Our room for more funding is bigger and more urgent than ever before. Our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, so smaller donors will have an especially high impact this year.
Good Ventures recently decided to phase out funding for several areas (GV blog, EA Forum post), including wild animal welfare. That’s a pretty big shock to our movement. We don’t know what exactly the impact will be, except that it’s complicated. The purpose of this post is to share what we know and how we’re thinking about things — primarily to encourage people to donate to Wild Animal Initiative this year, but also for anyone else who might be interested in the state of the wild animal welfare movement more broadly.
Summary
Track record
- Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.
- Wild animal welfare science is still a small field, but we’re really happy with the momentum it’s been building. Some highlights of the highlights:
- We generally get a positive response from researchers (particularly in animal behavior science and ecology), who tend to see wild animal welfare as a natural extension of their interest in conservation (unlike EAs, who tend to see those two as conflicting with each other).
- Wild animal welfare is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion at scientific conferences, and was recently the subject of the keynote presentation at one.
- Registration for our first online course filled to capacity (50 people) within a few hours, and just as many people joined the waitlist over the next few days.
Room for more funding
- This is the first year in which our primary question is not how much more we can do, but whether we can avoid major budget cuts over the next few years.
- We raised less in 2023 than we did in 2022, so we need to make up for that gap.
- We’re also going to lose our biggest donor because Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy to phase out their funding for wild animal welfare. Open Phil was responsible for about half of our overall budget.
- The funding from their last grant to us will last halfway through 2026, but we need to decide soon how we’re going to adapt.
- To avoid putting ourselves back in the position of relying on a single funder, our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend on not only how much money we raise, but also how diversified our funding is. That means gifts from smaller donors will have an unusually large impact. (The less you normally donate, the more disproportionate your impact will be, but the case still applies to basically everyone who isn’t a multi-million-dollar foundation.)
- Specifically, our goal is to raise $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving $10k or less.
Impact of marginal donations
- We’re evaluating whether we need to reduce our budget to a level we can sustain without Open Philanthropy. The more we raise this year — and the more donors who pitch in to make that happen — the less we’ll need to cut.
- Research grants and staff-associated costs make up the vast majority of our budget, so we’d need to make cuts in one or both of those areas. Donations would help us avoid layoffs and keep funding external researchers.
What we’ve accomplished so far
Background
If you’re not familiar with Wild Animal Initiative, we’re working to accelerate the growth of wild animal welfare science. We do that through three interconnected programs: We make grants to scientists who take on relevant projects, we conduct our own research on high-priority questions, and we do outreach through conferences and virtual events.
Strategy
A common misconception I encounter is that we’re trying to identify and scale up one intervention as soon as possible. Some of our work is oriented toward finding near-term interventions, but our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community. We think that’s a slower way to get to one good intervention, but a faster way to get to many great interventions, because investing in foundational research (e.g., methods for measuring welfare) will unlock a wide range of possibilities.
In particular, we want to ensure that as the field grows, it stays focused on the research topics that will help as many animals as possible, as much as possible, as soon as possible. This is non-trivial, because most wildlife science today tends to focus on rare or charismatic animals. Even for these animals, there is almost no research on how to protect them from naturally occurring harms. We think wild animal welfare science will be better positioned to do the most good if it focuses on things like:
- Numerous and neglected animals (e.g., fish, invertebrates, pest species, juveniles).
- The most prevalent causes of harm, whether they are caused by humans or not).
- Network effects (i.e., indirect effects of interventions), so that we can estimate the net impact of an intervention on all affected animals.
Progress
I’m happy to be able to report that we’ve been getting a lot of traction. When we first started, almost no one had heard of wild animal welfare science (at least, beyond the idea of studying the welfare of zoo animals). If people had heard of “welfare biology” at all, it was something they associated with weird philosophers, not serious researchers.
Today, five years later, Wild Animal Initiative’s team has the largest concentration of scientists focusing on wild animal welfare anywhere in the world — eight PhD scientists with degrees in ecology, physiology, animal welfare science, and related fields. When we go to conferences, people have heard of us; conferences that previously rejected our symposia proposals are now accepting them. The keynote address at this year’s Universities Federation for Animal Welfare conference was about wild animal welfare. Many folks (particularly in animal behavior science and ecology) are really interested in the ideas behind wild animal welfare, and are getting involved.
Here are some highlights of our progress to date:
- Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by:
- Helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established.
- Running training and education events, such as our Methods Workshop, which filled to capacity in a few hours.
- Publishing papers illustrating key priorities in the field, such as “The importance of considering age when quantifying wild animals' welfare.”
- Attending conferences where we present work that illustrates key concepts in wild animal welfare science.
- There were seven presentations about welfare at the Animal Behavior Society conference this year (all about wild animals), after only being mentioned three times in titles/abstracts from the previous several years. That’s not entirely due to us, but I think we were a significant contributor to the microzeitgeist.
- Identifying that a key barrier to the field is the lack of tools to measure wild animal welfare, and making strides in addressing that gap.
- Our staff scientists published several pieces identifying potential metrics to be tested and validated, including oxidative status, a range of potential physiological markers, and telomere length.
- We’ve encouraged our grantees and other researchers in our network to use this validation framework to improve the accuracy and interpretability of their findings.
- By advising our grantees and hosting workshops at conferences, we’ve encouraged scientists to utilize multiple metrics of welfare from multiple domains (such as behavior, physiology, and an upstream indicator) to increase scientific accuracy in the absence of single “gold-standard” metrics.
- We have a major publication in press analyzing which animal welfare metrics from the captive context are most feasible to apply in the wild. The paper scores 29 metrics across 11 criteria.
- Identifying the replacement of pesticides with fertility control as a promising potential near-term intervention that could eventually improve the welfare of huge numbers of animals, and designing projects that could confirm the welfare effects of that approach.
- Designing a field study (currently underway) to test the influence of a variety of factors on the welfare of house sparrows, one of the most numerous bird species in the world (but much maligned and very neglected).
- Supporting over 60 research projects through our Grants Program, focusing on themes like wild fish welfare, near-term interventions, validating welfare indicators, and modeling network effects.
- Most critically, we are starting to get evidence that our investments through grants are paying off. My biggest fear when we launched our Grants Program was that we would spend a lot of money on science that was supposed to be about welfare, but didn’t end up getting published or presented with any mention of welfare. Recent evidence (such as the papers our grantees are starting to put out, or the presentations they’re giving at conferences like the Animal Behavior Society conference) suggest that this isn’t the case.
- We also know that we’re filling a niche in scientific funding. 69% of our grants focus on species of least concern. The only other funder we know of that is willing to fund research on welfare-related concepts in wild animals is Morris Animal Foundation. Our analysis of their grants suggests that over two thirds of their grants focus on animals of conservation concern — research that is less likely to benefit large numbers of individuals.
- Many of our grantees have said that working with us has changed the projects they pursue or how they think about wild animals. Here are a few such testimonials:
- “WAI has allowed me to develop and apply understanding and interests of animal welfare to the funded project, alongside giving me the necessary skills to apply welfare aspects to my other areas of research. Because of this … I also feel more confident approaching senior academics with welfare-related research projects/elements in research projects.”
- “I was interested in animal welfare since the start of my career, but mostly focused on captive animals. The WAI funding allowed me to start a new and very exciting chapter of my career focused on the welfare of wild animals. I have since started new collaborations and projects that before seemed out of reach.”
- “Prior to becoming a grantee, I was only peripherally aware of the concept of animal welfare, mostly within the context of zoos. Having delved much deeper into the literature on welfare due to WAI has been wonderfully stimulating. It has led me to examine the philosophical underpinnings of many of the concepts I think about on a regular basis. Thinking about what [“quality” and “fitness”] mean to wild animals in the context of welfare has given me a very fresh perspective, and caused me to re-examine things such as life-history trade-offs. Further, it leads to very interesting questions about what managers should be maximizing … It's all very fascinating to me and has genuinely renewed my interest in biology and ecology generally.”
Why we need more funding, especially from smaller donors
We always have room to grow, but now we need to make sure we don’t shrink.
One of the things I like about working in a highly neglected field is that funding is almost always our main constraint. The work itself presents so many opportunities — questions to research, projects to fund, resources to develop, collaborations to explore — that no one obstacle can bottleneck the overall progress. Our potential impact is mostly a function of how much funding we have to employ our staff, run our programs, and regrant to other researchers.
In previous years, we’ve explained our funding needs mostly in terms of the extra things a bigger budget would allow us to do. Although we’ve never been able to fund the fullest version of our plans, we raised successively more money in each of our first four years, so assuming growth seemed reasonable.
This is the first year in which our primary question is not how much more we’ll be able to do, but whether we can avoid making major budget cuts over the next few years. I’ll explain the two main reasons for that, and why our strategy depends both on how much we raise and on how many people contribute.
We raised less last year than we did the year before.
The trend of growing revenue reversed for the first time in 2023, when we raised $1.3 million, down from $1.7 million in 2022. (These numbers exclude the grants we got from Open Philanthropy, which came in big, trend-obscuring chunks.)
That was concerning, but the causes seemed largely identifiable and fixable. So when it came time to set the 2024 budget, we decided not to cut back yet. Instead, we used our reserves to invest in modest growth, adding a few new staff positions to address long-standing pain points. I still think that was the right bet given what we knew at the time, but it did raise the stakes for fundraising in 2024.
We’re losing our biggest donor.
The board of Good Ventures (the foundation behind Open Philanthropy) decided to exit grantmaking in several areas, including wild animal welfare. We’ve been assured by multiple sources that Open Philanthropy still thinks we’re doing effective work in an important cause area, and that this change solely reflects a strategic decision by the board to focus on fewer cause areas (those the organization has been working on longer and the board is more bought into).
That’s a big hit. Open Philanthropy currently gives us about $2M per year, which is roughly half our total budget. We’ve also benefited from other things they’ve done to support the wild animal welfare movement. For example, they funded New York University’s Wild Animal Welfare Program (NYU WAWP), with whom we’ve co-hosted events that led to ongoing collaborations with researchers at several different universities.
The impact is even bigger when you take into account the growth trajectory we had predicted for the movement over the next few years. We had substantial uncertainty about what the future of Open Philanthropy funding for wild animal welfare would look like, but our best guess was that they would keep donating to WAI at similar or slightly higher levels, they would increase their support for the NYU WAWP, and they would start funding a few new wild animal welfare projects, perhaps including an applied project, like a field trial of fertility control for urban rat populations.
Our funding won’t dry up right away. Open Philanthropy has confirmed they’ll pay out the rest of the grant they had already committed to WAI: $6 million to cover a period of three years (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2026). They won’t be making any grants to us after that, and they won’t fund any new wild animal welfare projects from now on.
That buys us just enough time to not panic, but we still need to act soon. If we have enough funding to sustain our current budget into 2026, but we believe we’ll only have half as much funding coming in afterward, it would be reckless to not make any changes until we’ve burned through the last of our reserves. Cutting some of our spending soon would buy us more time to increase our fundraising enough to balance revenue and expenses — smoothing the budgetary cliff to a slope and raising the altitude of the plain we land on. Our current plan is to see how much we can raise from other sources over the remainder of 2024, then use that to inform whether/how to cut our budget in 2025 and beyond. (See the next section for more detail.)
Another donor could make up the funds, but not the security.
There’s a good chance that another big funder will step in at a similar level to Open Philanthropy. I can’t say anything more than that now, because nothing is for sure and these conversations are obviously very sensitive.
That would be a big help. If something like that happens, I’ll update this post as soon as I appropriately can. Similar to how the departure of Open Philanthropy is a reason to give more to WAI, the arrival of a new seven-figure funder would be a reason to give less to WAI. But I’m not sure how much less because relying on that new funder alone would be risky.
When making major funding-dependent changes, we have to consider both the funding we have available and the probability of continuing to raise enough to sustain that budget. When Open Philanthropy first started funding our Grants Program, we were comfortable growing accordingly because (a) we felt we had a good understanding of Open Philanthropy’s decision making, (b) Open Philanthropy had a track record of thoughtfully expanding into new areas, and (c) we could discontinue the Grants Program without having to cut staff or change our other programs. For any new seven-figure funder, we would have high uncertainty about whether they would continue their support, because (a) we would be developing a new relationship with that funder and (b) no one else has a history of funding wild animal welfare at that level, so they might stop shortly after starting. We would also have to consider that (c) all of our programs are now quite interconnected (e.g., decreasing our grant-making would make it harder to expand our research network).
Therefore, a funder effectively taking Open Philanthropy’s place would be a dream come true for WAI, but it still wouldn’t get us all the way back to where we were.
Smaller donors have a bigger role to play.
Our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend not only on how much money we raise, but also on how diversified our funding is. Funding is more diversified insofar as it comes from a higher number of donors or a higher proportion comes from smaller donors. We’re using “smaller” in its simple literal sense: if Donor A gives less than Donor B, then a marginal dollar diversifies our funding more if it comes from Donor A than if it comes from Donor B. Or, in more practical terms: If you’re not a multi-million-dollar foundation, then this post is for you. That means that giving anything at all is more helpful than usual, and giving more than you otherwise would have is more helpful than usual.
Diversification is a major contributor to sustainability. Beyond just the additional revenue from additional donors, the more evenly our income is spread across donors, the less vulnerable we are to the loss of any one of our biggest donors (currently: Open Philanthropy, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Animal Charity Evaluators, and a few individual donors).
Specifically, we’ve set the goal of raising $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving between $1 and $10,000. That would represent about a 12% increase over what donors at this level contributed in 2022. Twelve percent is significant because our projections show that if we can grow our revenue by 12% year-over-year for the next five years, that will be enough to rebalance our budget without having to make layoffs (though we’d still be making major cuts to our Grants Program).
What we’ll do with your donation
We’re evaluating whether we need to cut our budget down to a level we can sustain without Open Philanthropy. The more we raise this year — and the more donors who pitch in to make that happen — the less we’ll need to cut.
The question of what to cut interacts with the question of how much to cut. That’s partly because each of our programs uses inputs from the others — e.g., our Outreach Program presents the results of our Research Program at conferences, which in turn increases the number of relevant researchers applying to our Grants Program (and helps those researchers tailor their proposals to our priorities). It’s also because many tactics are only worthwhile — or possible — at or above some minimum level of investment. Therefore, we’ve decided to wait until the first quarter of 2025 to pick the best path forward, because the amount raised in 2024 is key to forecasting what kind of budget we’ll be able to support going forward.
But to illustrate how various amounts of funding could help, here are some concrete numbers for expenses in our two biggest buckets:
- Grants. Most of the grants we’ve made to external researchers have fallen into one of two buckets: $10,000–$30,000 each for Seed Grants (more exploratory, less direct connection to our top priorities) and $100,000–$200,000 each for Challenge Grants (high-confidence bets in projects tailored to our top priorities). In total, our grantmaking has amounted to $1 million to $2 million per year. This is the area where we have the most flexibility to quickly scale down our funding without limiting future opportunities, but we think it’s very important that we continue to fund at least enough projects that people see us as a resource and engage with our work. We think we could achieve that with a total of something like $300,000 per year spread across 3–10 projects.
- Staff. Each employee costs roughly $75,000 to $135,000 per year including salaries, benefits, and taxes. When all the costs associated with each marginal employee are included (e.g., training and professional development, conference travel and lodging, staff retreat travel and lodging), the range is more like $83,000 to $140,000. What does a year of a staff member get you? It depends on the role, but it might be things like:
- WAI presence at 3–6 scientific conferences per year.
- 1–2 scientific papers published and around 3 non-academic research notes.
- 1–2 grant rounds run, funding approximately $1M worth of research.
Unless you’re already familiar with budgets for academic science, that probably looks like a lot of money for not a lot of output. It’s true: Science is expensive. But we don’t think the most important measure of our work is our production — it’s what that production goes on to do. Even though our oldest paper was published only four years ago, our papers have been cited on average 7 times per article, in journals with an average impact factor of 7.3. Scientific papers accrue citations over time, so having more than a few in the first couple of years is pretty great.
Basically, every scientist who reads our work is someone who might go on to pursue a wild animal welfare science project themselves. Every journal that publishes us or our grantees contributes to the growing awareness of wild animal welfare science as a credible scientific field. Each grantee we support who goes on to work on wild animal welfare science in the future will mentor graduate students who might become interested in the topic themselves. We think we’ve made pretty significant progress toward getting wild animal welfare science to be a thing, putting wild animal welfare advocacy on a pathway to have a serious evidence base for figuring out how we can help wild animals. We hope we can keep that progress going and see wild animal welfare science lead to large gains in wild animal welfare within the next ten years.
Conclusion
Losing our biggest funder isn’t an existential threat to Wild Animal Initiative, but if we can’t find alternative funding sources, it will have massive consequences for the rate at which we can make change for wild animals. We’re pursuing every option to fill that gap. The quickest way would be if we could find another massive funder, but that still wouldn’t get us to where we need to be in terms of sustainability. We have a distinct need for building support among a wider range of individual donors, so if you’re considering donating to Wild Animal Initiative this year, I think recent events should update you in favor of giving.
Ok, I donated 10k
That's incredibly generous! Thank you so much, James!!