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Thanks for sharing! To which extent is your grantmaking informed by cost-effectiveness analyses?
Thanks for sharing! To which extent is your grantmaking informed by cost-effectiveness analyses?
It's one of the main factors going into the decisions from most of the funders in the circle :)
However, CEA's are rather shallow and most grants are quite experimental or exploratory in nature sometimes with the intent to allow orgs to scale and find ways to cost-effectively use funds at a larger scale in the future, either by themselves or by others.
Hi Martijn, Joey, and James,
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my post Saving human lives cheaply is the most cost-effective way of increasing animal welfare?. You are welcome to comment there.
The Strategic Animal Funding Circle just finished its first two rounds of grantmaking, and we ended up giving ~$900,000 across 16 organisations. Below is some brief reasoning behind why we were excited about these grants and broad factors that resulted in us not granting to other organisations. Overall we were pretty excited about the quality of applications we got and feel optimistic the circle will continue to run/deploy more in the future.
At the bottom of this post, you can find more information about the next round, how to apply and how to join as a donor.
Unclear theory of change
The most common reason an organisation was ruled out was for unclear theory of change. This has come up with other funding circles’ explanation copied from a prior writeup we made “Some applicants do not share sufficient reasoning on how their project (in the end) contributes to a better world. Other applicants have a theory of change which seems too complex or involves too many programs. We generally prefer fewer programs with a more narrow focus, especially for earlier-stage projects. Other ToCs simply seem like an inaccurate representation of how well the intervention would actually work. As a starting point, we recommend Aidan Alexander’s post on ToCs.” We particularly saw this challenge with research projects and political projects.
Lack of strong plan, goals or evidence for why a group may achieve success.
The groups focused too much on WHAT they wanted to achieve and insufficiently on HOW they planned to achieve this. In the future, we recommend that applicants elaborate on what are their SMART goals, what their plan is to achieve them or what other evidence exists that they will achieve what they planned for example, showing their track record or effectiveness of the intervention in general. This will enable us to judge and build confidence in their ability to execute the project and therefore increase our interest in funding it.
Price tag
Our group is making fairly small donations and thus is very price sensitive to a grant asking for $7k vs $70k. This may make less of a difference to a funder deploying several million, however, most of us are deploying on the order of $100k per round.. We often found that much larger price tags did not come with sufficiently stronger impact cases, cost effectiveness or justification. Someone asking for $150k would have to compete quite directly with giving 30k to 5 different projects and we often found the latter more compelling. This also ties into the focus of our group which is typically mid-stage and small organisations.
Areas we expected other funders to cover
The last common reason we would pass on an application is that we expected other funders to be better placed/likely to cover the project if good. Sometimes this was good news for the project (e.g. we know about a confirmed funding source that they did not yet know about); other times it was to do with the funding space as a whole (e.g. we expect US farmed animal work to categorically be better funded than other regions). In general, a lot of our interests were populous and neglected animals (fish, insects, shrimp), supporting work in neglected regions (e.g. SE Asia) or somewhat unusual approaches (policy or working with certifiers ). Concretely, something like cage free campaigns in the US is an area the whole group is highly positive on but generally would be funded by other larger funders.
Below are the organisations we supported in rough order of # of members who were excited about the project/donated to it.
Grant amount: $37,500
Description: This is a new capacity building project striving for accountability of cage-free commitments in Asia. "We empower individuals and organizations across Asia to support food businesses in fulfilling their animal welfare commitments and transparently reporting progress."
Reason we were excited about this grant: We were highly excited about this project, the focus, geographic selection and team all seemed very strong. The only reservation we had was counterfactuals as we expected many funders to be excited about this project.
Grant amount: $90,000
Description: This is for a subproject focused on improving the standards for the humane slaughter of shrimp at the millions of smallholder shrimp farms in India.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We are very excited about shrimp work due to the number of individuals affected and the fairly concrete improvements that can be made in the space. The team has a good track record in getting higher welfare standards adopted by major certification bodies.
Grant amount: $37,500
Description: Animal Policy International works to reduce animal suffering by closing loopholes in trade agreements.. They advocate for higher-welfare regions (UK, NZ, EU, Switzerland) to ban imports that don't meet their domestic standards, thereby incentivising producers in low-welfare regions (China, India, Australia, Vietnam etc) to improve their standards.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We liked the possible impact and team behind this grant. Policy is an exciting space but given the relative youth of the charity and thus limited track record we did see this as an experiment to see if this model is viable.
Grant amount: $30,000
Description: PAZ is an experienced animal welfare advocacy in France looking to gain progress on some of their most important agendas (rodenticide control, pigeon culling, live bait fishing) by lobbying for commitments from candidates for next year’s municipal election. Most notably, they aim to get one major city in France to experiment with using nonlethal methods of rat population control.
Reason we were excited about this grant: PAZ has a solid track record and we are excited to see more work on reducing the use and need for anticoagulants. PAZ’s main project will have major learning value, and it seems like an opportune moment to look for nonlethal means of rat population control, with more and more people concerned about its effect on other wildlife and some evidence that anticoagulants are growing less effective
Grant amount: $45,000
Description: France is a major hub for insect farming research and development. The public sector, through semi-public investment banks and other (in)direct subsidies, has been supportive of these developments, seeing insect farms as an important pillar of the protein transition and a circular way to make food production more sustainable. This coalition will push back on future public support by limiting investment and other stimuli.
Reason we were excited about this grant: Together, this coalition had both experience and subject level expertise. We believe insect farming to be harmful and neglected, and think governments should invest in more sustainable technologies that do not include living beings.
Grant amount: $100,000
Reason we were excited about this grant: We think the focus of this initiative is often overlooked and don’t think other funders are likely to jump in. We believe there’s a ton to learn from this initiative and are excited to see where they stand at the end of this grant period.
Grant amount: $58,974
Description: The aim of this project is to develop a tool for incorporating animal welfare into benefit-cost analysis. More specifically, the goal is to produce a method that corrects for species biases, producing much higher valuations for the most numerous farmed animals—chickens and fish—than you get when you simply defer to consumer preferences.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We think there is a high chance that the grantee will develop a high-quality tool and method. It is also possible that it will be applied and result in more favourable decisions affecting animals on a large scale. Although we have high uncertainty about this outcome and think the probability of it is low, we are interested in supporting it based on its expected value.
Grant amount: $50,000
Description: Arthropoda Foundation is a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can’t be funded any other way.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We think insects are both highly important and neglected. Although the way to make progress on them is less clear than for shrimp, we feel that further research could inform funders (including us) as to the highest impact steps to take in the space. Despite competing for resources, it seems likely that we should be funding both welfare science and direct advocacy interventions.
Grant amount: $50,000
Description: The Centre for Responsible Food Business works on a range of creative campaigning capacities including strategies that other groups might not be able to conduct themselves, including work on cage-free, greenwashing and egg labelling.
Reason we were excited about this grant: This group seemed well placed to both test and execute new strategies that other groups were not able to. We were excited about the campaigning experience of the team, many of their proposed ideas and felt they could contribute in significantly positive ways to the animal movement knowledgebase.
Grant amount: $7000
Description: This grant was aimed at outsourcing the organisation’s entire body of operations work for 12 months and free up valuable time to be allocated towards legal advocacy on behalf of farmed animals. This would free the Legal Counsel to have the bandwidth to undertake two to three new legal actions aimed at challenging the industrial animal agriculture system (criminal complaint, lawsuit, administrative enforcement action, etc.) each year.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We really liked the cost effectiveness focus of this group and think that typically small groups wait too long to outsource operations work so we're very happy to provide this sort of funding (even though typically donors might be less excited about this).
Grant amount: $28,500
Description: This group is focusing on a campaign in Slovenia against cages. Aiming at legislative action aimed at banning keeping hens and sows in cages.
Reason we were excited about this grant: It is possible that those efforts have a high probability of succeeding, and despite a relatively small scale of production in Slovenia, the grant appears cost-effective in expectation.
Grant amount: $150,000
Description: This grant is aimed to support the creation of a department focused on Animal Law & Policy in the University of Toronto Centre. The Centre will be at the forefront of advancing research, education, dialogue, and advocacy in the field of animal law in Canada. Its core mission will be to advance the field of animal law.
Reason we were excited about this grant: Although university funding is typically quite expensive relative to other animal actions for a new department this pricetag was surprisingly manageable. UoT is one of the top universities in Canada and we feel a program like this can go a ways to making late legal and social reforms both in the country and more globally.
Grant amount: $150,000
Description: ICAW is a global force for advancing animal welfare within industries worldwide. They collaborate with leaders at multinational corporations and inspire public action to drive meaningful change for animals everywhere. They advocate for transformative policies that prioritize humane practices and elevate welfare standards across the supply chain, creating a world where compassion and responsibility are at the heart of every institution “In the next 2-5 years while we plan to work on terrestrial vertebrates, our primary funding gap for our major interest areas are aquatic animals and invertebrates.”
Reason we were excited about this grant: We remain excited about corporate campaigns and feel ICAW is well-positioned to fill gaps for neglected animals like aquatic animals and invertebrates. This group seemed very strong both in terms of leadership and execution.
Grant amount: $45,000
Description: The Insect Welfare Research Society (IWRS) wants to work with the Royal Entomological Society (RES) to develop “Codes of Practice” for farmed insects. The Codes of Practice Project is an important opportunity to leverage the RES’s reputation and influence to create welfare guidelines that can influence production in and beyond the UK.
Reason we were excited about this grant: We think insects are both highly important and neglected. We think the Codes of Practice will be a useful foundation for further advocacy work, especially beyond the UK, and were excited to see RES’s plans to promote them in Africa, a region with lots of potential growth for insect farming in the future. We think SAFC is one of the few funding opportunities for this type of work.
Grant amount: $26,500
Description: NfDF aims to expose the suffering of chickens in Norwegian factory farming, with a particular focus on the extreme genetic selection of fast-growing breeds like Ross 308. This breed, which accounts for 75% of the 70 million chickens slaughtered annually in Norway, suffers severely. NfDF combines investigative journalism, media work, public awareness campaigns, and policy advocacy to expose the industry’s cruelty and mobilize public and political pressure for transformative change.
Reason we were excited about this grant: This project applies important investigative/media pressure to complement other advocacy efforts for broiler chickens. Nettverk for dyrs frihet has promising connections with media in Norway and positive reviews from other impact-focused groups (Anima International Norway), and this is a relatively small pricetag.
If you are a charity or individual with a charitable mission and think you might fit in with the group of projects supported above, we invite you to apply to our next round (opening late July/early August). You can see more information on our website, and a new request for proposals will be published on the EA forum soon.
If you are a funder who has the capacity to donate ±$100k or more a year to animals and think that you would want to cofund projects like these, we invite you to join the group! You can express interest by sending an email to jozden[at]mobius.life.
If you are a funder who occasionally gives larger $10k+ grants to animal welfare organisations or is thinking of doing so, we will be experimenting with an exclusive ‘Funder’s Inbox’ where we forward promising applications that have room for more funding beyond the circle rounds. You can express interest here.
SAFC is a collaborative effort of midsize funders who aim to support mainly early stage, impactful animal welfare initiatives that currently have too few pathways to funding. The circle is chaired by James Özden (Mobius - Director of Philanthropy), directed by Joey Savoie (AIM) and supported by Martijn Klop (AIM - Grantmaking-support). Non-chair funding members are anonymous, as by default for Funding Circles supported by Ambitious Impact.
Thanks for sharing this write-up. I really appreciated the transparency, especially your explanations for why certain grants were accepted or rejected. That level of detail is uncommon and will be helpful for future applicants as they decide whether and how to apply.
It was also interesting to read about the grants you did approve and the reasoning behind them. I found the point about some groups not realising they were receiving funding elsewhere particularly insightful. I recently spoke with a funder about how nonprofits often have less certainty about future funding (how much they will be able to raise and where from), while funders sometimes have a clearer picture because they coordinate with one another behind the scenes. I welcome this kind of coordination, and I wonder what else we can do to increase transparency across the funding landscape. Presumably, this could help some organisations save time by avoiding applications to opportunities that are unlikely to be a fit or if their project is already covered through coordinated funding.
Thanks again for your thoughtful work, and congratulations to the grantees.
Thanks Sofia! You should mainly thank Joey and James, who typed most and set the norm for transparency.
I definitely second that there's room for a guide that helps people seeking funding in the AW space with understanding where and when to apply, based on the scope, size and maturity of their organisation. This might be something the AIM grantmaking team could help with at a point in the future and I know Joey's quite keen on this, but Hive might be in an even better position to work on sth similar :)