What progress have you made since your last update?

Since Q3 2024, we have reached (and surpassed several of) the goals for our Slack space. We have:

• Grown to a weekly active user of > 700.

• Grown our neglected regions channels, specifically:

  • Reached 150+ members in our #r-india channel.

  • Reached 250+ members in our #r-latin-america.

  • Reached 250+ members in our #r-africa channel.

  • Reached 300+ members in our #r-asia channels.

• Cultivated >11 highly active channels (i.e., non-default channels that have more than 100 monthly viewers)

We have also ensured that > 80% of our help requests received useful answers throughout the year.

These goals are promising lead indicators for more tangible outcomes we’ve recorded since Q3 2024. Our Community Survey 2024 shows that Slack has aided our community members in multiple ways in the past year. In particular:

• 10 advocates received funding as a result of our programs.

• 11 advocates started a new project or initiative.

• 26 advocates started a new job as a result of our programs.

• 45 advocates started a new volunteering position as a result of our programs.

What are your next steps?

Recently we’ve welcomed three new part-time team members. Angel Lau (Philanthropy Coordinator), Nazlı Elvan Gökgöz (Community Coordinator), and Megan Jamer (Communications Lead) joined us after our most thorough hiring process yet. We’re excited about the increasing capacity that comes with our expanded team, which means we’re even better positioned to connect and empower advocates worldwide. In particular, Nazlı will focus on and increase our community engagement and support through Slack.

Since Q3 2024, we have also been working with movement leaders in neglected regions to shape our new Ambassador Program—designed to bridge the gap between global and local advocacy. Our team has traveled to Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam, strengthening connections with advocates on the ground. These new Hive Ambassadors will play a key role in localized community-building and lead region-specific projects tailored to their regions’ needs. Some potential projects include continuing to grow our neglected regional Slack channels, and onboarding and consulting advocates from neglected regions. 

Is there anything others could help you with?

Join CoNectar, Hive’s new monthly giving program, and become a co-creator of impact with us!  Our CoNectars are committed and generous supporters who help us advance our mission of connecting farmed animal advocates to increase their impact. By giving monthly, you’ll help Hive sustain and grow long-term projects (such as the Hive Slack) that strengthen the farmed animal movement. Learn more here.

What progress have you made since your last update?

Since Q3 2024, we have reached our goals of:

• 3,000+ newsletter subscribers

• ~9,000 monthly newsletter views

• ~50% open rate

• 10% click-through rate

We continue to publish our newsletter on a bi-weekly basis, keeping our community members up-to-date with happenings in the farmed animal movement, especially with more time-sensitive opportunities.

What are your next steps?

Since Q3 2024, we have been working with movement leaders in neglected regions to shape our new Ambassador Program—designed to bridge the gap between global and local advocacy. Our team has traveled to Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam, strengthening connections with advocates on the ground. These new Hive Ambassadors will play a key role in localized community-building and lead region-specific projects tailored to their regions’ needs. One of their potential projects is translating the Hive Newsletter and curating it with locally relevant content.

In 2025, we aim for 5,000+ subscribers while maintaining the same 50% open rate and 10% clickthrough rate.

Is there anything others could help you with?

Join CoNectar, Hive’s new monthly giving program, and become a co-creator of impact with us!  Our CoNectars are committed and generous supporters who help us advance our mission of connecting farmed animal advocates to increase their impact. By giving monthly, you’ll help Hive sustain and grow long-term projects (such as the Hive Highlights Newsletter) that strengthen the farmed animal movement. Learn more here.

@vascoamaralgrilo

Hey Vasco! Thank you for your question - we greatly appreciate efforts to make our efforts more measurable. Our Managing Director, who is also leading our MEL efforts, Kevin, would love to get your thoughts and work together to help assess some of the questions you raise more thoroughly and systematically. If you are open to it, he would love to reach out to you in a month or so, once we’ve finished some bigger projects we are currently working on! For now, here is a semi-complete answer to the questions you raise. Due to our current capacity, there are also rough guesses and subjective judgment calls in this answer, so please take it with a huge grain of salt:


“How many of the 12 advocates who received funding, 26 that started a new job, and 11 that started a new volunteering or training position were funded by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund, or hired by organisations funded by such funders?"

Unfortunately, some of the data here is missing, since they are from our anonymized community surveys in 2023. This especially affects the funding-related outcomes (for other outcomes, we’ve had advocates come and tell us their stories more commonly). From the data in 2024, which we have mostly logged manually, my rough guess is that 45-70% of the job placements were placed at organizations that were or could likely be funded by impact-focused funders like OpenPhil or AWF (once again, happy to look into this further in a month or so!). For Volunteering placements, this would likely be significantly lower (10-25%), but we view volunteering placements primarily as a way to help new organizations get started on lean budgets and for advocates to upskill or demonstrate their skills in an entry-level friendly way. As such, this may not be the best benchmark for us to assess this particular outcome, although it would certainly make sense to run mid-term retrospectives on these advocates and organizations wherever possible. 

“What was the spending to achieve this impact?”

Great question, and one that we have been trying to get an answer to. Due to the interconnectedness of our programs and our general approach to community building, we find it misleading and inaccurate to pinpoint high impact outcomes to specific programs and even more so to specific costs. Our current best approximation to this question would be reframed as something like “What fraction of your total impact are captured High Impact Outcomes” - and one could then take said relative percentage from our budget to arrive at an answer. The outcomes outlined from the survey were achieved at $58,000, but this included Constance volunteering full-time and a very frugal and unsustainable work environment - as it often does with bootstrapping a new charity. For 2024, we estimate it to be roughly 35%-50% as cost-effective, but we are awaiting our community survey results to be able to make these claims confidently. 

“For example, if the funding per advocate was 10 k$, the annual salary for the new jobs was 30 k$, and people got there 1 year earlier than they would have without Hive, and 3 volunteering placements are worth 1 paid work placement, and funding and direct work were 10 % more cost-effective relative to the counterfactual hire or grant without the advocates supported by Hire, the total benefits would be 101 k$ (= (12*10*10^3 + (26 + 11/3)*30*10^3)*0.1).”

We currently track our $value added figures only as internal sanity checks and anchor them on some figures outlined in AAC’s ICAP model (see here). This is a considerably less detailed approach as we’d ideally like, but seems to us to be a more efficient approach at the moment considering our small team and the efforts that are required to provide such detail. Thus far, our funders seem to agree with this leaner MEL approach (in fact, some have highlighted that we collect an unusually large amount of data. With this approach, we aim (and have so far successfully managed) to roughly cover our costs through these High Impact Outcomes alone so that any additional impact we facilitate (e.g., impact from facilitating support for existing projects, cultivating impact-focused discussions in the wider movement or making it less time-intensive to stay up to date for movement leaders) and impact that haven’t logged due to lack of reporting are “for free”, so to speak. 

I think your approach is an interesting alternative and we would love to explore whether it is more accurate for our purposes! At the moment, it appears that, with your rough estimates, we add ~a third of the value we currently estimate or, taking more common salary numbers (~$50,000/year), ~half of the value we currently estimate. 

Thanks a lot Sasha for the thoughtful comment, your support means a lot for sure, especially considering this space was originally a volunteer side project! Please pass on my thanks to your partner too! @Arepo

Thanks a lot Jakob! @JakobW

thanks a lot Melina!! @Melina-Tan

Aww thanks so much Caroline, we appreciate your readership and support, and are happy you're benefiting! @Caroline-Oliveira

Thanks so much Elabi! @Elabi

Aww thanks so much Melina, your continuous support means so much for Hive! @Melina-Tan

Thanks a lot Cecilia, for your donation and for being a community member! @ceciliavalenza

Thanks so much @Nina ! We are always so happy to direct our community to HIP:)

Thanks so much Steven, for your kind words and the donation, and for being a valued community member. And of course for helping me decide to switch to Hive full-time back in 2023! @stevenrouk

Thanks so much Cecilia for your early readership and the donation! @ceciliavalenza

I'm quite excited about the potential impact of ballot initiatives. Thank you for your work!

I love moonshot projects and I really hope you succeed. I really appreciate and value your persistence Brad and keeping going on top of your job. Happy to support!

The movement needs more money, thanks a lot for your work! Rooting for you!

Do you have animal welfare included in your events/programs, even partially?
Is all the food you serve at your events vegan?

Thanks for doing the important work team on neglected species!

Thanks a lot for your work Marine! Best of luck with the project.

Animal work in the Global South is very important. Thanks a lot for your hard work Caroline and team!

Very neglected region and very important work focused on effectiveness. Thoughtful and helpful team. Thank you for your work and for your collaborative culture!

@Brad-West Thanks a lot Brad and thank you for being a Hive community member!!

I am so grateful for your work Steven and team, and also for our partnership. We appreciate the RSS feed of CFA events on Hive. On a personal level, super appreciate you as a movement colleague and a friend. You rock!

Thanks a lot for working in such a neglected region and country Abdiaziz! Please feel free to join our free community to get more support, we have a separate channel for Africa. https://tally.so/r/wkGKer

I'm so appreciative of your work, team TMM and Nicoll! You have trained our whole community, not to mention the Hive team, on how to measure our work. When we speak to funders, they are usually impressed by how much we can measure even though we do meta work. Thanks so much for your work and I hope you can help many other charities, so that we can help animals more effectively!

Thanks so much Rachel and also for your effort in promoting Hive! @rachelatcheson

Thanks so much Marine! Appreciate your readership and the donation! @Marine-Lercier

Community members like you make Hive what it is Johannes :) Thanks so much for your support, not just the donation but every day!
@jp

Thanks so much Emily! We are so happy to have you as a community member @eguzzardi

Yay thanks so much Shannon! @shunter1111