: 

We have a significant funding gap to cover our costs to continue our work from 2024 on similar capacity. If we don’t raise additional funding, we may have to size down and reduce our work on various projects and areas, which will likely include activities such as:[4] 

Importantly, we are currently largely funded by larger foundations (“How we are funded”). While we’ve been fortunate to receive this support, we need a more diversified funding base, especially from individuals, to ensure long-term sustainability and resilience for Hive. We’re setting an ambitious but achievable goal: to increase the share of our funding from individual donors from 2% to 10% in 2025, with a long-term aim of reaching 25%.

To kickstart this effort, we’re asking for your support in our end-of-year campaign to raise $10,000 from individuals (to be matched by a generous anonymous Hive community member, so if met, Hive will get $20,000). This contribution will enable us to make crucial steps toward a more sustainable funding mix and allow Hive to grow with the needs of our community in mind. 

We would greatly appreciate your support.

Hive Community, Inc. currently has its 501(c)(3) application pending with the IRS. If approved, your donation will be tax-deductible in the US for this year. However, we cannot issue a tax-deductible receipt until we receive confirmation of our status. Once approved, we’ll follow up with a receipt confirming our tax status. For questions, please contact Sofia at sofia@joinhive.org.

If you prefer an immediate tax-deductible receipt, you can make a donation here through our fiscal sponsor, Humane America, a registered 501(c)(3) (we don’t pay any fees for their sponsorship). Please email sofia@joinhive.org if you'd like to donate via DAF, or if you’d like to donate a bigger amount and want to know more details about what your donation will fund. 

What things cost:

As a young organization, working on an area as wide as community building, it is difficult for us to accurately point towards a specific program or a specific outcome that would occur if and only if you donate a specific amount. This is due to the interaction between different programs and our aim to continuously reassess, optimize and innovate our work. For the sake of transparency and to illustrate and approximate what we would do with different amounts of marginal funding, we want to outline some of the major costs that we currently carry and the way we prioritize them. 

Slack Fees (covered)

Our costs for most of our technical tools are relatively low. However, we need a substantial amount of money to cover our Slack fees. Slack charges $1.08 per active member per month (that is, with the 85% nonprofit discount, usually it’s $7.25 per user). Given the activity in our space, we expect to pay $12567 in Slack fees for 2024 and ~$16,000 for 2025. We find it key to our engagement to remain open and accessible for everyone and therefore don’t charge our members. Keeping our Slack space for free is one of our biggest priorities so we can consider these costs as covered.

Very basic core Staff costs (covered) 

For 2025, we currently have the costs covered for 2.5 FTE who constitute what we consider our very basic core team. This is considerably lower than what we had available for 2024 (4.5 FTE) partly due to one of the co-founders who was a full-time volunteer not being operationally involved. Thus, this would mean reduced capacity and likely some loss of momentum and output on most of our programs. It is, roughly, what we consider the minimum for Hive to continue existing in our core, but may still carry some risk of losing too much momentum such that it will be significantly more costly to revive the community. 

Newsletters (expected to be covered)

Costs: $7,668 

Our Newsletter, Hive Highlights, is one of our core programs. We send it out on a bi-weekly basis and it reaches 2,900+ people with a ~50% open rate. It currently costs us ~$380 in paid staff time per newsletter edition (=$9,120 per year, minus $1,452 which we have already raised for this program through Manifund EA Community Fund). We are very keen on continuing to send out our newsletter on a bi-weekly basis because we have seen that this benefits advocates on time-sensitive opportunities and resources and helps us make any single newsletter edition less overwhelming. We could potentially reduce costs for this by sending the newsletter less frequently or spending less time curating and writing it.

Additional Staff (partially expected to be covered)

Costs: $25,000 - $150,000

Our largest cost is our staff cost. We currently have enough runway for 2.5 FTE  to continue with Hive until the end of 2025. However, in 2024 we worked with 4.5 FTE, meaning that we have a funding gap of $100,000 to maintain our performance. Here is our plan to hire extra staff:

This would put us at roughly the budget that we worked with in 2024. We think that we will be able to roughly mirror our output and impact from 2024 for this budget and sufficiently maintain our momentum through the year. We have not yet raised this funding, but are moderately confident (~70%) that we will be able to raise this amount throughout 2025 with a few upcoming grant decisions and applications. However, we will likely need to work on a tighter runway and focus considerable time and effort on fundraising.

Any funding beyond that would actually grow Hive. If we raise additional money, we plan the following: 

This is the budget that we believe will be best to set up Hive for success. It would provide us with what we roughly consider to be the most we can cost-effectively scale up. We believe that this gives us the best chance to build on top of and capitalize on the momentum that we’ve seen this year. In addition to just broadly increasing our capacity and helping us engage our community more, there are two specific outcomes we hope to achieve through these:

We believe that funding beyond this level would likely be beneficial, but are simply not as confident in the specific programs we would develop and improve yet. We also believe that growing too much too quickly can be of concern and would prefer to slowly and reliably scale up Hive.

Our Uncertainties:

Naturally, we wouldn’t pursue our work if we weren’t convinced that Hive is a uniquely promising opportunity. However, there are various uncertainties that may pose reasons not to fund us or raise doubts about our impact. These are our main areas of uncertainty and what we do to address them: 

On Counterfactuality and Measuring Impact

It is very difficult for us to accurately assess the impact we are making. A lot of our impact may be indirect, long-term, or happening behind the scenes (e.g., through connections and conversations facilitated through our platform without our involvement).[6] The largest part of the impact we track is a result of us actively reaching out to people and hearing their stories, as opposed to them reaching out to us, and is thus limited by our capacity. 

On the other hand, of the impact we can record, we find it hard to assess how counterfactual it is. Internally, we try to make quantitative counterfactuality statements for our impact based on research done by other organizations - however, this relies on various subjective judgment calls about the comparability of our work to others and the relative value of different “types” of impact.

We currently largely rely on self-reports (i.e., we often log impact based on advocates telling us that it occurred as a result of our work). We are aware that this is not the most accurate form of assessment, because advocates may use proxies such as “final” or “largest” contributors to an outcome, rather than thorough reflections around counterfactuality. On the other hand, people who are sympathetic to us and our work may overassign our contribution. We have seen both cases in which, upon reflection, our contribution seemed counterfactual even though it was initially not reported as such, and vice versa.

Overall, we believe that there are both reasons to believe that we overreport on some areas of our impact and underreport on others. We broadly believe that the nature of our work leans more towards advocates underassigning than overassigning impact to us and thus continue to rely on self-reports as a rough proxy. Our longer-term goal, however, is to improve our MEL efforts and assess our impact more accurately and efficiently - which may very well lead to the recognition that self-reported impact is overassigned to us.

On our approach

Having just started a little over a year ago, you may find that we put a lot of emphasis on our MEL and setting us up for success to continuously innovate, improve and drop our programs. The reason is simple - we believe that there is a really strong theoretical case to be made for funding community building in farmed animal advocacy (or meta work in general - one of our team members is contemplating writing a forum post on this soon). We also believe that our lead metrics and track record of impact to date are promising early indicators that we are doing a good job in this domain. However, there is no way of knowing whether the way we approach community building is the most impactful way to move forward. Community building as a whole is such a complex project with countless strategies and potential focus areas that it is a continuous effort to optimize our work. We control and base our work on research and try to set ourselves up for success wherever we can. While it would be naive to claim that we have it all figured out, we believe we have learned a lot already and are very keen on improving more.

Appendix: FAQ 

How do you plan to sustain growth without losing community value, and have you reached a saturation point in membership?

We are working toward rapid growth until 2025-2026, aiming to reach the upper bounds of our capacity to scale - which we currently estimate to be around 7,500 members.[7] We anticipate a steady momentum that may require less intensive effort to maintain as we grow and cultivate our community. We’re optimistic that as long as growth is managed carefully, the community will actually gain value with more members, as larger numbers often bring diverse insights and stronger networks. However, we are aware of the risks associated with too much growth, such as participant overwhelm and potential drops in engagement. Our strategy is to pause or slow down growth if we observe significant declines in community quality or member experience and potentially redefine our strategic focus.

Regarding saturation, we are seeing signs of diminishing returns in certain regions, particularly in Western Europe and North America, where we estimate that we’ve reached roughly 70% of our primary target audience. To keep expanding meaningfully, we’re focusing on low and middle-income countries, where we see opportunities to engage new members without overburdening existing community dynamics. This balanced approach should help us grow inclusively and sustainably, maintaining value for both new and long-standing members alike.

Don’t you just get all your funding from a large funder like Open Philanthropy?

While we have been successful in securing funding from large funders (Open Philanthropy, EA Animal Welfare Fund and the Navigation Fund), they have at most given us a third of our budget each. Also, foundations comprise 89% of our total funding and we want to increase the share of individual donors to Hive to make us more resilient to foundation priority shifts. For more information, see our post “How we are funded”.

Isn’t Hive a US or Western-based community?

Hive is a global community. We acknowledge that US-/Western European members are currently relatively overrepresented in our community and our strategy involves further efforts to reach neglected regions. While most of Hive’s communication is in English, we have started channels where community members can use Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese Mandarin, Dutch and are open to adding more. Our current team members come from a variety of countries, with more than half coming from non-Western countries, and collectively, our team speaks 10 languages.

Thank you for reading and let us know if you have any questions! 

  1. ^

    As measured across metrics including daily, weekly and monthly active users, users who posted and messages posted. For example, compared to the EA Anywhere Slack on the day of writing (11/4/2024), we have 1,083 vs. 845 monthly active users and 545 vs. 283 members who posted in the last month. Our data is transparently visible to members of our Slack space here.

  2. ^

    “High Impact Outcomes” are one of our key metrics and consist of any instance in which an advocate reports to have achieved any of the following as a result of our work: Job Placement (role), Job Placement (freelance or short-term), Volunteer Placement (role), Volunteer placement (project), New Project/Initiative started, Funding received.

  3. ^

    One of Hive’s co-founders, Constance Li, who was a full-time volunteer at Hive, is going to focus on AI for Animals and has stepped back from her operational role at Hive.

  4. ^

    To be precise, some of our programs are still to be evaluated further in our 2024 review and community survey - this list of programs is based on our internal estimates so far.

  5. ^

    This would increase their salary from $50,000 to $60,000.

  6. ^

    For example, using Slack analytics we estimate that ~25% of the messages sent in our Slack space are sent in direct messages that don’t involve any of our team members (this would be ~20,000 messages happening outside of our scope). 

  7. ^

    For example, using Slack analytics we estimate that ~25% of the messages sent in our Slack space are sent in direct messages that don’t involve any of our team members (this would be ~20,000 messages happening outside of our scope). 

anon2021 @ 2024-11-13T19:23 (+5)

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?

How do you currently value your cost-effectiveness on how much $ you are adding to the movement vs. spending.

Hive @ 2024-11-14T12:42 (+4)

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!

anon2021 @ 2024-11-13T19:29 (+3)

Additionally I have noticed that hive have sponsored a lot of events. How much of your budget does this take up? Do you imagine continuing to sponsor as many events in future?

Hive @ 2024-11-14T12:44 (+3)

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.