ACE's mission to find and advocate highly effective opportunities to improve the lives of animals drives our research program. We seek to understand a wide variety of animal advocacy activities at a basic level in order to identify those areas that are most promising. We then undertake deeper research into interventions and organizations within those areas, in order to identify which have the strongest evidence of efficiency.

Because animal advocacy is a developing field of research, our work often leads us to questions that have not yet been answered. We conduct original research on these questions, and we keep a list of potential studies for other researchers to conduct.

Interventions

Animal advocacy organizations use a wide variety of tactics to address many forms of animal suffering. Identifying which methods most efficiently solve which problems is thus a key step in comparing programs and organizations. To find these methods, ACE researches the effectiveness of various tactics and interventions intended to improve the lives of animals. This research helps us identify the strongest animal advocacy programs, and can provide guidance to animal advocates in deciding which course to pursue. As such, we prioritize evaluating interventions with the potential to be highly cost effective and about which we believe there is ample information available.

See a list of interventions we have evaluated.

Organizations

ACE's charity recommendations are one of our highest priorities. We conduct brief evaluations of many organizations to identify the most promising candidates, then research those organizations' methods and achievements in greater depth. While success is defined partly by the organization under consideration, ACE's evaluations always consider the effectiveness of an organization from the perspective of reducing the largest amount of suffering.

See a list of organizations we have considered.

Foundational Research

In addition to research on interventions and organizations, ACE conducts and reviews research that deal with more general topics relevant to animal advocacy. This foundational research provides necessary background for specific evaluations and for comparing work done in different areas. Major themes of our foundational research include research on how best to conduct surveys to assess the success of outreach programs and research on the general effects of programs that spread vegetarianism and veganism.