We would like to extend our gratitude to Giving What We Can (GWWC) for conducting the "Evaluating the Evaluators" exercise for a second consecutive year. We value the constructive dialogue with GWWC and their insights into our work. While we are disappointed that GWWC has decided not to defer to our charity recommendations this year, we are thrilled that they have recognized our Movement Grants program as an effective giving opportunity alongside the EA Animal Welfare Fund.

Movement Grants

After reflecting on GWWC’s 2023 evaluation of our Movement Grants (MG) program we made several adjustments, all of which are noted in GWWC’s 2024 report. We’re delighted to see that the refinements we made to our program this year have led to grantmaking decisions that meet GWWC’s bar for marginal cost-effectiveness and that they will recommend our MG program on their platform and allocate half of their Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to Movement Grants. 

As noted by GWWC, ACE’s MG program is unique in its aims to fund underserved segments of the global animal advocacy movement and address two key limitations to effectiveness within the movement:

• Limited evidence about which interventions are effective and in which contexts
• Disproportionate attention devoted to some regions and animal groups

For impact-focused donors seeking opportunities to build an evidence-based and resilient global animal advocacy movement, our Movement Grants program is an effective giving opportunity which supports brilliant animal advocates all over the world.

Alongside their recommendation of our MG program, GWWC has outlined several areas for improvement that we are grateful for and will reflect on.

We agree with these suggestions by GWWC:

• Improving the MG model to reflect our movement-building strategy—we have already started to revise our theory of change for the MG program to explicitly separate the pathways to impact for grants that are made primarily on the basis of movement-building and which are made on a more ‘direct impact’ basis. This will help us better account for movement building in our model and make future assessments about whether we want to maintain this approach to our grantmaking.
• Revising our use of Impact Potential (IP) scores in the MG model—the IP scores played a minimal role in our final grant decisions this year. Before the GWWC evaluation, we had already decided to revise our use of these scores because they do not model scope in a sufficiently useful way and they run the risk of combining parameters in our model in such a way that clouds the decision-relevant information.
• Better integrating scope comparisons—while our current MG model has scope baked into some of the factors (e.g. theory of change, long-term impact), we agree with GWWC that a more robust approach would be to make scope a factor that our grant reviewers score separately. We intend to make this adjustment in our next round of Movement Grants and we appreciate the specific logistical suggestions from GWWC on how we might do this.

• Improving the documentation of our reasoning for making grant decisions—this is mainly related to our internal processes that don’t have any bearing on our grant decisions; however, we agree with GWWC that despite our diligent record keeping for how our thinking evolves through the grant review process, we need a better record that summarizes, in one place, the main rationale and cruxes for each grant decision. This is something we intend to implement in our next granting round.

   

We also want to note the following challenge:

• GWWC recommends that we introduce a clearer framework for prioritizing between interventions. We agree with this recommendation—of the possible interventions available to help animals, some are already excluded from applying or rejected at an early stage from our grantmaking based on the scope of impact. However, while we intend to make further improvements in scope comparison between interventions, there remain challenges due to the many externalities that affect intervention effectiveness and our ability to estimate them. GWWC notes in the report that we appear resistant to doing this because it would be unhelpfully speculative. We want to clarify that we are willing to make speculations where we think they will be useful while highlighting the challenges. There is a difference between the more speculative forward-looking cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) we would be undertaking as a grantmaker compared with the CEAs the Charity Evaluations team undertakes on completed work. To overcome this, we may also consider comparing the known cost-effectiveness of the most similar organizations’ previous work or leveraging CEAs that have used the total available information on an intervention (e.g. this estimate). However, we remain cautious about spending time and resources on trying to find comparable cost estimates between interventions when doing so might not sufficiently increase the overall marginal cost-effectiveness of our grant decisions. We also want to note that this is a challenge for any animal advocacy funder, not just ACE. This is an area where we expect to continue to try different approaches and improve year-on-year, balancing available information and our team’s capacity. 

   

We are grateful for the rare opportunity to reflect deeply on our work and to learn from GWWC’s perspectives so that we can award grants that are the most impactful for animals. We are especially thankful too for the larger GWWC and EA community that is willing to support highly promising projects to help some of the most neglected individuals who suffer greatly. 

Charity Evaluations

On the other hand, we are disappointed that GWWC does not find our Charity Evaluations program justifiably competitive with MG (and the EA Animal Welfare Fund) and believe that donors might miss out on some of the most impactful donation opportunities because of GWWC’s decision. We will elaborate on the relationship between our Charity Evaluations and Movement Grants below, but first address some points specific to Charity Evaluations.

We agree with some of GWWC’s conclusions and suggestions for improvement, which appear in their 2024 report. We think that focusing on these will improve the quality of our recommendations moving forward:

• Devote more resources to quantitatively modeling cost-effectiveness, including better defining upper and lower bounds and exploring new ways to assess speculative programs (such as using a mix of qualitative and quantitative arguments).
• Explicitly assess charities’ strategic prioritization, such as their own focus on cost-effectiveness. While we develop a sense of this internally as we evaluate charities, we think it could be helpful to take it into account more systematically.
• Explore other methods for more comprehensively capturing the magnitude of impact and limiting factors. This might mean adapting the theory of change analysis to include systematically assessing the weakest-seeming and most fundamental assumptions.
• Reconsider the minimum and maximum sizes of grants we’re willing to make through the Recommended Charity Fund (RCF), for example by potentially reconsidering the safeguards in the disbursement model that lead to more consistent grant amounts over time.

However, there are also areas where we disagree with GWWC’s conclusions. While we acknowledge these parts of our methods have room for improvement, we think the changes that they suggest may not make a meaningful difference to the quality of our recommendations:

• Include all decision-relevant factors in the published charity reviews. GWWC has highlighted their concerns based on our public reviews, such as recommendation decisions that seemed to insufficiently take into account scope (e.g., comparing ÇHKD and Sinergia’s cost-effectiveness results, arguments for longer-term paths to impact, etc.). While we agree that it’d be ideal to more clearly publicly demonstrate and formalize cross-charity comparisons and the other thinking that leads to our decisions, we also want to note that we already consider much of what GWWC suggests in our internal decision-making. We’ve made significant adjustments to our charity reviews in the past year and will continue to refine them to ensure they are transparent and informative while remaining accessible and encouraging effective giving. We think it’s possible that the Charity Evaluations program may have been disadvantaged in this evaluation by our in-depth charity reviews since GWWC’s comments seem to be informed more by what we published rather than the quality of our internal decisions.
• Update the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, it’s possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.
• Increase emphasis on the marginal dollar. We think our current methods adequately track where influenced funding would go. With the exception of granting restricted funding, we already implement GWWC’s suggestions. For example, we consider how charities’ programs are likely to change with gaining or losing an ACE recommendation and we also take into account charities’ strategic prioritization (although we don’t assess it systematically, as noted above, and some of this information is kept confidential so it doesn’t appear in our charity reviews). Additionally, this consideration only comes into play relatively infrequently; in most cases, ACE-influenced funding does not go toward novel programs but toward expansions of current programs, investments in the charity as a whole, or funding gaps. 
• Give more consideration to cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) in decisions not to recommend charities. Similar to GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators, ACE looks for evidence to justifiably conclude that a charity should be recommended, and we do not recommend charities in the absence of that evidence. When we say that a CEA did not play a meaningful role in our decision not to recommend a charity, we mean that it was insufficient to justify a recommendation. From that perspective, CEAs play just as much of a role to recommend as to not recommend a particular charity. While there are improvements we can make to our CEAs so that they are more indicative of cost-effectiveness (or lack thereof), we don’t see this as an indicator of a lack of scope sensitivity.

GWWC also suggests some broader strategic shifts in our programs that we plan to consider as a part of upcoming strategic planning. While these changes would help align our Charity Evaluations program more closely with GWWC’s criteria, we’re currently unsure if they would do the most good for the animal advocacy movement and for animals. These include:

• Making restricted recommendations to specific programs, granting restricted funding, and removing the constraint that the fund grants to all current Recommended Charities each round. We need to carefully consider any trade-offs between the benefits of this idea and downstream considerations such as the needs of our donor base and losing the benefits of allowing Recommended Charities the flexibility to pursue what they need the most to maximize their impact. Also, restricting funding likely introduces some degree of funging, reducing any cost-effectiveness gains.
• Allowing Recommended Charities to apply for Movement Grants. Theoretically, this would mean Recommended Charities could apply for targeted Movement Grants funding for their marginal programs (which we don’t currently permit). However, this might risk negatively impacting the movement-building goals of the Movement Grants program. 
• Changing the evaluation cycle from two years to one year. In theory, this would allow for a more precise assessment of charities’ upcoming programs, which is why ACE used a one-year cycle until 2021. However, we changed to a two-year cycle largely based on feedback from the charities we evaluated that annual evaluations were overly demanding/time-consuming. We’ll carefully consider the balance between timely evaluations, the burden on charities that we evaluate, and our team capacity (for comparison, ACE has an evaluations team of 5.5 FTE compared to GiveWell’s ~39 researchers).

Moving forward, we will continue evolving the Charity Evaluations program to find the organizations that can do the most good with additional donations and we thank GWWC for critically engaging with our work. We also appreciate that they acknowledge the difficulties of our work and the inherent differences between evaluators and funders in the animal advocacy space. However, given those difficulties, we’re currently not sure whether ACE nor any other evaluator that recommends whole charities in this space would be seen by GWWC as competitive with charitable funds that give restricted grants. Because of this, we’re not sure whether we think that GWWC’s current approach leads to the best outcomes for animals.

How ACE views Movement Grants vs. Charity Recommendations

We want to acknowledge that the language GWWC uses implies that they see our Movement Grants (MGs) and Charity Evaluations programs as “competitive” with each other. This is not a view we share—we see them as complementary.

Although there’s some overlap between charities that are a fit for each program, they serve different purposes: 

• The Recommended Charity Fund (RCF)
  • provides high-impact evidence-based donation opportunities, and
  • ensures critical organizations can do their underfunded and neglected work.
• The Movement Grants program
  • funds highly promising projects,
  • is more likely to fund hits-based opportunities, and
  • focuses on movement-building.

The programs are complementary and supplement each other:

• MGs support charities that may go on to become Recommended Charities (RCs)—this is evidenced by the fact that the majority of our current RCs are former MG recipients.
• Some charities are ineligible for our Charity Evaluations because RCs need to be able to absorb more funding and have more of a track record, and ACE needs to have confidence in them over a longer time horizon (the entire two-year recommendation cycle). This means that the RCF misses some of the highest-impact funding opportunities because it doesn't fund independent projects, brand-new charities, or only specific projects at a charity that might do a mixture of more and less cost-effective work.
• We don’t give MGs to RCs for the duration of their recommendation, so the MG program also misses some of the highest-impact funding opportunities.
• MGs can support former RCs if they re-enter an exploratory phase and need project- or program-specific funding to test out their ideas.

They also serve different donors:

• In our view neither clearly has a higher expected value than the other. However, since the MG program funds projects with a smaller track record or projects that can have a longer-term impact in building the movement, which leads to more uncertainty and variance in outcomes, it is more suited to donors with a higher risk tolerance. On the other hand, the RCF includes more established, highly cost-effective organizations with a strong track record and a clear path to impact and appeals to more risk-averse donors. 
• Funds work well for individual donors but some users of ACE’s and GWWC’s services, such as certain Effective Giving Initiatives and other third parties, cannot collect donations for regranting funds. They must either set up their own fund composed of established, well-researched charities that can take in large amounts of unrestricted additional donations, and/or direct donations to specific charities.
• The effective animal advocacy space is still deeply neglected and mostly funded by existing animal advocates. Therefore, we see ACE’s unique role as critical in securing counterfactually new donations to high-impact charities. We aim to engage audiences who are currently unfamiliar with both effective giving and EAA, and who might never change their individual behavior (for instance by changing their diet). To convert them to support farmed and wild animal welfare requires more accessible and simple solutions. Individual Recommended Charities are more intuitive and easy to understand and may be more appealing to this audience.

We are proud to support all of our current Recommended Charities and Movement Grantees, and would like to take this opportunity to celebrate the impactful work they do to help make the world a kinder place for animals.

 - ACE Team

From your 2024 evaluator research page:

Note: we were highly time-constrained in completing this second iteration of our project. On average, we spent about 10 researcher-days per organisation we evaluated (in other words, one researcher spending two full work weeks), of which only a limited part could go into direct evaluation work — a lot of time needed to go into planning and scoping, discussion on the project as a whole, communications with evaluators, and so on.

I think you did great based on the time you spent. Going through your evaluations, I thought to myself "good point" (or similar) so many times! Have you considered fundraising specifically for your evaluator research? I would be interested in supporting you as long as some (e.g. 1/3) of the additional funds go towards evaluating animal welfare evaluators.

I very much agree with your decision of not recommending ACE's RCF, and I think your evaluation was great.

Another example where we think ACE could have engaged more robustly with their CEAs is in cases where ACE did not reach estimates for Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) averted per dollar.

Did you have the chance to look into the pain intensities Ambitious Impact uses to calculate SADs? They are not public, but you can ask Vicky Cox for the sheet. I think they hugely underweight excruciating pain, such that interventions addressing this (like Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative) have their cost-effectiveness underestimated a lot. Feel free to ask Vicky for my comments on the pain intensities.

Nitpick. ACE's additional funds discount for low uncertainty should be higher than 0 % (and lower than 20 %), or there is a typo in the table below?

ACE considers charities’ priorities for additional funds — in other words, how the charity would use unexpected additional funding — and assesses ‘uncertainty about effectiveness and tractability of plans’ — how likely they think each line item in the charity’s plan is to experience diminishing returns or not play out as expected under the charity’s growth plan. ACE assesses each line item in a charity’s proposed future plans on a scale from very low uncertainty to very high uncertainty, with a corresponding discount applied to the cost of the line item.

Category	Discount
Very low uncertainty	0%
Low uncertainty	0%
Moderate/low uncertainty	20%
Moderate uncertainty	40%
Moderate/high uncertainty	60%
High uncertainty	80%
Very high uncertainty	100%

From your evaluation of ACE MG:

Using quite an expansive definition of institutional diet change advocacy, we identified that two of the 30 EA AWF grants (constituting 0.27% of funding) went to these kinds of activities, compared to six out of 28 MG grants (constituting 11.12% of funding).

[...]

Are institutional diet change advocacy campaigns competitive with other opportunities?

To understand whether this difference constituted a concern, we asked experts for their views on the promisingness of institutional diet change advocacy.

 [...]

• On existing evidence, some institutional diet change advocacy campaigns can meet a cost-effectiveness bar, but this is not typical.
• It’s probable that most of the impact of institutional diet change advocacy runs through direct impact rather than movement building.

Which diet change interventions are more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns? Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem, and I suspect many diet change interventions are harmful due to leading to the replacement of beef and pork with poultry meat, eggs (which can be part of a vegetarian diet), fish and other seafood.

In any case, I do not think this is that important for your recommendation. You found only 11.1 % of the money granted by ACE MG went to diet change interventions, and it does not look like marginal grants were super related to diet change.

In support of being more funding constrained, ACE also provided us with a summary of how they would likely have disbursed an additional $200K–300K USD in the 2024 round. This included a mixture of fully funding more of the opportunities that they only partially funded, and funding some opportunities that missed out altogether in the round — in particular, two opportunities related to insect farming. We attempted to naively model the scope of some of the opportunities that MG indicated they would have funded and concluded that we expect these opportunities to have relatively high marginal cost-effectiveness — competitive with other opportunities ACE MG funded.

Thank you Sjir and Aidan for this excellent work! I think it's quite valuable for community epistemics to have someone doing this kind of high-quality meta-evaluation. And it seems like your dialogue with ACE has been very productive. 

Selfishly as somone who makes a number of donations in the animal welfare space, I'm also excited by the possibility of some more top animal charities becoming supported programs on the donation platform :) 

• However, because we expect the approach of grantmakers/evaluators to change more slowly than the work/programs of an individual charity, we are not comfortable relying on the information we used last year without undertaking a reinvestigation,^[1] which we don’t expect to do (see below)

I think the rate of change is overwhelmingly a function of size, not of whether it respects grantmakers/evaluators or work/programs. I would expect THL's work/program to change more slowly than the Animal Welfare Fund. In any case, I agree with your decision of not recommending THL. As you say, it is more consistent with the scope of your project:

• We generally base our charity and fund recommendations on our evaluating evaluators project, for reasons explained here. This year, the evaluators and grantmakers we’ll rely on – based on our evaluations – will be EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and ACE’s Movement Grants, and neither of these currently recommends THL as a charity (as neither makes charity recommendations).