As we begin our 2017 evaluation process, we’re releasing a few updates to our criteria and evaluation methods. This year we have reworded and reordered our criteria, continued tweaking how we evaluate organizational factors that influence effectiveness through our last two criteria, added conversations with non-leadership employees to our plan for comprehensive evaluations, started offering participation grants, and updated the structure of the criterion which addresses the qualitative aspects of a charity’s programmatic impact.
How Should We Evaluate Organizational Factors That Affect Charity Performance?
ACE evaluates charities using multiple criteria, in an effort to identify the most cost-effective animal advocacy charities and programs for donors to support. Some of our criteria—such as cost-effectiveness calculations and room for additional funding—address factors that have a clear, direct influence on how effective we would expect additional donations to be. … Read more
Interventions We’d Like to See
Since we published our post on charities ACE staff would like to see, we’ve been considering a related question: are there additional or new interventions we’d like to see the animal advocacy movement attempt? To distinguish this post from the previous one, … Read more
Lessons From ACE’s 2016 Donor Survey
ACE periodically surveys donors to both our organization and our Top Charities who report that their donations were influenced by our recommendation. This post discusses some key results from our 2016 donor survey, sent in October and November 2016 to donors who had made donations since our 2015 ACE and Top Charity donor surveys were conducted. … Read more
How should major funding sources influence our charity recommendation decisions?
ACE’s charity recommendations occur in the context of thousands of other giving decisions. Some of these are fairly predictable. Individual donors acting independently will provide some funding to just about every animal charity out there, and some charities have their own development or fundraising plans which can help predict growth. … Read more