All of Animal Charity Evaluators's Comments + Replies

Rest assured, our new charity application process and commitment to serious impact-driven advocacy is no joke. We're here to keep the conversation on animal advocacy going strong, even on April Fool's Day!

Thank you, Toby! We appreciate the positive feedback and definitely share your thoughts about the value of this exercise.

- Max

Hi Michael, thanks a lot for the helpful comments, and for taking the time to be so thorough in your feedback. We've been thinking a lot about how to produce proxies for impact that can be meaningfully compared with one another, with BOTECs being one possible way to help achieve that, so it's really useful to get your views. We'll talk these through as a team as we consider improvements to our process for the coming years.

- Max

Thanks for the kind words! Really glad to hear you're likely to support the great work being done by our Recommended Charities.

Like you say, involvement with EA is a hard thing to judge: I wouldn't feel qualified to name directors that I believe are involved in EA, for example. Also, while all the charities we recommend use evidence-driven strategies to achieve the maximum benefits for animals, many of them might not consider themselves EA, or might not want to be labelled as such for strategic reasons. In answer to your more specific question, two of our ... (read more)

Thank you for your thoughtful question and interest in our evaluation approach. At ACE, we recognize the unique challenges present in our domain, where there is often less data and consensus on effective interventions compared to GiveWell's focus on global health and poverty. We also evaluate charities using a diverse range of 26 types of interventions, some with complex, long-term Theories of Change that are challenging to quantify.

For these reasons, we currently don't apply a specific cost-effectiveness bar across all charities, but we are consistently r... (read more)

First, we want to sincerely thank Giving What We Can for running this “Evaluating the Evaluators” exercise. We recognize that ACE has set ourselves a difficult task, compounded by the fact that we’re the only organization doing what we do. Therefore, receiving this kind of feedback is both very rare and very welcome. There’s a great deal in GWWC’s report that will help us improve our processes for 2024, which ultimately means more animals will be helped and spared. While we were disappointed that GWWC has decided not to defer to our recommendations this ye... (read more)

Thank you for your comment! While there is limited hard evidence on the effectiveness of ballot measures, there have been some successful cases of them improving animal welfare standards over the last few decades in the U.S. (Schukraft, 2020). We agree that citizen initiatives such as ballot measures and other types of policy work are promising interventions, and hopefully, we will see more studies backing this up soon.

- Alina

Hi Nuño, we've now published our blog post on our approach to assessing Cost Effectiveness, including a charity’s approaches to implementing interventions, their recent achievements, and the costs associated with those achievements. Thanks, Holly

Hi Ben! Thanks for question, and I'm glad you're excited about our recommendations.

The situation was as you noted: a significant portion of New Harvest's assets were in the stock of companies that had not gone public. In retrospect, when we last evaluated New Harvest in mid-late 2021, it would have been more accurate for ACE not to count assets that may be difficult to liquidate quickly, because they are not truly available to maintain operations. As you'll see in the upcoming "Our Room for More Funding Approach in 2022" blog post, we have since updated ou... (read more)

Thank you for this initial feedback, Nuño - we appreciate you taking the time. In the coming weeks, we'll be publishing one blog post for each of the evaluation criteria that we use when reviewing charities (for a total of 4 posts). The blog posts will give more detail on how we made our assessments, how this year's approach differs from previous years, and any limitations we see. The Cost Effectiveness blog post will be published on Dec 15th, so we look forward to sharing more details then.

- Elisabeth

We continuously work to improve and strengthen our evaluations process and appreciate your thoughtful and constructive critique of it. As our research team expands under new leadership, we welcome the opportunity for you to contact our team to discuss the points above as we consider improvements to our processes. We would also be more than happy to clear up any misunderstandings you’ve outlined regarding the current evaluations process we have in place. Best of luck with your submission!