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

2. 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.

3. 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. 

4. 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.

5. 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.