Thanks Emre, 

In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the “bar for funding” is when the average of fund manager’s votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar).  And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: “How Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?”. 

However, if you mean what’s the bar in terms of impact per $, we’re currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions.  But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldn’t be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps. 

Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we can’t share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications.  There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below). 

On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (“According to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)”. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. There’s also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).
So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains. 

Thank you for this thoughtful question and for your kind words about the Animal Welfare Fund! You raise an important point. Let me break down our approach:

First, we don't operate with fixed portfolio allocations or minimum percentages per species. Instead, we aim to maximize the marginal impact of our grants based on our best current understanding. This means evaluating each opportunity on its own merits and seeing if it is above our bar. More about our bar here. 

Secondly, it is worth noting that purely theoretical calculations often differ significantly from practical funding opportunities. While back-of-the-envelope calculations might suggest allocating a large percentage to certain species (like shrimps), we simply don't see enough promising, implementation-ready opportunities in those areas to make such allocations feasible. Historically, we were more limited to the applications we received, but recently we started doing more active grantmaking to generate those opportunities in areas that are cost-effective but neglected, and in 2025 we plan to further invest in it. 

Even still, if those opportunities existed, I think it would be unwise to make decisions purely based on those naive utilitarian calculations. I say naive, referring to the difference between an actual cost-effectiveness and estimated cost-effectiveness. If I knew the actual cost-effectiveness of given interventions, that accounts for all uncertainties:

• Empirical - e.g., how many shrimps are we actually affecting?
• Moral - e.g., how to trade off different intensities of pain and what moral weight should be assigned to different species?
• Epistemological - e.g., how to account for far-future effects vs near-term effects of animal welfare interventions, given complex cluelessness?

that gives me a true number for cost-effectiveness, a “god comes from the sky” kind of situation, then I would rely on it. However, any estimate of cost-effectiveness is going to be a naive one and merely a very uncertain estimate that may miss those important uncertainties. Additionally, I would refer here to the timeless classic “Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)” by GiveWell. While AWF's approach is different in some places than the one outlined in this GW blog post, I think the main point stands. They conclude that:
“I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed. Thus, when aiming to maximize expected positive impact, it is not advisable to make giving decisions based fully on explicit formulas. Proper Bayesian adjustments are important and are usually overly difficult to formalize.”
In light of that all, I think that we have imperfect information and too much fundamental uncertainty to justify extremely undiversified allocation, even if explicitly utilitarian calculation would point to that. 

Additionally, in practice, our fund managers bring diverse perspectives on for example how to weigh speculative versus evidence-backed approaches. This natural diversity helps ensure we maintain a balanced portfolio between proven interventions and those with high expected value but less certain ones.

Currently, we're working on refining our strategic framework, which may introduce additional allocation considerations. That said, our focus on neglected species and interventions already creates an implicit prioritization - we rarely fund work focused on cattle welfare, for instance, as other funders adequately cover this space.

For each grant we consider, we assess whether it meets our cost-effectiveness bar, which is influenced by other opportunities we see in our pipeline. This approach allows us to remain flexible and responsive to the most promising opportunities while maintaining high standards for expected impact.

Great question, Peter! Relatedly, have you (AWF's team) considered disclosing which organisations you are not funding because of funding diversity concerns (as opposed to marginal cost-effectiveness without accounting for funding diversity below your bar)?

Thank you, Rick, for your kind words and thoughtful question! Let me break down when it might make sense to donate directly to individual charities versus contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund.

There are a few specific instances where donating directly to individual charities could be the better choice:

1. When you have strong specific views about effectiveness or moral weights that differ significantly from our approach. For example:
   1. If you believe certain species should be prioritized based on moral weight calculations that differ substantially from current research.
   2. If you want to focus exclusively on particular intervention types (like corporate outreach) or specific animal groups (like hen welfare).
2. If you are a large donor who feels strongly about donating to a specific organization and actively wants the experience of donor stewardship by that specific organization, such as regular impact updates or contributing your time and skills as a volunteer or a board member.
3. When you have unique opportunities to make high-impact donations in areas where AWF faces operational constraints. Fortunately, we don’t have many restrictions in our grantmaking and can fund a wide range of opportunities, but sometimes a grant is too complicated legally and operationally. For example, we can make grants to China, and we can make grants to for-profits, but for-profit in China is a stretch. If you can make grants in such a context, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to refer you to a particular opportunity. You may also find yourself in a situation where you have the ability to support a talented person you know who would find it hard to put together an application (we try to make it a low-burden process, but can imagine there are still obstacles in terms of language, internet access, etc.).

However, for most individual donors, contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund offers several key advantages and is a better option:

1. Access to opportunities: Through our open application process, we discover and evaluate promising projects that individual donors typically wouldn't encounter, including early-stage initiatives that aren't yet widely known or opportunities that have to stay private for strategic reasons. 
2. Evaluation capacity: Our fund managers bring extensive experience evaluating animal welfare projects and maintain a broad knowledge base across different areas. We also can put in a lot of time to evaluate a given opportunity, in many cases much, much more than an individual donor could. 
3. Information advantage: We often have access to confidential information about organizations and the wider funding landscape that helps inform our grant decisions.
4. Complex active grantmaking: We can often create new grantmaking opportunities that require a lot of time, knowledge, network, and trust to shape up. Those are also often one of the highest-impact opportunities and are highly counterfactual since they wouldn’t exist if not for those efforts. This would be very hard for individual donors to arrange. 
5. Operational efficiency: We make the donating and grantmaking process efficient, straightforward, yet robust. For example, you can donate to AWF tax-efficiently, and we can grant to many organizations where you wouldn’t be able to donate tax-efficiently directly yourself, or we conduct thorough due diligence on our grantees and set up a strong grant agreement. 
6. Ability to have candid conversations, track progress, and conduct MEL: We have a capacity and systems in place that allow us to track grantees' progress and have candid conversations with organizations about their success, but also struggles and learnings that they may feel more hesitant to discuss in public, based on that we can also conduct monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) from the grants we make.
7. Comparing the value of funding to different projects: We evaluate not only the promise or impact of a project but also the value of marginal funding. It's worth noting that many charities individual EA donors support directly are also AWF grantees, and we can decide to fund them at a larger amount (while ensuring they still have funding diversity and are not too reliant on AWF). With our broader view of the landscape, we can better assess whether additional funding to that charity would be more effective than funding the next marginal opportunity. This kind of comparative assessment is typically challenging for individual donors to make given limited information access.

That said, we respect that donors may have specific priorities or insights that make direct donations more appropriate in their situation. We aim to be transparent about our approach so donors can make informed decisions about what best aligns with their goals. We also care about organizations not being too reliant on AWF as their only source of funding, I think organizations that are unlikely to receive other funding (e.g., from Open Philanthropy or Farmed Animal Funders) are especially good donation opportunities for individual donors. In this case, there are still advantages that AWF has (eval ability, access to info, etc.), so if you are a large donor considering donation, you can reach out to us. 

Thanks for the question!

 

I’d refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and it’s less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models we’re investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates. 
There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/ fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning)
Often to make a grant decision we don’t need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold. 
 

I don’t think they’re doing explicit cost-effectiveness analyses at this level of detail for the grants they’re assessing. They don’t have the time (consider how many hours they have per grant vetted), and the evidence to make those analyses anything more than multiplying a bunch of guesses together just won’t exist for many applications. Instead, they’ll be looking at other forms of evidence, like the strength of the theory of change, the strength of the team, the quality of thinking displayed in the team’s plan and their track record

Thanks for another great question.
Similar to the answer about pain intensities, we’re trialing this in our cost-effectiveness models (though we are using the full range of the RP welfare capacity placeholder estimates, not just the median). ( I, Neil, also an employee in the RP animal welfare department, want to be cautious of any bias before the RP moral weights become a permanent feature). I also think the broader point about the RP placeholder welfare capacity ranges still holds- it is non-welfare capacity range factors that will often be more decisive. Based on the evidence assembled so far, using that methodology, the welfare capacity ranges between species are likely not many orders of magnitude different and so it mostly matters when you're comparing animal populations of similar sizes which just doesn't seem to be the comparison we’re making very often - in most cases, it still comes down to raw number of animals affected or years of suffering, cost to achieve the impact, and probability of success.

Thank you, Charlotte! Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we are excited to do this AMA. 

One way to BOTEC this is by looking at how much time it saves us and what can be done with that time. Let's assume the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the 1st and therefore saves us half as much time. Instead of saving us 35h per week (40h - 5h management, meetings, review etc.), they save us 17.5h (requiring much more management and oversight to get the same results, which I actually think is conservative), for the same up to $120k spent on salary and benefits.

In the first case, we get 35 × 52 workweeks in a year = 1,820h, and in the second 910h. The cost-benefit analysis is $65 per hour for the first candidate and $131 per hour for the second, with a difference of $66 per hour.

As discussed in our room for more funding post, we currently believe we could conduct more active grantmaking to a value of $2M. If we assume that with 15h, a more senior staff member whose time we saved by hiring can generate an active grantmaking opportunity that costs $200k, and assuming its cost-effectiveness is $1.4 per DALY ( I took the RP CCM DALY estimates (which you helpfully listed here in DALY/k$, and I reversed to be $/DALY), where the Cage-free Chicken Campaign was $1.4 per DALY.), that means 142k DALYs difference. In the 66h difference between candidates, we get 4.4 such opportunities, so 624k DALYs are lost due to hiring the 2nd best candidate. At $1.4 per DALY, that's ~$873k.

Therefore, if the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the first, we would need $873k more to offset it. This could be a conservative estimate, because a half-as-good staff member might simply not generate as good evaluations no matter how much management time they get. Or it could be liberal because we may need more than 15h to generate the next marginal active grantmaking opportunity, or the 2nd best candidate could be more than half as good as the first. I think a range of $500k-$800k is reasonable.

That was a fun exercise; thanks for your question! 

I think the marginal cost-effectiveness of AWF's spending on grants and salaries should ideally be equal. Under these conditions, if the 2nd best candidate is 50 % as productive as the best one, and the salary for full-time work is 120 k$/year, I believe the 2nd best candidate plus 60.0 k$/year (= (1 - 0.5)*120*10^3) would be as good as the best candidate.

As AWF, we haven’t made any direct comparisons between AWF and GW, so we wouldn’t be able to answer that. While I read your cost-effectiveness analysis, and I’m grateful for the work you do to publicly estimate that for a range of charities, I won’t have the capacity to review it in depth in order to point out specific disagreements if they were to occur. 

Hi John, 

Anecdotally and from my perspective, infighting within the animal protection movement has decreased notably over the last decade, but this doesn’t mean it’s gone. Additionally, as you know (but sharing for those reading), infighting is not the only contributor to mental health challenges in our space.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund historically has not funded advocate mental health work directly. Given our limited funds and our niche within the wider funder communities for both the animal protection and effective altruism movements, the EA Animal Welfare Fund is not currently prioritizing funding direct mental health assistance for advocates. However, we are not fundamentally opposed to funding this kind of work if we were to review a strong application demonstrating (amongst other criteria) movement need, an excellent track record, cost-effectiveness (in terms of expected indirect animal impact), and inability to secure sufficient funding from other sources.

With that said, we have funded capacity-building organizations, like Scarlet Spark, where part of their services include improvements to team wellbeing. 

Additionally, the EA Animal Welfare Fund considers interpersonal dynamics and organizational cultures when conducting grant evaluations, whether this means conflicts between individuals within an organization or conflicts between organizations. The community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has supported our fund managers in investigating conflict allegations regarding applicants and navigating funding recommendation options (including exit grants and full rejections). We have declined to fund several applications when we see organizations not engaging as respectful team players within the wider movement space. We have also phased out funding for at least one organization where we observed organizational cultural issues that were detrimental to employee well-being and mental health and, in our estimation, the long-term sustainability of the organization’s impact on animals. 

Thank you for caring about the mental health of our animal advocate community. I know your organization, Overcome, coaches at least some animal advocates through mental health challenges, and I have heard (anecdotal) positive testimonials from advocates receiving coaching. To your point of “willingness to use existing services is low,” I encourage animal advocates reading this, who might be in need of mental health support, to reach out to Overcome to assess fit for support.

I wish I had a more quantitative answer at this point. We have begun tracking grant impact, and forecasting its outcomes using a system that categorizes grants into four possibilities: successful as planned, successful pivot, unsuccessful due to theory of change, and unsuccessful due to execution. Once we've collected more data through this system, we'll be able to provide more precise numbers. :)

For now, I can say that modifications to original outcomes happen fairly often - my rough estimate is in about 30% of cases. These modifications can involve either scaling back to more modest goals or, in some cases, expanding to more ambitious ones.

Generally, we view pivots positively when grantees adapt their outcomes based on new information and the modified outcomes have led to (or are likely to lead to) meaningful impact. In these cases, we increase our confidence in the grantee's ability to execute this type of work while decreasing our confidence in the assumptions underlying the original theory of change. When grantees don't deliver their planned outcomes, we look for evidence that they've learned valuable lessons that will help them either develop more realistic expectations and plans, or improve their tactics to better achieve their goals. 

While we appreciate all the efforts that advocates undertake to improve the plights of animals, we do take track records into account when evaluating subsequent applications. Our tolerance for "misses" before deciding not to fund a grantee depends on several factors, such as our priors about the effectiveness of their work, or the ambition of their undertaking - two misses from a grantee that has been achieving significant impact for years but is now struggling with an ambitious campaign is different from a grantee who misses twice on their moderate goals and hasn't had any positive track record before.

Ultimately, how we balance accountability versus flexibility is highly case-dependent, taking into account the full context of the grantee's work and circumstances.

Hi Vasco! I indirectly address this question above. Indeed, we think that SWP is a great, highly cost-effective donation opportunity, and we're proud to have been one of their early funders. 

However, I'd be hesitant to make confident broad-stroke claims about comparative cost-effectiveness. That said, AWF have visibility across many different funding opportunities and can allocate funds to wherever they'll have the highest marginal impact. If we believed funding SWP at a larger scale would be more cost-effective than other opportunities we're considering, we could increase our support to them. This would indicate that it's better to donate to AWF since we can make that comparison and choose an opportunity that is more cost-effective on the margin. 

However, some of the grants we make have a high expected value, but their impact is not as certain. At this point, SWP represents a more "certain" opportunity for impact with a proven track record. Some of our grants may help start and scale the next SWP (as they did with SWP in the past), and some will not pan out and achieve 0 impact, so if a donor wants to have a higher certainty of impact, rather than rely on expected value-driven/hit-based giving, then donating to SWP directly may be a better option for them. 

Thanks for the question. This is not a question the fund has to consider very often - we're typically evaluating grants that would affect animals living lives we expect are negative lives. 

It's possible there are some cases where we're evaluating some interventions to reduce the number of farmed animals (e.g., meat reduction or farm prohibitions) where some of the animals who would not come into existence because of the reform would have otherwise lived net positive lives (some have estimated under particular ethical assumptions that cows raised for beef could be living net positive lives), but the vast majority of the impact would still be aiming to affect animals that are experiencing net negative lives and don't have a viable path on the table to achieve net positive lives instead.

To go a bit more in-depth and offer a more personal take rather than speaking for the AWF. Personally, even if I put on my 100% utilitarian hat, I would still have some uncertainty. First, I would need to have high confidence in:

1. Their lives being in fact, net positive. I think there is too much uncertainty about the welfare of animals and how to approach it depending on ethical theory. For example, if we give significant credence to negative utilitarianism or simply place a high weight on excruciating pain, then even if animals lead decent lives, slaughter at the end of their lives may outweigh it.
2. Methods to measure and aggregate their welfare, such as temporal welfare aggregation challenges.
3. Ability to determine where this threshold is and at which point life becomes net positive. Some claim that this concept is not even valid.

But yeah, if I was confident in all of that, or was risk permissive, with a 100% specific flavor of utilitarianism hat on, maybe I would.

But personally, I'm not sure I'm 100% utilitarian, and I have a more complex parliament, where some members/ethical theories say that it wouldn't be ethical (e.g., rights-based). I could imagine a case where more members would agree if, for example, there was no slaughter before natural death would occur for a given individual, and animals would die being completely anesthetized. Additionally, farms would be completely open, where an animal could choose to leave the environment they are in (where they are taken care of, but their products are taken away from them) and choose another one (where perhaps they are not taken care of but are free to fully express their natural behavior (e.g., where their offspring would hatch from eggs instead of eggs being taken away from them)). There are still dilemmas, such as whether truly informed consent is possible for animals, whether the choice to stay implies positive welfare or just status quo bias, and whether providing choice is sufficient for moral permissibility, etc. 

Then there is also the issue of whether we are obligated to bring into life beings who will lead net positive lives. I certainly don't act in accordance with that now, and I think population ethics is something I cannot solve, so I don't know what I would do. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Jokingly, maybe spend my donation budget to fund Peter Singer to figure it out :P 

Are you effectively assuming that when they are awake and not experiencing hurtful pain or worse, that they are experiencing pleasure as intense as hurtful pain? I would probably assume only pleasure that intense for eating, dustbathing and playing, at most. Foraging might be annoying or hurtful intensity.

We are excited about efforts to increase the amount of funding that goes to high-impact animal interventions. That being said, we believe there are as many, if not more, promising opportunities to increase funds from these other sources, such as:
a) less effective animal sources, supporting work of animal-focused effective giving and fundraising initiatives such as FarmKind, or Farmed Animal Funders, and cross-cause ones, e.g., Effektiv Spenden and others. I believe AIM had a report offering an impact evaluation of those, but I cannot find it now. 
b) less effective human sources, such as leveraging government R&D funding to be redirected to alt protein. This had significant successes, as described by Lewis in his new newsletter “6. Putting Green into Going Green. Governments invested over $200 million into research and infrastructure advancing alternative proteins, including in the US ($71M via DOC, DOD, and Massachusetts), Denmark (DKK 420M / $59M), Japan (¥7.87B / $51M), the UK (£27M / $34M via two grants), the EU (€12M / $13M) and Beijing (80M Yuan / $11M). New alternative protein research centers, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, opened in London, North Carolina, and Singapore.” We also think that influencing climate philanthropy has a lot of potential. 
We haven’t evaluated the two methods you described, and I’m not aware of any such estimates, so I cannot comment on their effectiveness. But I think that in any scenario, those interventions I mentioned would be better on the global net, species-agnostic welfare than, e.g., moving from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals.