Category: Transparency
Our thinking on the importance of organizational culture
This blog post explores our thinking on the importance of organizational culture. Internal culture plays a pivotal role in ensuring that your organization’s staff, board, and volunteers can efficiently and effectively advance their mission. We beleive only by recognizing problems with internal culture and committing to fixing them can we efficiently and effectively accomplish our mission. … Read more
2020 Donor Survey Analysis
Every year, we conduct a survey of donors to ACE and our recommended charities to help us understand who is supporting our work and who is using our charity recommendations when donating to the animal advocacy movement. Here’s what we found for 2020.
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2021 Prospective Goals
In the spirit of nonprofit transparency, ACE publishes goals each year. In 2021, our goals focus on updating our animal charity evaluation and recommendation processes, funding effective animal advocacy activities, and assessing and monitoring our own charity’s impact. … Read more
ACE’s Compensation Strategy
This summer, we developed our first standardized wage formula at Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE). Here we share the factors that we decided to include, those we left out, and our reasoning, in the hope that our considerations will be useful for other effective altruism (EA) and animal advocacy organizations. … Read more
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, … Read more
2019 Prospective Goals
2018 was a year of transition for ACE. We had a number of changes in key staff and carried out an extensive and thoughtful Executive Director selection process. One of our primary goals for 2019 is to focus on navigating these changes, … Read more
2018 Prospective Goals
We are currently finalizing an updated strategic plan which we will use to guide our work moving forward over the next three years. That plan will be published in the next few months; in the meantime, we share some of our 2018 goals below. … Read more
Sexual Harassment within the Animal Advocacy Movement
ACE takes the promotion of safe, equitable, and respectful environments within the animal advocacy movement to be of utmost importance. We are proud to be a charity that has women in a majority of our leadership roles and that is actively working to improve internal diversity and inclusion—having embedded these topics into our internal and external strategies. … Read more
Response to a Recent Critique of Our Research
In this blog post we respond to a persistent critic of ACE’s research and charity evaluations. Mr. Harrison Nathan has repeatedly expressed concerns about our research and communications—in a recent online post he criticized our focus on effectiveness, our intervention evaluations, and our analysis of corporate outreach. We’ll focus on those three topics here. … Read more
2017 Prospective Goals
Later this year we will update our three-year strategic plan, which currently covers 2015–2017. In this post, we briefly discuss our goals for 2017. Our approach to this task was to list everything that we would like to do at this point in time. … Read more
Looking Back at 2016 Prospective Goals
Below we discuss last year’s prospective goals and whether we were able to meet them. While we succeeded in accomplishing most of these goals, we were unsuccessful in certain areas. Since we were ambitious in our pursuits, we are satisfied with the rate of success we achieved. … Read more
Responses to Common Critiques
As we continue steadily growing our organization, we are constantly trying to learn and improve. We find it useful to engage with critiques from others, and we share some of our responses and thoughts on feedback we’ve received below. We’ve selected critiques that we feel are most important, … Read more
2016 Prospective Goals, Gantt Chart, and Call for Feedback
2015 was a very successful year for ACE—read our Year in Review to learn more details about our work. Because of this, we need to rethink our approach and goals to align with new opportunities. In addition to regularly updating our strategy, … Read more
Prospective Goals: Looking Back at 2015
Below, we discuss last year’s prospective goals and whether we were able to meet them. Looking back at 2015, we are satisfied that we achieved a large percentage of what we hoped to achieve over the past year. You can find more details about our achievements in our Year in Review, … Read more
ACE 2015 Year in Review
Download the Year in Review
2015 proved to be a year of incredible growth at ACE, and everyone involved with the organization—our staff, board, donors, and followers—should be proud of all that we have achieved together. Of particular note is that we influenced more than $826,000 in giving to our recommended charities, … Read more
Our Thinking on Only Publishing Approved Reviews
Many people approach us with concerns about our policy of not publishing information about a charity without their permission. Doesn’t that impede our ability to be a watchdog? Does that mean that we only report on positive accomplishments? Aren’t we being partial? … Read more
Strategic Plans and Prospective Goals
As strategy is particularly important to the success of any organization, we spend considerable time internally discussing our plans for the future. Last month we updated our strategic plan from 2014 and replaced it with our three-year plan for 2015-2017. Our new plan features updated sections on our philosophy and our objectives, … Read more
Prospective Goals: Looking Back at 2014
This blog post will briefly discuss how we’ve accomplished most of our prospective goals for 2014, while noting challenges we have faced along the way. We have also published a year-in-review document that highlights some of our most notable successes in 2014. … Read more
2014 Year in Review
As 2014 comes to an end, we invite you to take a moment to celebrate the successes you’ve helped us make over the past year. … Read more
Our Thinking on Charity Rating Systems
When we table at conferences, we are often asked why we don’t rate charities. Many people have one specific charity that they care about and want our opinion in a letter grade or equivalent rating. For instance, they might prefer a system in which we assigned every group we consider a rating on a scale from 1 to 10, … Read more
Strategic Plan
As tempting as it was to pull out all the stops and start promoting ACE early on, we made a conscious decision to wait. Sure, we had some good information, and we likely would have done some additional good by advertising our work. And, our recommendations were based on reasonable conclusions. But ACE isn’t especially concerned with small, short-term wins. Instead, as shown in our strategic plan, we’re constantly thinking about the big picture. … Read more
ACE Highlight: Donation Policy
Like all nonprofit organizations, we need donations to survive. However, it is important that we separate our donation sources from our policy decisions. To this end, we enforce a donation conflict of interest policy that restricts which donations we may accept from potential donors. … Read more