Thanks Steven, great question! In short: yes we do, and no there isn’t :-) We think GiveWell’s approach of using GiveDirectly as a benchmark makes sense for GiveWell, and we’ve had several team discussions about whether we could take a similar approach. One step in this direction is to seek to get to the same unit of animals helped/suffering averted for each charity to make it easier to compare across charities, and we’ve sought to do that this year through our use of AIM’s Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) model. (You can read more about our 2024 cost-effectiveness assessments here.) However, while we found this helpful for this year’s Evaluations, it’s not always possible to reach a meaningful SADs estimate given limitations such as the long-term or speculative nature of some charities’ programs, a lack of reliable data around charities’ achievements, a lack of evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of different animal advocacy interventions, and the diverse range of programs conducted by the charities we evaluate. We’re also not aware of any charities in the animal advocacy space that share GiveDirectly’s room for additional funding and potential for scaleability.

Instead, we currently base our recommendation decisions on a set of decision guidelines that align with our evaluation criteria (see here for the guidelines and additional context), and use these to score charities against one another. It’s possible that in future a sufficiently scalable charity will emerge, and the animal advocacy movement will have sufficient evidence and data for us to produce reliable cost-effectiveness assessments for all the charities we evaluate, but at the moment this doesn’t seem realistic.

Currently, our Recommended Charities are those we’ve identified as the most impactful giving opportunities for animals based on the information we have available. Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, for those looking for impactful donation opportunities, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund that supports all 11 of our Recommended Charities and where gifts are currently being matched.

— Max

Thanks for your questions! 

1. We refine the methods of our evaluation process every year based on internal and external feedback in order to improve on the previous year and be more accurate in our assessments. We also update our position on the likely effectiveness of interventions based on new research and consider the particular situation of each country in our assessments. However, this year we didn’t explicitly score or prioritize certain interventions and countries. Instead, we analyzed the impact of the specific work of each charity using our new evaluation criteria (see below). In general (with some exceptions), we continue to prioritize work on farmed animals and wild animals, interventions that are more institutional in scope, and countries that are more neglected or have higher levels of animal suffering. 

2. ACE’s methods to evaluate charities have changed a lot over the years. We used to have more criteria to evaluate charities and we have reduced that number of criteria over the years, focusing on the most important factors for making recommendation decisions. The biggest changes we made this year were introducing a process allowing interested charities to apply for evaluation (rather than ACE inviting charities to be evaluated), and updating our evaluation criteria. Specifically, we:

• updated our cost-effectiveness methods (conducting more direct cost-effectiveness analyses, compared to last year’s scoring system that was based on less direct proxies for cost-effectiveness);
• introduced a qualitative theory of change analysis that explores the evidence, reasoning, and limitations around charities’ programs in more detail; and
• updated our room for more funding criterion to place more focus on the likely impact of charities’ future funding plans.

You can read more about our latest charity evaluation process here.

— Maria

Hey Ula, great question! This year we conducted an influenced-giving analysis to assess ACE’s counterfactual impact on funding via our Charity Evaluations and Movement Grants programs. We aim to publish the full reports on November 29th.

During our last fiscal year (April 2023-March 2024) the total reported ACE-influenced donations to the charities recommended during that time was $8.5 million, and we estimate that $3.7 million of this would not have been donated if not for ACE’s influence. The upcoming report will thoroughly explain how this was calculated. 

Our charity recommendations last for two years. We don’t guarantee that any charity is re-evaluated or re-recommended, so charities know to prepare for that when their two-year recommendation cycle ends. For some charities, being recommended by ACE might be their first introduction to certain donors. Anecdotally we’ve also found that some donors choose to continue donating to formerly recommended charities. 

We expect that being recommended for the first time, leads to a greater increase in funding than retaining a recommendation. The same seems likely for a recommendation for a newer intervention or animal group, or for a younger charity compared to the budget impact of a recommendation for a well-known charity. According to a recent survey, ACE’s annual influence per charity has varied anywhere from about $150,000 to $1,000,000+. Some of those gifts might not be fully counterfactual (this will also be further explained in the report coming out next week). Assessing budget impact and change in recommendation status is something we need to examine further though, so we’ll be expanding our impact assessment work this year to include more than just our quantitative counterfactual impact on funding.

Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund because these gifts are currently being matched. Donations will help all 11 of our Recommended Charities that we estimate will have an exceptional impact for animals with additional donations. 

— Elisabeth

Thanks for the question! None of our current Recommended Charities work on cultivated protein sources, though we have previously recommended charities working on this (such as Good Food Institute and New Harvest) and awarded Movement Grants to projects in this area (such as Cellular Agriculture Australia). We’d certainly be open to considering charities and Movement Grant applicants working on this in the future. 

— Max

Thanks for your questions! This year we decided to use Ambitious Impact’s new unit SADs (Suffering Adjusted Days) in our cost-effectiveness analysis. This allowed us to provide the estimate in a unit that could directly compare the suffering across different interventions and animal species. For example, we could compare in the same unit the welfare improvement of cage-free campaigns, crate-free campaigns, and institutional meat replacement campaigns (see Sinergia’s review). We found SADs especially useful for more direct interventions, where the welfare improvement and the number of animals affected can be quantified with some certainty. Note that because SADs are a recent methodology that hasn’t been finalized yet, we expect that some of the estimates we used might change. Although we found SADs very useful in our cost-effectiveness analysis, we plan to discuss in our coming strategic sessions whether we will keep using this methodology in our evaluations, and for which interventions it might be more or less suitable. Depending on our strategic priorities and capacity, we will consider refining and updating the current estimates, as well as producing estimates for more interventions and species. 

— Maria

Thank you for your question. We refine our methods each year and we don’t think that recent changes mean that we can no longer rely on the decisions we made in 2023.

Specifically about cost-effectiveness, in the past ACE has identified limitations of direct cost-effectiveness analyses and found it less helpful to directly estimate the number of animals helped per dollar. Instead, we began exploring ways to model cost-effectiveness, such as achievement scores and the Impact Potential criterion. Since then, the animal advocacy movement (namely Welfare Footprint Project, Ambitious Impact, and Rethink Priorities) has invested in research that enables quantifying animal suffering averted per dollar and in turn, we’ve evolved our methods. However, we think it is still remarkably challenging to do these calculations and draw conclusions from them, and that using proxies is still a reasonable approach.

Additionally, while we’ve introduced a theory of change criterion to formalize our assessment of charities’ assumptions, limitations, and risks, we have already been taking these factors into account during our decision-making in the past. Our other two criteria, room for more funding and organizational health, were included in our methods in both years.

In summary, while we see recent improvements as a step forward, we wouldn’t claim that 2023 charities were evaluated with a less rigorous methodology.

— Zuzana
 

At ACE we currently prioritize farmed and wild animals, so none of our Recommended Charities work to reduce the use of animals for scientific purposes (i.e. research, testing, and science education). 

If you’re interested in organizations and institutions that are focused on this area, here are few great options to explore:

• Johns Hopkins Centre for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT)—U.S.-based but engages in some international work
• Replacing Animal Research (formerly FRAME)—U.K.-based
• PETA International Science Consortium—U.S.-based but does international work
• EuroGroup for Animals, Animals in Science department—E.U.-based

There are also government-funded alternatives centres around the world like the European Centre for Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM).

— Elisabeth

Thanks for these questions!

1. We don’t have a certain bar per criterion that charities need to meet to be recommended. It’s the totality of our assessments across all the criteria that add up to our judgment call on whether a charity is marginally cost-effective enough to be recommended. The weighting of the criteria can differ from charity to charity depending on things like the interventions they use, whether they have direct or indirect impact, whether they operate on a short- or long-term theory of change, the level of uncertainty we have, the availability of data that allows us to calculate impact per dollar, and other factors. We arrive at our recommendation decisions through iterative team discussion and a set of scores. You can learn more about our recommendations decisions and guiding questions on our Evaluation Process page.
2. In 2023 we began not publishing comprehensive reviews for charities that are evaluated but that we don’t give Recommended Charity status to. This is because in addition to being an evaluator, ACE is a meta-fundraiser and we directly promote the charities we recommend. In the shorter summary reviews for the charities we evaluate but we don’t give Recommended Charity status to, we still share many of the details that were relevant to inform our decision (e.g., the theory of change table).
3. It’s a great question about where we have uncertainties in our new methods. First, we found our attempt to estimate Suffering Adjusted Days (SADs) averted per dollar less useful and more uncertain than we expected. We had hoped to be able to estimate SADs averted per dollar for the key programs of all the charities we evaluated this year, but that didn’t end up being possible, largely due to either the types of data charities collect to monitor their own programs or the general lack of empirical evidence about the effectiveness of animal advocacy interventions. The new theory of change assessment really helped with this because the corresponding analysis of how we expect charities’ activities and outputs to lead to outcomes and impact helped reduce a lot of our uncertainty, and helped give us a deeper understanding of each charity’s work (and aims). Second, we were uncertain about what research our team needed to do ahead of the evaluation season to best prepare us for the implementation of our new methods. We ended up doing a lot of research during the evaluation period, which included reaching out to external experts. While there will always be charity-specific research for us to do, I think we’re now in a better position to anticipate many of our research needs ahead of time. Lastly, some internal logistical processes created a bit of uncertainty among team members about roles, responsibilities and workflows that were hard to anticipate when rolling out the new methodology, but we have had regular retrospective meetings after each stage of our process so we know how to address all those internal sticking points in the future.

– Elisabeth

Hi, great (and topical) question! Yes, some ACE staff use generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude to help generate ideas or to help draft lower-priority internal documents. However, we don’t use such models for external or high-priority documents given the various limitations of AI models (such as the risk of factual errors, biases, and plagiarism), and we also don’t input information that could be potentially sensitive.

We apply a similar principle to image generation models. Given the risk of AI-generated images being seen as misleading in certain contexts, potentially casting doubt on, e.g.. photographic evidence of farm investigations, we instead use images from public-domain sources, prioritizing ethically aligned sources such as We Animals Media.

Personally, the most useful AI tool in my day-to-day work is Perplexity, which cites its responses and can be really helpful for locating research papers. I also find ChatGPT and Claude helpful for summarizing research, cleaning up documents, and advising on spreadsheet formulas. A newer tool is Google’s NotebookLM, which seems very useful for distilling information from a wide range of sources.

For more information you can check out ACE’s Responsible AI Usage policy. We also have an internal document where staff share AI use cases with one another, so you could consider introducing something similar at your own organization if that sounds helpful!

— Max