Announcing the New ACE Influenced Giving Reports
As the Executive Director of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), I am proud to present the ACE Influenced Giving Reports. These reports showcase the counterfactual funding moved toward Recommended Charities and Movement Grantees. They are comprehensive analyses that reflect our past efforts and represent a significant stride toward our commitment to making a measurable difference in the realm of animal advocacy.
The ACE Influenced Giving Reports are a testament to our dedication to raising funds for highly impactful and promising animal charities. Our dual mission has always been to find the most effective ways to help animals and promote them. We recognize that our most profound influence on animal welfare stems from the financial resources we mobilize for charities. These reports—researched and written by ACE’s Programs Director, Elisabeth Ormandy—evaluate how much funding our Recommended Charities and Movement Grantees would not have received if not for Animal Charity Evaluators’ work.
Encouraging High-Impact Charity Donations
From January 2019 to March 2024, our team conducted 62 comprehensive charity evaluations, leading to 38 charity recommendations. Our data indicates that we have influenced at least $47 million in donations to our Recommended Charities. This figure is likely an underestimate, as additional donations may be beyond the scope of our current data. We estimate that $20 million of these donations would not have been directed to our Recommended Charities without our intervention. This funding has allowed life-changing organizations to grow and work in ways that are likely to produce the greatest gains for suffering animals.
Driving Funding for Highly-Promising Projects
During the same period (January 2019 to March 2024), we awarded 178 Movement Grants to promising organizations and projects worldwide. Over seven rounds of granting, we disbursed a total of $5.3 million to our grantees. Our best estimate indicates that $2.6 million of this funding would not have been allocated to these projects otherwise. This financial support enabled the launch of new initiatives in countries where a rapidly increasing number of animals are being slaughtered. However, more work is needed to address the needs of the hidden and overlooked animals.
Seeking Evidence to Do More Good
These reports are a crucial step in fulfilling our ambition to empower more people to protect more animals. They represent the initial phase of evaluating the impact of our work. Following our guiding principles, we seek evidence for the best actions to take because the situation for animals is dire and urgent. The cruelty, disease, neglect, and other hardships faced by both domesticated and wild animals are growing. If we want to do the most good we can for these animals, we must prioritize those activities with the greatest potential to help them. Therefore, we should measure our actions and evaluate the change we create.
The results presented in these reports will help us make strategic decisions within each program to evolve our methods, tactics, and fundraising efforts. We share this information to hold ourselves accountable and to provide information to existing and potential donors, funders, and charities that participate in our programs.
Overall, we expect that influencing donations to highly impactful work is where ACE create the most impact for animals. However, in these reports, we did not attempt to assess whether the money we influence is doing the most good for animals. To ensure we improve in this area, we are taking steps to assess and increase our impact. We are engaging in a new project to continually refine our program monitoring and qualitatively measure and evaluate our outputs and early outcomes.
For a detailed look at our findings and methodology, we encourage you to explore the full ACE Influenced Giving Reports.
Showing Gratitude for Creating Change
I would like to extend my gratitude to Elisabeth Ormandy, whose work has been instrumental in the success of this analysis and the strategic direction of our programs. Her expertise and dedication have increased the rigor of our approach and the impact of ACE’s work. I am eager to see how the work of animal advocates around the world will be further amplified by ACE’s programs under her leadership.
But, it is the generosity and thoughtful compassion of those who support the ACE Recommended Charity Fund and our Movement Grants Fund that makes me feel particularly grateful and hopeful for the future. Your gifts make real and positive change possible in the lives of animals. Because of you, interventions that offer the highest potential for animal welfare improvement are activated. That means more animals will be spared a life of horrors.
Working Together to Help More Animals
If you appreciate our achievements in influencing new donations for animals, I encourage you to support ACE in addition to our Grantees and Recommended Charities. Your contributions enable us to continue our rigorous charity evaluations, expand our research, refine our methodologies to enhance our impact, and inspire more people to help animals. Together, we can achieve a future where we give moral consideration to all individuals who have the capacity for subjective experiences.
With sincere appreciation,
Stien van der Ploeg
