Your recommended charities include those evaluated with your new methodology and some re-recommended from last year, which were evaluated with less rigorous methodology. Are you concerned that these differences might result in funding less effective organizations instead of those that genuinely benefit animals?
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, regarding cost-effectiveness, in the past, ACE identified limitations of direct cost-effectiveness analyses and found it less helpful to estimate directly 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
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