A New Name, a New Site, and a New Beginning

I’m proud to write our first blog post as Animal Charity Evaluators. Please explore our site to find exciting fresh content on being an effective advocate for animals.

Some highlights:

• We have decided to focus on research and recommendations, and our new site reflects that direction. We encourage you to read about our planned research, our prospective goals as an organization, and our analysis of online veg ads and leafleting. Be sure to download the accompanying spreadsheets, where you can plug in your own numbers and see the effects of your donations.
• Accompanying our research data are our resources. Learn about being effective as a volunteer, as an organization, or in your career.
• We are dedicated to constructing a more rigorous approach to the evaluation process. We’ll be releasing our intervention and charity evaluation templates by the end of January 2014, and will use these for our first revision of our recommendations in April.
• Our strengthened focus on content means we had to reduce our efforts in other areas. We will no longer be offering career counseling sessions. While we consider these potentially high impact, we didn’t feel we had the resources to properly follow-up and improve our methodology. For more information on effective careers, visit 80,000 Hours.
• We have also (at least temporarily) scaled back our community. This was another area that we believe has high potential value, but that took away from our main goal of developing quality content. Former members can maintain a connection to ACE through social media and our monthly newsletters. Once we have developed a stronger foundation, we may revisit having a public community on our site.
• Through all of our efforts, we intend to maintain a dedication to transparency.

Releasing this new site was the first step in our journey toward building a more professional organization. As with any site that features a large array of new content, we expect that readers may find occasional issues; we encourage you to contact us with any suggestions.

We hope you enjoy the new site, and encourage you to travel with us as we work to find and advocate highly effective ways to help animals.

Best,
Jon