2020 Prospective Goals

At the start of the second quarter of 2020, we find ourselves looking at a world very different from the one in which we imagined ourselves a couple of months ago. Our global population is facing health and safety concerns, a potential economic recession, and rapid social and political change. Now more than ever, our movement must adapt in creative ways, focus on our core principles, and act in solidarity as we navigate the challenges ahead.

At ACE, we’ve come together to select projects and goals that will enable us to continue supporting the effective animal advocacy community in accomplishing our shared objective: to help as many animals as possible.

We are fortunate at ACE that the core of our work has remained unaffected by the pandemic. Our team is accustomed to working remotely and we have been engaging with our community in virtual spaces for years. However, we want to be realistic about the impact that this pandemic has had on the entire world, including the effective animal advocacy space.

Our researchers are in the process of adapting our charity evaluation and grant-making processes to place a higher emphasis on traits that are relevant to navigating uncertainty. We are identifying research priorities that can provide timely guidance to our network throughout our changing economic and social landscape. Just as we strive to be a resource to our external stakeholders, we seek to support our own team as we face the difficulties this pandemic brings to us all on a personal level. We’ve doubled our paid sick time through the end of the year, proactively offered pay advances in case staff members need them, and continued to prioritize wellbeing as a key value through paid time for self-care, increased opportunities for social connection and team-building, and other initiatives.

Below, we’ve presented our prospective goals for 2020 in a slightly different format to previous years to better reflect our new internal operating model. Rather than working in discrete departments, we have transitioned to working in cross-functional, project-based teams. We hope that this change will result in greater efficiency, more cross-pollination of ideas, more creativity, more sustainable workloads for our staff, greater opportunities for learning and growth, and—ultimately—a larger impact for animals.

Note: As we are publishing this list in April, many of these goals are already accomplished or underway.

Programs

Charity Recommendations

Make improvements to our processes for conducting charity evaluations and announcing the resulting recommendations

• Implement 75% of the suggestions that arose during retrospective meetings from last year’s charity evaluation process, such as improving our method for predicting charities’ revenue and expenditures
• Review evaluation materials, including our internal guidelines for researchers and evaluation handbook for charities, and implement relevant improvements
• Review evaluation workflow and implement improvements to make the most efficient use of our own staff time and that of participating charities

Expand the international scope of our charity evaluations

• Conduct a systematic search for charities to consider in high-potential countries
• Invite at least seven charities based outside the U.S. to participate in our evaluation process
• Introduce a new criterion or section of a criterion focused on assessing the ability of multi-national charities to operate successfully and responsibly in markets outside their country of origin
• Identify resources to navigate cultural differences and facilitate cross-cultural communication with charities

Achieve additional objectives for this year’s charity evaluations

• Draft reviews for at least 15 charities in order to inform our 2020 Top and Standout Charity selections
• Verify all major claims reported by charities participating in our evaluation process
• Hold a retrospective meeting after each stage of the evaluation process to better identify the most important research questions that arise during our evaluations and recommendation decisions, allowing us to investigate those questions during the off-season (see Research Operations section below)
• Adapt our evaluation framework to take into account the limitations and opportunities presented by the pandemic by adjusting the questions we ask of charities and how we weigh them
• Host a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event with our researchers post-recommendations release

Influence $9M in donations to our Top and Standout Charities, including via our Recommended Charity Fund

• Distribute a guide of best practices to our recommended charities on how they can make the most of their ACE recommendation
• Assist charities directly with implementing English-language donation web pages that include impact-tracking mechanisms
• Announce our 2020 charity recommendations one week prior to Giving Tuesday in order to give our recommended charities enough notice to plan successful Giving Tuesday fundraising campaigns
• Create ongoing Facebook fundraisers for our Recommended Charity Fund so that donors have a convenient and fee-free way to donate year-round
• Coordinate a Giving Tuesday and end-of-year matching fundraising campaign to support our Top and Standout Charities and Recommended Charity Fund
• Publish printed materials, including our 2020 Guide to Giving booklet, to be sent to supporters electronically and by post
• Publish a PDF version of our 2021 Guide to Giving at the time of our 2020 recommendations announcement

ACE Movement Grants (formerly Effective Animal Advocacy Fund)

• Support animal advocacy organizations by distributing grants through this Fund
• Conduct two rounds of grants
• Adapt our decision process to take into account the limitations and opportunities presented by the pandemic
• Distribute a guide of best practices to grant recipients so they can make the most of their grant

Raise $1M for us to regrant through this Fund

• Create ongoing Facebook fundraisers for this Fund so that donors have a convenient and fee-free way to donate year-round
• Secure a matching donor to support a fundraising campaign for this Fund

Improve our grant-making decisions to help us best accomplish our goal of supporting movement growth, resiliency, and effectiveness

• Conduct research into the optimal allocation of resources across cause areas and interventions and work to understand current funding gaps
• Hold a retrospective meeting after each round to better identify the most important research questions that arise during our grant-making decisions, allowing us to investigate those questions during the off-season (see Research Operations section below)

Animal Advocacy Research Fund (AARF)
We plan to use the remaining funds from the AARF’s initial pledge by carrying out our 8th round of research grants. Additionally, we will reflect on our lessons learned from this Fund’s four-year history and ACE’s future goals in order to conceptualize a strategic plan for the Fund going forward. In particular, we hope to bring the AARF’s focus closer to the rest of our work in order to better support the research questions that inform our grant-making decisions and charity recommendations. We will then follow-up with our network to secure additional funding to support our research grants and other AARF expenses in the future.

Operations

Research Operations

Resolve uncertainties about intervention research

• Update our process for carrying out intervention research
• Systematically identify uncertainties relevant to four (yet to be determined) interventions
• Conduct research to resolve existing uncertainties relevant to our work, such as estimating numbers of animals spared per vegan per year

Implement systems to help our researchers stay up-to-date on current research in effective animal advocacy

• Establish a weekly journal club
• Implement a citation manager to keep a structured overview of existing research

Focus more on long-term impact

• Engage with relevant effective altruism thinking on longtermism
• Research and publish a blog post with our initial thoughts on longtermism and its application within animal advocacy

Philanthropy Operations

• Launch an ACE fundraising campaign
• Increase donor retention by 2%
• Seek out additional collaborators to support ACE’s operations and recommended charities

Build philanthropy department capacity

• Hire a Philanthropy Officer to assist with fundraising
• Increase automations and set up reports in our donor database, Salesforce
• Increase knowledge about our donor base
• Analyze the results of our 2019 donor survey
• Prepare and administer our 2020 donor survey

Ensure the ACE-influenced funding to Top and Standout Charities and EAA Fund grantees is distributed in the way we think is best

• Improve the rigor of tracking gifts we’ve influenced
• Understand how ACE-influenced funding is currently distributed among our recommended charities, Recommended Charity Fund, and EAA Fund
• Use our knowledge of ACE-influenced funding to inform our Recommended Charity Fund and EAA Fund grant decisions

Communications Operations

Improve our website

• Increase website speed and reliability by moving to another hosting provider, in addition to cleaning up our website files and database
• Make it easier to donate to ACE and our other giving options by increasing the visibility of our donate pages and calls-to-action, even more so during fundraising campaigns
• Modify our website’s internal search configuration to make search results more relevant; our measurement of success is to achieve a 5% increase in time spent on the site for those visitors who use the search function

Assess existing communications activities and focus on those that are high-impact

• Plan and hold at least one virtual focus group session with ACE supporters to inform our 2021–2023 strategic communications plan
• Revise our 3-year (2021-2023) strategic communications plan
• Narrow paid advertising activities to focus on those that are most cost-effective, such as placing advertisements on podcasts or that promote fundraising campaigns

Achieve additional communications operations objectives

• Build a media list and improve press outreach to increase the quantity and quality of media mentions
• Support independent media outlets to increase their coverage of effective animal advocacy topics
• Secure at least 10 external speaking engagements for ACE staff members and network at additional virtual conferences and events
• Host virtual events to enable us to engage with our stakeholders
• Maximize our Google Ads grant monthly spend by hiring a contractor to assist with account management
• Update our social media strategic plan (a subset of our 3-year communications strategic plan) to include brand guidelines and templates for visual platforms and to allocate less staff resources to social media management
• Continue to publish engaging content like our roundtable and interview series
• Explore direct mail as another channel to communicate with our supporters in lieu of in-person events

People Operations

Improve protocols, policies, and benefits to ensure fairness and attract and retain high-performing candidates in all of our roles

• Survey our U.S.-based employees about their preference between ACE’s continuation of the Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) or enrollment in group health insurance
• Expand our policy around the HRA to include reimbursement for dental and vision insurance in addition to medical insurance and increase the monthly reimbursement amount received through the HRA for eligible employees
• Make improvements to select paid-time-off policies (holidays, vacation, and sick leave) to ensure equitable distribution across all of the countries in which ACE operates
• Develop a sabbatical policy to retain tenured talent
• Improve our performance evaluation process to encourage real-time feedback and formally include feedback from peers and direct reports
• Hold two rounds of performance evaluations for all employees
• Encourage employees to make full use of their professional development budget and time allotments
• Review compensation best practices and standards by sector in order to develop a more competitive compensation program at ACE, including salary benchmarking
• Review our employee recruiting process and solicit external expertise to ensure that we are avoiding bias as much as possible and identifying high-performing candidates

Promote a healthy and safe organizational culture

• Conduct culture survey through an independent party in February and July and share results at staff retreats
• Host virtual staff retreats in March and August
• Hold annual, organization-wide training on discrimination and harassment, including a review of ACE’s new Respect in the Workplace policy, in September
• Develop a Code of Conduct to complement ACE’s Respect in the Workplace Policy and ensure professionalism from all ACE team members
• Increase representation, equity, and inclusion elements in our onboarding materials to ensure staff members are literate on these issues in the context of their work
• Hold a day-long equity training with an external consultant to complement our continuous efforts to address representation, equity, and inclusion at a systems-level

Build capacity and improve project management

• Implement a project management tool (Asana) to streamline communication and manage projects with more organization and clarity
• Develop and implement a new operating model to improve collaboration, efficiency, and the quality of work products
• Continue developing contingency plans to retain institutional knowledge when turnover occurs
• Conduct cross-training for all essential program and operating functions to improve institutional resilience and make employees feel more comfortable taking time off
• Build the management capacity of managers and mentors (who support interns) with the development of management curricula, peer-support calls, and other tools
• Identify general areas for improvement (such as around burnout, transparency of board member roles to staff, etc.) and implement solutions

Improve Internship and Fellowship and Volunteer Programs

• Establish and maintain a network of volunteer translators
• Revamp the internship program to streamline the application process, application review process, onboarding, and overall experience for interns; create a more consistent experience across mentors and types of internships
• Rebrand the research internship to a fellowship
• Pause the Internship and Fellowship Program for the second half of 2020 to give employees more time to adjust to the new operating model and reduce our expenses

3-year strategic plan

• Develop 2021–2023 strategic plan