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Hive Slack - an active community space for engaged farmed animal advocates

ActiveGrant
$3,749raised
$14,960funding goal

Project summary

Hive is a global community-building organization for farmed animal advocates. One key part of our work is our Slack space, which hosts 2,700+ members and has grown to become the most active Slack space in the larger EA ecosystem (that we know of), judged by both absolute and relative numbers. We currently have over 700 weekly and over 1000 monthly active members.

This level of engagement has helped members cultivate a sense of community and stay up to date with the farmed animal movement and has led to more tangible outcomes such as job placements, co-founder matches and new projects/initiatives being started. Given the activity on our space, we expect to pay $12567 in Slack fees (+ 20% contingency = $14960) and are requesting your support in covering these costs, to ensure that the space is accessible to anyone across the world without us having to charge our community members. We find it key to our engagement to remain open for everyone and, moreover, believe that those who wouldn’t be able to pay the fees may stand to benefit the most from access to a global community.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The Project’s goals: 

The Slack space plays a key role in our mission to facilitate coordination and collaboration within the farmed animal advocacy movement. Some of the central Key Results we aim for in our Slack space are: 

  • Grow to a weekly active user range of 500-800 in Q4, 2024

  • Grow our neglected regions channels, specifically:

    • Reach 100+ members in our #r-india channel.

    • Reach 150+ members in our #r-latin-america.

    • Reach 200+ members in our #r-africa and #r-asia channels respectively.

  • Cultivate >7 highly active channels (i.e., non-default channels that have more than 100 monthly viewers, as measured by the end of Q4)

  • Maintain >90% of our help requests to receive useful answers throughout the year.

What these metrics translate into:

We believe that these goals are promising lead indicators for more tangible outcomes. Our Community Survey 2023 has shown that our Slack has aided our community members across the board. That means, that our Slack space has shown to be effective in both the type of impact that would affect a larger community to a smaller degree (such as gaining relevant knowledge that increases advocates’ effectiveness) as well as the type of impact that would affect less advocates but to a larger extent (such as a job placement or a co-founder matching).

  • > 12 advocates received funding as a result of our programs.

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

  • > 11 advocates started a new volunteering or training position as a result of our programs.

  • Our community survey respondents reported having made > 270 impactful connections. (We define “impactful connection” as a connection that has benefitted someone in a way that is important for their animal advocacy activities.)

How we achieve our goals:

In order to achieve this, we run several programs in line with our Slack space. Within the Slack program specifically, we try to continuously improve our onboarding, moderating and cultivation processes and run experiments and micro-surveys to evaluate our efforts. We have integrated several automations and established partnerships with various organizations to integrate them into our Slack space and have a team of volunteers that help us in all of this. 

How will this funding be used?

The funding will be used to cover the fees we have to pay Slack to keep our workspace. Slack charges $1.08 per active member per month (that is, with the 85% nonprofit discount, usually it’s $7.25 per user). So far in 2024 (January to July) we are expected to pay $6,708 in Slack fees and our conservative growth prediction puts us at $12,467.19 for the end of the year. We are requesting $14960 (the predicted fee + 20% contingency) to ensure that we have enough money to cover the fees. Any additional funding will be reserved for next year’s fees.

Funding FAQs:

  1. How many members will my donation pay for? 

Want to donate $10? >> you can host 9 members for a month

Want to donate $50? >> you can host 47 members for a month

Want to donate $100? >> you can host 92 members for a month

  1. What counts as an active member? 

Anyone who logged in and sent or viewed at least one message or one channel in any given time period. This means that while we have 2,700 members in our community on Slack, we only pay for active members ~1,000 of them.

  1. Why Slack premium vs Slack free?

  • Slack premium allows users to keep the full history of posts since February 2023. We believe that the community’s value partly comes from the members being able to search for and access what others have posted before (resources, answers to questions etc.). 

  • Slack premium allows other features that helps streamline communications, such as automated workflows and unlimited app integrations.

  • Slack free doesn’t allow for workspace analytics, which is a key factor in our efforts to monitor, evaluate and learn from our community building efforts.

  • Slack premium allows Slack Connect, which means that our members can become members of other premium spaces in the EA community without those communities having to pay for their license. 

  1. Why Slack as opposed to a free platform like Discord or Facebook?

  • We decided to host the community on Slack, because most of one of our key audiences - movement professionals  - are already familiar with the platform, reducing the entry barrier and allowing for easier integration into their work life. The tool plays a big role in the success of online communities, and it has proven true for us so far. This rings especially true for more professionals-oriented communities. We believe that had we chosen a free platform such as Discord or Facebook, our community wouldn’t have gotten so much traction. 

  • Slack is incredibly user-friendly and allows us to create multiple channels for sub-communities, replies in threads, forwarding, linking various other functions that improve structured communication.

  1. Have you tried to ask Slack for a further discount?

We have! Unfortunately they said they can’t provide a further discount beyond 85% on all active members, but they allowed us to pay quarterly which helps with cash flow (our last payment was $2,854.71 which was based on an average of 881 monthly active users).

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

In just 1.5 years, we have grown our community from 0 to 2,700 members. At 1,000+ monthly active users and 700+ weekly active users, we have grown to become the most active Slack community in the larger EA-Ecosystem that we know of, both in absolute as well as relative numbers. This success can be attributed to various factors, but we believe that it is in large part due to our dedicated, experienced and well-connected team in both the EA and the animal advocacy movement: 

Our Co-founder, Sofia Balderson, has 6+ years of leadership experience in the global movement. She previously workes as Head of Programs at Animal Advocacy Careers and Partnerships and Project Manager at Veganuary. Additionally, she launched Clariteam, a free productivity course for animal advocates, and is a PRINCE 2 certified project manager.

Our Co-founder, Constance Li, has over 20 years in the movement, including involvement with The Humane League, PCRM, and Nutrition Facts. She spearheaded a successful cage-free campaign at Rutgers University in 2013, resulting in 2.5M allocated to purchasing cage-free eggs and has startup scaling experience, since she bootstrapped a 3+ year old profitable medical business with 350+ 5-star reviews; 6 staff, which is largely self-sufficient.

Our communications Lead, Allison Agnello, was previously the Digital Media Specialist at Animal Legal Defense Fund and currently co-organizes SF Bay Area EA.

Our Generalist, Kevin Xia, was previously the board president of EA Austria and organizer for EA Vienna. During that time, he also co-started and still runs an Effective Animal Advocacy group with ~100 members.

Our developer, Douglas Browne, was previously a software engineer with Google for six years and with Verily Life Sciences for two.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

We believe that there are several causes why this program might fail or not scale up as we expect: 

  1. We vastly underestimate the extent to which our community has grown and gained momentum due to it being new (and thereby vastly overestimate our ability to scale it up and drive engagement). Novelty and initial hype may be some of the main contributors to our community’s success to date and maintaining this momentum may be considerably harder than expected. Similarly, if people tend to follow a pattern of join -> benefit -> and leave - then scaling this community up may become increasingly hard. 

  2. On the other end of the spectrum, the community may grow faster than expected/controllable. We are currently fairly targeted in our outreach and are shared largely through word of mouth. As we increase in community size, it may become harder and harder to ensure the best-fit people to join our community, possibly leading to (a) us having to invest considerably more time into moderating the community to ensure value and relevance, and/or to (b) us having to pay considerably larger Slack fees due to many ill-fit people joining and being active, without gaining or providing much value.

  3. We may be too reliant on Slack as a platform, limiting our ability to properly penetrate different regions in which Slack is simply not used all too much, such as various countries in Africa, where a WhatsApp group may be of lower barrier, or China, where a WeChat group may be of lower barrier. This can often affect especially those countries, who stand to benefit even more from a global community and have a ton to both share and learn. Our efforts to overcome language and cultural barriers have grown quite a bit recently, but the technological barrier that comes with remaining with one particular platform that hasn’t made its way into regional use yet, may be among the hardest to overcome. This would lead to us having to innovate quite a lot and explore options beyond Slack, in order to benefit a truly global community.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

So far, we received various smaller grants from different foundations as well as two larger grants from two larger grantmakers within the EA Animal Welfare space. None of these grants specifically fund the Slack fees, but since our Slack platform is a core program of ours, general funding to our organization also goes towards covering the fees. So far we have not raised enough to fund Slack fees in 2025. Managing Slack also involved staff time which we cover via these grants.

🐳

Vasco Grilo

10 days ago

Thanks for sharing, Sofia! 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? What was the spending to achieve this impact? These data can be used to determine a benefit-to-cost ratio. 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). If so, the spending would have to be less than 101 k$ for your activities to be worth it. I think it would be great if you could assess your cost-effectiveness following a similar methodology with more accurate numbers.

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

9 days ago

@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. 

🐳

Vasco Grilo

9 days ago

@SofiaBalderson

Thanks for all the context, Sofia!

Yes, I am happy to be contacted later on.

I am glad you already have internal estimates of your benefit-to-cost ratio (excluding unreported impact). I think it would be nice if you made them public at some point.

I think the approach I used is conceptually similar to the one Animal Advocacy Careers is using, but theirs is more rigorous, as I just made up my numbers.

donated $10
Arepo avatar

Sasha Cooper

5 months ago

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

Heavily discounted = high value signal at least on an abstract market evaluation, and I generally find it convincing that active Slack communities are valuable

<3

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $30
stevenrouk avatar

Steven Rouk

5 months ago

The Hive Slack fills a neglected part of the animal advocacy movement, which is a space for interactive communication and resource sharing. I personally have found value in the Hive Slack workspace (such as hearing about resources I wouldn't have known about otherwise, or making connections with individuals I wouldn't have otherwise), and I have heard from others who have similarly benefitted. There is no other communication space quite like the Hive Slack, and the team has done a great job of rapidly evolving the space to meet community demands.

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $40
Nina avatar

Nina Friedrich

5 months ago

Fabulous initiative to connect the Animal Welfare space!

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $25
ceciliavalenza avatar

Cecilia Valenza

5 months ago

Hive slack space helps me stay updated on what's happening in the movement and connect with colleagues. thank you for creating this amazing community <3

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $50
Elabi avatar

Daniel Elabi

5 months ago

Happy to support this initiative

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

Thanks so much Elabi! @Elabi

donated $50
Melina-Tan avatar

Melina Tan

5 months ago

Donated $50 as a token of thanks to Hive, for creating a superb space where animal advocates can connect and access a wealth of resources. You’re helping us maximize our impact for the animals!🧡🙌

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $185
Brad-West avatar

Brad West

5 months ago

Great community. Happy to support.

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $50
🍓

Rachel Atcheson

5 months ago

Love their work!

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $50
🍉

Emily Guzzardi

5 months ago

Hive is one stop shopping for connecting with so many issues and people in AR! A wealth of information.

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $410
🥨

Johannes Pichler

5 months ago

I use Hive almost every day to stay up to date in the animal welfare world and to stay connected with other passionate animal advocates! So grateful for this awesome community! I hope this gets approved!

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

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

donated $200
🐙

Shannon Hunter

5 months ago

I use Hive and it's such an invaluable resource!

SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

5 months ago

Yay thanks so much Shannon! @shunter1111