Hive
@ Hive
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Thank you for your comment, you are raising an important point! You’re absolutely right that having Constance volunteer full-time has been an extraordinary help, and we haven’t explicitly accounted for this in our internal cost-effectiveness (CE) estimates yet. This would pose an interesting challenge when thinking about marginal cost-effectiveness, as her contribution isn’t something that additional funds could replicate directly.
For now, we’ve only used our historical CE estimates as a “sanity check” while designing our 2025 goals and budget, ensuring they align broadly with our plans - so we didn’t strongly anchor on this data. For now, our numbers seem to check out nevertheless, because other shifts in our team and budget (e.g., changes in staffing and salaries) have kept our average costs per FTE relatively stable (e.g., in 2024 we operated on ~$240k with 4.5 FTE, including Constance, and for 2025, we expect to hold 4.5 FTE at ~$260k). Additionally, we’ve introduced more automations, outsourced tasks to volunteers where appropriate, and focused our resources on programs that have shown the most promise. We expect that these steps have helped ensure we’re using our funds more effectively, and hopefully counteract this limitation.
That said, we see the need to revisit these estimates in greater detail, especially as we evaluate our end-of-year community survey results. Funders haven’t raised this specific concern with us so far—perhaps because they’re more focused on our theory of change, specific projects, and broader impact metrics. However, your point is a valuable reminder to incorporate these nuances more explicitly in our future planning.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective and for your support of the community. We deeply appreciate it!
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.
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!
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:
I hope this makes sense! Let us know if you have any questions regarding this!
You're welcome! Reasoning transparency is a strong part of our org culture, if it wasn't obvious enough :) We'll add Manifund to our tasks list, thanks for the flag!
Hi Rafael! Glad you were able to attend the first day. And we appreciate the feedback, thank you! You aren't the first mention the post-EAG overwhelm; we'll be taking this into consideration for future conferences.
Last week, we helped facilitate a Digital Platform Coordination call to start conversations between members of the animal advocacy movement and see where work might intersect. If anyone is involved in digital platforms, either using existing solutions or building your own, feel to join the conversation on Slack as we continue to coordinate & share info.