2026 Engagement Survey

Introduction

Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey, which should take no longer than 15 minutes. Your honest responses are essential to Animal Charity Evaluators’ goal to make decisions that help animals and strengthen the animal advocacy movement.

Purpose

ACE’s charity evaluations seek to identify organizations that we are confident will deliver outstanding benefits for as many animals as possible. Leadership and workplace culture shape both an organization's long-term effectiveness and whether their advocates stay in the movement, so we ask about both as part of every evaluation.

To assess organizational health, we ask leadership about the internal policies and processes in place at the organization, and we ask staff and volunteers about their experience of working at the organization. This helps ensure we have the information we need to make robust, evidence-based recommendations.

We developed this survey in collaboration with the organizational consultancy Scarlet Spark to ensure we ask the most relevant questions. The questions we ask are understood to be reliable predictors of organizational health and are based on recognized frameworks such as the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey.

Privacy

ACE will preserve respondents’ anonymity by not asking for identifying information in this survey or collecting IP addresses. Only the evaluations committee at ACE will have access to the data. The data will be deleted permanently after one year.

Only an aggregated summary of the survey responses—with no individual responses—will be shared in ACE’s reviews and with the leadership of each respective charity. Individual responses to survey questions will never be used verbatim in ACE publications or shared with the leadership of the organizations in question.

Additionally, we may share anonymized, organization-level summaries of engagement survey responses with Scarlet Spark to improve our processes for assessing leadership and organizational practices in future evaluations. Scarlet Spark will operate under a confidentiality agreement with ACE and will not share any information with any other party. ACE pledges to keep all potentially identifying information strictly confidential. However, it is important to note that ACE may be required to share survey data in the (unlikely) case of a legal dispute or if we learn of illegal activity at the organization in question.

If you wish to make us aware of any significant concerns you have about your organization (including, but not limited to, instances of harassment and discrimination), please do so using our Third-Party Whistleblower Form rather than providing the information above. Using this form, you can specify what information you are happy to share with your organization’s leadership, and what information you wish to remain confidential. Though we do not have the capacity or expertise to formally investigate claims, we will share as much information as you allow with the charity’s leadership and encourage them to take positive action. Their response to any claims will inform our recommendation decisions.

Please note that the Whistleblower Form is in English. Please use Google Translate or another online translator to translate the questions. You can respond in your own language.

Please rate each of the following statements on a scale from 1 (no, I strongly disagree) to 5 (yes, I strongly agree): 1 = No, I strongly disagree 2 = No, I moderately disagree 3 = I neither agree nor disagree 4 = Yes, I moderately agree 5 = Yes, I strongly agree

If you wish to make us aware of any significant concerns you have about your organization (including, but not limited to, instances of harassment and discrimination), please do so using our Third-Party Whistleblower Form rather than providing the information below. Using this form, you can specify what information you are happy to share with your organization’s leadership, and what information you wish to remain confidential. Though we do not have the capacity or expertise to formally investigate claims, we will share as much information as you allow with the charity’s leadership and encourage them to take positive action. Their response to any claims will inform our recommendation decisions.

Please note that the Whistleblower Form is in English. Please use Google Translate or another online translator to translate the questions. You can respond in your own language.