I understand that you can shift where the team and community feels good about, but you still need a basic plan.

You can't ask for 500K and say, hey we will keep you updated how we spending your money.

Give us some kind of plan. If you want to hire a Marketing company then let us know more details about them, who are they, what projects did they work on before, any ideas how they are going to promote not only SPL, but also Hive since the money will be coming from Hive community.