Project summary

Hive is a global community-building organization for farmed animal advocates. One key part of our work is our Hive Highlights Newsletter, which has ~2,700 subscribers at a ~50% open rate and ~7,000 monthly views. The subscriber base has been steadily growing since we started the newsletter in 2022 and, after popular demand, we started to publish it on a bi-weekly basis in November 2023. This rhythm has been useful in keeping our readers up to date, especially with more time-sensitive opportunities, without being overwhelming. However, curating, compiling, proofreading and publishing the newsletter currently costs us ~$8000 in staff time per year (24 editions, $380 per edition, or just $0.25 per each newsletter open). Similar to our other programs, we want to ensure that they remain accessible to everyone and hence are hesitant to introduce paid-only benefits. If we don’t manage to successfully raise enough, we may have to revert to our monthly rhythm or cut down on our efforts in curating the resources shared, ultimately reducing the frequency and/or quality of our newsletter.
Here is how the newsletter grew from June 2022 to today.

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

We believe that the newsletter is a scalable program that can replicate the impact we have had so far through a much larger part of the farmed animal advocacy community. By maintaining our bi-weekly rhythm and the quality of our curation progress, we are aiming to scale the newsletter to the following metrics by the end of the year:

• > 3000 newsletter subscribers

• > 9000 monthly newsletter views

• > 50% open rate

• > 10% click-through rate

Assuming that we reach this goal, each newsletter edition will be delivered to ~3000 people, ~1500 of which will open it and ~300 of which will click to learn more about at least one of the resources or opportunities that we link in it.

What these metrics translate into:

The Newsletter plays a key role in our efforts to disseminate knowledge and connect people to resources and opportunities. We have seen, how the newsletter helps movement leaders stay up to date on the latest news, connects advocates to opportunities and help people learn more about effective animal advocacy: 

“Hey, I just thought I'd let you know that I find your newsletter EXTREMELY valuable. Thanks for putting it together. I really look forward to it every month. It’s hard to keep track of what’s going on and you do an amazing job at it".

Andres Jimenez Zorilla, (formerly) CEO - Shrimp Welfare Project

“The [Hive] newsletter has been a very valuable resource for me to stay up-to-date on new developments within the movement. For my work at Animal Advocacy Africa, I use it to scan for and have found plenty of new opportunities that we could recommend to the advocates and organizations we support".

Moritz Stumpe, Researcher - Animal Advocacy Africa

“I'm so grateful for the newsletter - I've been listening to the podcasts recommended in it during my work hours, and read posts with a cuppa in the mornings/evenings. Loving the resource as it covers so many different aspects and areas within EAA. It'll be heavily used by me as I want to learn as much as I can about the community as I figure out what career in EAA would be a good fit”

Shaileen McGovern - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland.

“I have not been to any formal effective altruism events, but I draw a lot of useful insights from EA communities and thinkers as well as ones who are not affiliated with EA. I hope to see the EA and non-EA people collaborate well and see the value in each other’s approaches, so I love resources like your newsletter that bridge the two.”

Phoenix

“You aren’t just compiling knowledge but doing so in a user-friendly, brain-friendly way, and you are advocating for animals along with the people who fight for them. I also trust that you will include various perspectives vs one narrow lens. This is the one thing you need to read every month to be informed and inspired.”

Tania Luna, Co-founder - Scarlet Spark

“Thanks to the newsletter, I have found a volunteer research position with an organisation that promises to do very valuable and high-impact work on New Zealand welfare legislation.”

Sabrina Bravo

Find more testimonials that people have left for our newsletter here!

We believe that the newsletter is a scalable program that can replicate the above impact through a much larger part of the farmed animal advocacy community.

How will this funding be used?

The funding will be used to pay for the staff time necessary to curate, compile, proofread and publish the newsletter. This currently costs us ~$16250 per year (24 newsletter editions), or ~625$ per newsletter.  In order to ensure that we deliver the newsletter in the most useful manner as possible, creating each newsletter involves the following steps:  

1. Collecting the links throughout the two weeks before the newsletter is due to be published (~2 hours)

2. Putting the newsletter together with the available links, sometimes summarizing the articles briefly and selecting highlights for the newsletter (~8 hours)

3. Proofreading by a second person + testing the newsletter and the links (~2 hours)

4. Promoting the newsletter on social media such as LinkedIn and on our Hive Slack  (~0.5 hours)

Relying on paid staff to produce the newsletter ensures its consistency and quality. If we don’t get sufficient funding, we may have to cut back the frequency of our newsletter, reducing the costs by ~40%. This comes at the cost of various time-sensitive opportunities and resources, where deadlines may be less than ~one month in the future.

Alternatively, we can reduce our efforts in curating and ensuring high-quality and impact-focused resources to be shared in our newsletter, reducing the costs by ~15%.

How will your donation make a difference?

Want to donate $10? >> 20 advocates will open an edition

Want to donate $50? >> 100 advocates will open an edition

Want to donate $100? >> 200 advocates will open an edition

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

Since its inception in July 2022, our newsletter has grown to ~2,400 subscribers at a ~50% open rate and ~7,000 monthly views. Due to popular demand, we increased the frequency of the newsletter to be sent out twice a month in November 2023 and managed to sustain our relative engagement rates, indicating that this rhythm strikes a good balance between timely updates and overwhelm. We managed to achieve this increased frequency without sacrificing quality in large parts thanks to our team members:

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. She started the newsletter as a side project back in 2022 and you can learn about her journey and learnings in her forum post here!

Our communications Lead, Allison Agnello, is currently writing the newsletter. Allison was previously the Digital Media Specialist at Animal Legal Defense Fund and currently co-organizes SF Bay Area EA. She has 5+ years of experience in digital communication and marketing in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.

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

We vastly underestimate the extent to which our newsletter already covers the low-hanging fruit/those who stand to benefit the most from it. We broadly assume that our newsletter benefits (1) highly engaged advocates and movement leaders, who stand to benefit by saving time and effort to stay up to date and (2) new/less engaged advocates, who struggle to navigate the landscape and use the newsletter as their primary source of information for relevant news, resources and opportunities. The former group may quickly be exhausted, but we currently believe that there are many more new/less engaged people to reach. If this assumption turns out to be wrong, the newsletter may not be as scalable as we expect it to be.

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 newsletter, but since our newsletter is a core program of ours, general funding to our organization also goes towards covering this work. So far we have not raised the funds for 2025 to continue writing the newsletter past January, so your donation will help us to do that.