Our mission at ACE is to find and advocate highly effective opportunities for improving the lives of animals. To do this, we use science to analyze the impact of interventions (i.e. tactics) to help animals. Our general definition of an "effective intervention" is one that creates comparatively larger positive impact (measurable reduction of suffering or alternatively an improvement of well-being) for sentient beings at low cost. By extension, we evaluate animal charity organizations based on how well they meet the ultimate goal of effectiveness. The practical implication of our work is twofold: One, we educate individuals (especially activists or altruists) about the most effective ways to make a difference for animals; and two, we recommend the highest-performing charities, based on our findings, to utilitarian-minded donors.

We leverage research from other organizations and conduct our own research to gather the largest possible pool of data to inform our decisions. Currently, very little reliable research exists around effective animal advocacy. Our aim is to help close that gap directly but also encourage other organizations to produce more high-quality research in order to continuously build a shared body of knowledge and improved findings.

We certainly believe there is great value in addressing global poverty and other human-centric causes. Nevertheless, given that our goal is to most efficiently reduce the largest amount of suffering, there is a very compelling case to focus on animals. Animals vastly outnumber humans. To illustrate, almost 60 billion animals are bred and killed for food each year worldwide, compared to the entire human population of 7.13 billion as of December 2013. Furthermore, as evidenced by numerous sources (undercover videos, standard agricultural practices), the suffering that animals endure – often caused by human self-interest – is enormous. By educating people about how they can best advocate for animals, we contribute to the largest possible reduction of suffering for the largest number of sentient creatures.

By addressing the current system of institutionalized animal exploitation, particularly the food industry, from the viewpoint of helping animals, we acquire major wins for the human population (health, global hunger, etc). Additionally, as a unique characteristic of farmed animal advocacy, it translates into everyone's everyday food choices, and thus there is a significant potential for flow-through and ripple effects. Not only does farmed animal advocacy directly lower the demand for animal products (and in turn lower supply due to the highly economically elastic nature of agricultural production), but also each changed individual will likely perpetuate this change through influencing others around them, sometimes without any additional organizational intervention. Lastly, shifting the purchasing power away from factory farm products immediately creates new demand – and in turn, supply – for ethical alternatives, reinforcing the change full circle.

ACE does cause prioritization because it allows us to more efficiently sort through organizations and interventions to find those that are likely to have very good cost-effectiveness. There are thousands of animal charities in the world, and our goal is to identify the best - or at least some that are exceptionally effective. We can’t conduct in-depth reviews on thousands of individual charities to decide which are most cost-effective, so we need to use broad, easily recognizable criteria to narrow the field. The cause a charity focuses on is one of the easiest characteristics to identify: it’s often obvious from the name of the organization. Together with what interventions the charity implements, it provides a strong signal about the charity’s probable cost-effectiveness because charities working in the same area using a similar approach tend to have similar expenditures and results.

Our top charities work on farmed animal advocacy because we believe that to be the cause area where advocates can have the largest impact in helping animals due to scale, neglect, and tractability. Groups that specifically work on behalf of farmed animals receive a very small percentage of overall funding in animal advocacy despite presenting the vast majority of animals that are killed by people.

We wouldn't state that we specifically promote veganism, even though that is one way for an individual to help prevent suffering. Instead, we promote anti-speciesism – namely, we believe that which species a being belongs to does not in itself matter in considering how much we should care about it (though this could change if research determines that certain species have a larger or smaller capacity to suffer). Creating anti-speciesist attitudes in the public could lead to immense changes for animals, not just in the change of diet, but in how animals are used and exploited in all forms. We currently believe that farmed animal advocacy is a highly effective method to create these new attitudes while substantially reducing suffering.

In an ideal world, we would like to directly measure the change in anti-speciesist attitudes that take place as a result of organizational efforts, but as that seems difficult to quantify, we are currently using change in meat consumption as one possible metric for this change. As our knowledge evolves, our metrics will change.

In the wild, there are many animals that give birth to tens, hundreds, and even thousands of offspring. Many of them die soon after birth in seemingly painful ways, including by being eaten alive or starving to death. There is a large potential to alleviate suffering on a grander scale in this context by somehow preventing the suffering that each of these individual animals might endure through their birth and quick subsequent death. While this idea is intriguing to us, we don't know of any particularly impactful solutions to dealing with this problem.

As an organization we are open to considering both direct (such as leafleting) and indirect (such as research on animal sentience) methods of alleviating suffering. We are confident that neglecting wild-animal suffering solely because currently we don't know of large-scale methods to combat it would be a mistake, and that researching this issue could have very high potential value. However, due to our limited staff time and resources and the fact that we have many actionable methods to consider, we focus our evaluations on organizations that are in a position to conduct measurable and concrete efforts. If we learn of an organization that examines wild-animal suffering in this way, we look forward to evaluating them at that time.

Thousands of humane societies dedicated to cats and dogs exist across the United States; indeed, intervening on behalf of stray cats and dogs has often been a focal point for animal advocates. We know much about preventing suffering in these contexts – we know how to reduce the spread of disease, how to humanely implement population control measures, and how to place companion animals in loving homes – but this knowledge is counterbalanced by high costs of implementation. When you factor in medical care, vaccines, food, shelter housing, and employee costs, it seems unlikely that this is a cost-effective method to alleviate suffering. Additionally, the level of support for efforts on behalf of companion animals is high relative to other animal causes, which means there is likely less low-hanging fruit for producing positive change. Because of this, ACE does not currently recommend companion animal shelters as a way to get the biggest return on donations.

Sanctuaries certainly have value, but direct care for animals can be very expensive, and we caution against taking in too many direct rescues when considering how to maximize your impact as an advocate. We feel that sanctuaries' biggest value stems from their educational work, and that sanctuaries can improve their impact by focusing more on this area. For further reading, please see our blog post about this topic.

ACE considers suffering in general; if there is a large amount of suffering, regardless of the origin, and we can take action to prevent it, then we believe that taking such action deserves consideration – for example, people should certainly help human victims of natural disasters like earthquakes. However, there are some instances of mass suffering of animals (e.g. wild animals) for which we don't currently know of any particularly impactful remedies. If our research suggests a cost-effective way to alleviate suffering on a wider scale, we will revise our recommendations based on that knowledge.

We begin our process by defining the initial framework of interventions and charities based on the following triage criteria. We start with interventions which have demonstrated the potential to affect large numbers of animals at low cost, and which either have direct evidence of effectiveness or which allow for relatively easily-performed studies to provide initial evidence for or against their effectiveness. Then we primarily investigate charities which perform promising interventions or which publicly provide other evidence that their own activities have high cost-effectiveness.

For interventions and charities that pass the initial screening process, we use our methodically designed intervention template and organization evaluation template to guide more thorough investigations. We use existing data, including data provided by the charities, in addition to performing our own studies to estimate effectiveness where necessary. Although we use quantitative and empirical data from authoritative sources wherever possible, our charity recommendations ultimately involve subjective factors, including how to weigh competing criteria. We publish in-depth discussions of our research so that donors can understand our reasoning and substitute their own judgments if their values differ from ours.

Note that we continuously refine and perfect this overall process, learning from our successes and mistakes as well as from newly available external findings. It is possible that new developments will lead to us redefining our criteria in the future. As this process is not an exact science, we never guarantee bullet-proof results, but we believe in extra transparency and we always disclose our methodology, especially the subjective factors.

Out of respect for the confidentiality of groups’ private communications with us, we don’t discuss the reasons that individual organizations declined to be reviewed. However, we can discuss the general reasons that groups might decline to be reviewed.

The reasons for not having reviews published varies from organization to organization, but usually stems from a disagreement about how to view effectiveness. Most groups think that what they’re doing is effective, and when their view doesn’t align with ours, they are reluctant to let us publish our review. Another common reason is that we typically include some criticisms in each review, whether directly about a group’s impact or about other concerns we have. Some groups are reluctant to let us publish a review which includes criticism, despite the fact that we agree they are doing some good work overall. Finally, some groups tell us they don’t approve of our recommendation system in general, or don’t think the effectiveness of different groups can be compared.

In some cases, we never know why a particular group has declined to be reviewed. Since we require groups to actively approve any review before it is published, they can stop publication of the review by dropping out of contact with us at any stage. Sometimes this occurs late in the process, when we’ve been discussing specific issues in the review and can guess which they might find intractable. Other times it occurs very early in the process, such as to initial contact emails seeking the individual within the organization with the authority to approve or reject a review. In these cases, we have little information about groups’ motives for not responding to contact; some of our contact attempts may never even have reached someone who could act on them. Other groups might have declined to respond for reasons similar to those given above, such as fundamental disagreements with our methods or the expectation that our review wouldn’t be sufficiently favorable.

Because groups have varied reasons to decline to be reviewed, the safest conclusion about these groups is simply that they weren’t enthusiastic about having a review published on our site. If you want to know more details about the reason a specific group declined to participate, it’s best to reach out to them directly with your questions.

At this time, we do not suggest restricting donations to our top charities (though if strongly desired by a donor, a few relatively stand-alone and scalable interventions exist where a restricted donation could work easily, such as sponsoring online, pay-per-click advertisements). We have chosen our current charities because we believe they effectively use their funding to drive results for animals; therefore we feel they are in the best position to determine distribution of donor funds. Furthermore, while we continue researching and measuring interventions, at this time we don't have absolute evidence of any single specific intervention being so superior as to warrant the extreme measure of a restricted donation.

Additionally, often there is a potential issue with fungibility, where donations that are restricted to one area may result in money that would otherwise have gone to that area being reallocated to other parts of the organization. While some organizations are able to use restricted donations exclusively to increase the resources flowing to a designated intervention, these are infrequent exceptions. In the future, when we have a better understanding of the charity dynamics, and if we amass more evidence around clear superiority of any single interventions, we may consider recommending restricted donations to an organization after confirming that the funds will not be fungible.

In very specific situations where a large group has a smaller division that we endorse funding, we may recommend restricting donations to that specific division if we can confirm that the money will not be fungible.

We have a methodical process to identify and evaluate candidate charities. There could be two main reasons why we did not consider a charity. One, the charity did not meet our initial screening criteria in regards to charity's main mission/intervention focus compared to the most effective interventions based on our research. Two, the charity did pass our initial screening but through the evaluation process, we encountered other reasons to ultimately not consider the charity (for example, they did not have room for more funding, or were contacted but chose not to participate in our process). For a more detailed explanation, view our general recommendation process. We do our best to consider as many charities as possible; if you feel we have missed a potential candidate for our top recommendations, please contact us.

No, ACE does not receive any funds related to conducting an evaluation on any one group. We are funded almost entirely by private donations made by individuals who support our overall mission to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

For our first round of recommendations using our new criteria in May 2014, we did not consider any international charities. We began considering select international groups with our December 2014 review process, and we intend to continue considering international groups moving forward. However, there are several issues that prevent us from examining some of them. Evaluating non U.S. charities can be difficult due to language constraints; many groups that we looked at simply don't have materials available in a language spoken by ACE staff members. Also, while we utilize WorldAnimal.net to help us locate international animal charities, it can be difficult simply to find groups working on effective advocacy in foreign countries. We are happy to consider international charities that are recommended to us, so long as we can effectively communicate with their organization. If you feel we have missed a good candidate for our top recommendations, please contact us.

This is definitely a serious issue that deserves attention. China produces almost 7 times as many pigs and over 7 times as many egg-laying chickens as the US. Additionally concerning is that the broiler population, while not yet surpassing that of the US, has been steadily climbing each year for the past several years, whereas the US broiler population has remained stagnant or even declined slightly.

There are many reasons for the continuing increase in animal product consumption in China; one such factor is surely Western influence. Because of this, the logistical difficulty of operating campaigns in China, the greater availability of groups to pioneer and study methodology of outreach in the US, and the philanthropic power of US donors on behalf of animals, we currently believe in primarily focusing on the US. We have contacts with some veg groups in China, and they have very low levels of resources (financial and personnel) with which to organize, and also face some social restrictions on how they can assemble. It is worth trying to provide some resources to them (and indeed our executive director has done this in the past), but the many complications slow down the process. It's important to investigate effectiveness before we expend significant resources unwisely.

Once we invest more in evaluating methods of outreach, we feel we will be in a better position to invest more time and capital in China and related areas. In the meantime, working in the US and changing the perception of animals as food while conducting research will hopefully also beneficially impact foreign consumption patterns. Additionally, we started to consider some international charities for our December 2014 recommendations, and play to continue considering select international groups in the future.

ACE offers a unique perspective in the animal advocacy movement by using objective means to identify the social efficacy of animal welfare tactics and charities. We hold no stake in any one group or intervention, and our sole interest in promoting the best ways to help animals ensures that we do not hold a bias toward any specific area.

We update our charity recommendations on December 1st of each year. Outside of this cycle, we occasionally update our recommendations if warranted by significant new research or other reliable information.

Yes! We are proud to be a platinum-level Guidestar participant, ranked as Best in America by Independent Charities of America, and recommended by many effective altruist influencers such as the Centre for Effective Altruism, Raising for Effective Giving (REG), Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and Peter Singer.

Ultimately, our goal is to direct funds to where they will be used most effectively, which is often to organizations that directly engage in interventions helping animals. As such, we encourage donors to donate to our top charities. In June 2015, we implemented a new service that enables donors to support our top charities by donating directly to ACE using forms earmarked for specific charities. In general, we will not focus on soliciting donations for ACE; however we do require financial support in order to continue providing our services. We greatly appreciate contributions to ACE.

We track the amount of giving to our recommended charities in several ways. These ways vary depending on what each of our top charities allow, but include the following: 1) Featuring a check box on the donate form of the charity that notes "I heard about X charity through Animal Charity Evaluators." 2) Compiling information on web traffic using unique URLs to track the amount of people who proceed from our site to a top charity's site and the donate to that charity. 3) Asking donors to add their donation information to an Effective Altruist Donation Hub, where they can select an option similar to that used in the aforementioned check box. 4) Compiling anecdotal reports from individuals who have donated to our top charities because of our recommendation. We then cross reference names, donation amounts, and dates between the different methods to avoid duplication. Using these methods, in 2014 we influenced over $141,000 in giving to our top charities, and we influenced over $828,000 in 2015.

We don’t take the prospect of matching donation campaigns lightly. As others have noted, matching donation drives are often used by organizations that would have received the money anyway, thus compromising the authenticity of a matching situation. If a donor offers a large gift, these organizations might request to use the large gift as part of a matching campaign so as to generate additional income. This situation can be morally suspect, as the organization would have received the money anyway, and we don’t endorse matching campaigns that are created in that manner.

However, occasionally a donor comes along who understands the value of non-illusory matching campaigns, and chooses to offer their money to an organization on the condition that they use it in a matching drive. This is how ACE matching drives come to fruition, and we’re happy to report that we only offer genuine opportunities (such as influence matching or coordination matching) to double your impact in our work to help animals.

Yes, ACE is a registered 501(c)(3) charity, and all donations in the United States are tax-deductible. Additionally, Swiss and German donors can qualify for tax deductions to ACE by donating through GBS.