Mercy For Animals
Evaluated Charity
Mercy For Animals (MFA) operates in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Southeast Asia. They conduct various farmed animal advocacy programs, often involving the distribution of footage from their undercover investigations of factory farms, which they primarily promote via media outreach and online campaigns. MFA also engages in corporate and institutional outreach, research, lobbying, policy work, public awareness campaigns, volunteer training, and supporting farmers transitioning away from animal agriculture.
| Primary area of work: | |
| Review Published: | 2023 |
Animals suffer miserably at factory farms. Mercy For Animals works to expose and end their abuse.
Why did Mercy For Animals not receive our recommendation?1
Mercy For Animals’ work to improve animal welfare standards, increase knowledge and skills for animal advocacy, and increase the availability of animal-free products is promising because it primarily focuses on animal groups, countries, and interventions that we consider high priority. We find their producer and corporate outreach work to help farmed chickens in the U.S. particularly likely to be impactful. For more information, see their Impact Potential spreadsheet. However, despite their impactful work, we estimate that additional funds would have marginally more impact going to our recommended charities. See 2023 Criteria Methods and Limitations for a detailed explanation of how we conduct evaluations and our 2023 Evaluation Process for information about our decision-making process. While Mercy For Animals did not receive a recommendation from us this year, we recognize them as one of the most effective charities in their space.
Are Mercy For Animals’ programs cost effective?
After analyzing the recent achievements and expenditures of Mercy For Animals’ programs, we assessed their institutional outreach work with schools in Brazil as particularly cost effective because they reached a high number of institutions compared to other achievements in the same intervention category. In contrast, we assessed their institutional outreach work supporting Brazilian and Mexican companies to add new vegan menu items as less cost effective because they reached a smaller number of companies compared to other achievements in the same intervention category, and we thought the impact on the provision of alternatives to animal products was moderate. For more information, see Mercy for Animals’ Cost Effectiveness spreadsheet.2
$7M
Funding Gap
2024-2025
200+
Staff Size
1999
Year Founded
How is Mercy For Animals’ organizational health?
Organizational factors can influence a charity’s effectiveness and stability. Based on our assessment, we are confident that Mercy For Animals has the key policies and processes in place necessary for healthy workplace conditions, governance, and staff engagement. We also positively noted their sensitive approach to international expansion and their commitment to fostering a more global and diverse leadership team.
How much additional funding could they use?
We estimate that Mercy For Animals has room for $3,000,000 of additional funding in 2024 and $4,000,000 in 2025, beyond their current projected revenues for those years. Therefore, we believe that they could effectively use a total revenue of up to $30,850,000 in 2024 and $32,850,000 in 2025. For more information, see their Room for More Funding spreadsheet.
For full disclosure, ACE’s country prioritization framework that we use to inform our Impact Potential scores is largely based on Mercy For Animals’ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI). This year, we made some changes that departed from the FAOI; we consulted with MFA’s FAOI leads to get their views on these changes and how best to implement them. Additionally, ACE currently participates in the Intergroup Research Meeting, where representatives of animal advocacy organizations (including Mercy For Animals) meet monthly to update each other, discuss, and give advice on ongoing and completed projects. ACE does not seek any feedback from this forum regarding achievement scoring or recommendations decisions.
Mercy For Animals notes, as a caveat to ACE’s cost-effectiveness assessment, that cost effectiveness and absolute impact are very different by their understanding, and there is a potential trade-off between cost effectiveness and organizational size. According to MFA, larger organizations often engage more effectively with influential global entities, which can come at the expense of increased investment in infrastructure and people support. They emphasize the pivotal role that sizable organizations with access to high-level decision-makers play in a movement ecosystem. MFA’s Theory of Change aims to achieve short-term goals but also to build capacity and create a foundation for meaningful institutional change in the long term. As such, a substantial portion of their budget is allocated to programs aimed at building that foundation—an effort whose impact, in their opinion, is not fully captured in evaluations of institutional impact that are better suited for assessing short-term impact.
