@vascoamaralgrilo
Hey Vasco! Thank you for your question - we greatly appreciate efforts to make our efforts more measurable. Our Managing Director, who is also leading our MEL efforts, Kevin, would love to get your thoughts and work together to help assess some of the questions you raise more thoroughly and systematically. If you are open to it, he would love to reach out to you in a month or so, once we’ve finished some bigger projects we are currently working on! For now, here is a semi-complete answer to the questions you raise. Due to our current capacity, there are also rough guesses and subjective judgment calls in this answer, so please take it with a huge grain of salt:
“How many of the 12 advocates who received funding, 26 that started a new job, and 11 that started a new volunteering or training position were funded by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund, or hired by organisations funded by such funders?"
Unfortunately, some of the data here is missing, since they are from our anonymized community surveys in 2023. This especially affects the funding-related outcomes (for other outcomes, we’ve had advocates come and tell us their stories more commonly). From the data in 2024, which we have mostly logged manually, my rough guess is that 45-70% of the job placements were placed at organizations that were or could likely be funded by impact-focused funders like OpenPhil or AWF (once again, happy to look into this further in a month or so!). For Volunteering placements, this would likely be significantly lower (10-25%), but we view volunteering placements primarily as a way to help new organizations get started on lean budgets and for advocates to upskill or demonstrate their skills in an entry-level friendly way. As such, this may not be the best benchmark for us to assess this particular outcome, although it would certainly make sense to run mid-term retrospectives on these advocates and organizations wherever possible.
“What was the spending to achieve this impact?”
Great question, and one that we have been trying to get an answer to. Due to the interconnectedness of our programs and our general approach to community building, we find it misleading and inaccurate to pinpoint high impact outcomes to specific programs and even more so to specific costs. Our current best approximation to this question would be reframed as something like “What fraction of your total impact are captured High Impact Outcomes” - and one could then take said relative percentage from our budget to arrive at an answer. The outcomes outlined from the survey were achieved at $58,000, but this included Constance volunteering full-time and a very frugal and unsustainable work environment - as it often does with bootstrapping a new charity. For 2024, we estimate it to be roughly 35%-50% as cost-effective, but we are awaiting our community survey results to be able to make these claims confidently.
“For example, if the funding per advocate was 10 k$, the annual salary for the new jobs was 30 k$, and people got there 1 year earlier than they would have without Hive, and 3 volunteering placements are worth 1 paid work placement, and funding and direct work were 10 % more cost-effective relative to the counterfactual hire or grant without the advocates supported by Hire, the total benefits would be 101 k$ (= (12*10*10^3 + (26 + 11/3)*30*10^3)*0.1).”
We currently track our $value added figures only as internal sanity checks and anchor them on some figures outlined in AAC’s ICAP model (see here). This is a considerably less detailed approach as we’d ideally like, but seems to us to be a more efficient approach at the moment considering our small team and the efforts that are required to provide such detail. Thus far, our funders seem to agree with this leaner MEL approach (in fact, some have highlighted that we collect an unusually large amount of data. With this approach, we aim (and have so far successfully managed) to roughly cover our costs through these High Impact Outcomes alone so that any additional impact we facilitate (e.g., impact from facilitating support for existing projects, cultivating impact-focused discussions in the wider movement or making it less time-intensive to stay up to date for movement leaders) and impact that haven’t logged due to lack of reporting are “for free”, so to speak.
I think your approach is an interesting alternative and we would love to explore whether it is more accurate for our purposes! At the moment, it appears that, with your rough estimates, we add ~a third of the value we currently estimate or, taking more common salary numbers (~$50,000/year), ~half of the value we currently estimate.