In addition to our charity evaluations, Animal Charity Evaluators provides resources and advice for advocates looking to improve their advocacy; for example, we recommend that charities take steps to evaluate their own programs, and we provide some tools on our site to assist with that endeavor. However, we recognize that some younger organizations simply don’t have the capacity to devote many resources to self-evaluation, and that these organizations might benefit more from practical advice pertaining to their various departments. To that end, ACE is proud to kick off our white paper project, a collection of papers that will provide advice on best practices for young animal charities.
Today we release our first white paper, which offers some best practices for hiring and human resources. It was primarily authored by Darina Bockman,1 Francesca Sadi, and Lindsey Tauber—three individuals from the business world who wished to share some of their knowledge with animal charities. We will follow up with white papers on a variety of other topics that sometimes pose a challenge to new animal advocates, including aspects of operations, development, and self-evaluation.
We realize that there are other, similar resources available on the internet. One only needs to google “best practices for X” to see a plethora of useful results. But that’s part of the problem; you’ll often see so many results that it’s difficult to discern which ones you should rely upon. Additionally, these resources are written with as broad of an appeal as possible, which means that sometimes the information found within them isn’t as valuable to the specific needs and unique qualities of the animal advocacy movement. ACE’s project intends to address both of these concerns.
Our hope is that by offering a ‘one-stop shop’ for these materials, we can simplify the process for those who are looking to develop or improve their animal charity. In the event that a reader desires more information on one specific area, we provide a list of links to quality resources. Additionally, we are reaching out to charities that have completed an exploratory evaluation with ACE, asking them to answer some questions about their greatest needs with regard to each topic that we’ll be writing about. In this way, we hope to provide the most relevant information.
We aim to produce at least two white paper projects each year, enlisting the assistance of professionals from relevant fields whenever possible. They will be housed online in a single collection so that we can update them as needed while saving on printing costs.
If you have suggestions on an area that we should cover, please let us know! We look forward to bringing these resources to animal advocates everywhere, so that we can all work as effectively as possible in our respective approaches to help animals.
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