Strategic Plan
“The more you chase the Holy Grail of short-term performance, the less you get in long-term results.” Walter Cabot
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.
A popular TED Talk by Dan Pallotta highlights the need for nonprofits to think strategically and invest time to thrive. He talks about how people might invest money in a business like Amazon and be ok without seeing a return for six years because they realize that the business is building up infrastructure to achieve their goals. Conversely, nonprofits are expected to produce more immediate results with their funding, and not spend money on things outside their immediate mission. This is tied to the idea of “overhead being the enemy of the cause,” when in reality some careful investments could multiply the amount of money available for the cause in question. If charities don’t produce tangible results in short order, donors become disillusioned with their work, and many will choose not to support them in the future.
I can relate to these issues, having spent the last decade in the nonprofit sector. Donors want to know what their donation achieves; that’s why I would always come up with little milestones ($20 feeds a bunny for a month, or $100 helps vaccinate 15 cats) to encourage contributions. And those methods worked! It can certainly be frustrating: On the one hand, you need the freedom to plan long-term to achieve your intended results; on the other hand, you need to compromise that planning to produce immediate wins.
Our strategy shows that ACE is committed to thinking about the big picture. We are carefully planning our efforts to ensure we achieve our goals in the long-term. We’ve rebranded as ACE, we’ve published a site with loads of fresh content, and we’ll have revised recommendations based on our new criteria in early May. At that point, we’ll be working with our recommended organizations to track money moved, and focus more heavily on promoting the fruits of our labor. This plan will enable us to not only move large amounts of money to our recommended organizations, but also put us in a strong position to accomplish our other goals of spreading a meme of concern for animals and creating an environment that encourages evaluation.
What do you think of ACE’s plan? Are we missing anything? Would you like to see us reprioritize? How can we improve? We highly value feedback from our community, and encourage suggestions in the comments below.
Note: The above links to our strategic plan direct to an updated version (uploaded April 1, 2014).
Those are some great points, Frazer. We have “Spread a meme of greater concern for animals” as a goal, and part of that means looking for potential influencers in our investigations. I agree that there is large potential in the areas you mention, and we’re trying to take them into consideration as we evaluate organizations.
We also have “Create an environment where organizations strive to find and use the most effective ways to help animals” as a goal. That includes working to bridge gaps between organizations through projects like our survey guidelines, which can be used by people regardless of which charity they belong to. We hope that project will bring some organizations together in comparing their efforts and learning from one another.
Our first goal of being the #1 resource for donors, charities, and advocates shows that we plan on working to educate those using less effective methods on how they can improve their efforts. This is a more long-term goal, as we first need to build credibility within our first target audience to proceed with convincing more generic animal advocates.
Those things being said, we’ve received some great feedback about what people would like to see in the strategic plan, and we plan on revising it in the near future to elaborate on some areas like the ones you mentioned.
I’d like to see something about how to leverage popularity – ie, aligning with celebrities and leaders, rebranding to appeal to different audiences, getting mentioned in big films and music.
I’d also like to see a focus on messaging to get the big animal charities aligned, and messaging to entice causes that are using less effective methods
Thanks Ben and Gina for the comments! My answers (and some from our research manager Allison Smith) are below.
1. Target number of submitted charities ACE will review this year.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a number, and in fact it’s very difficult to offer a guess. We reviewed 29 US farm animal organizations for our revised recommendations in May, but we are unsure as to how many we will be able to review for the December recommendations. We are learning about the review process as we go through it, and though we certainly plan on reviewing more charities before the December recommendations, we can’t offer an exact number. Funding will dictate whether or not we’ll investigate international charities this year; right now we only have one full-time researcher, and that limits our abilities. If we hired another researcher, we could review more charities.
2. Target number of shallow, medium, and deep investigations (e.g. 20 shallow, 10 medium, 5 deep).
We have a similar difficulty in producing this target number for the same reasons I provided in the first answer. This is our first foray into reviewing charities with our new criteria, and we are still learning the time commitments involved with the process. We use medium/deep investigations to help us identify the strongest candidates for recommendation, and once we start considering international charities, it will be extremely difficult to estimate a firm number.
3. How ACE will determine which charities to investigate to which level (shallow, medium, deep).
Allison: We use heuristics and our criteria to determine which organizations will get medium and deep reviews. Keeping in mind our criteria for organizational recommendations, we choose organizations to review at each level based on which we think could be candidates for our top recommendation. At the shallow review level, we chose those that look like solid possibilities, as well as many groups that don’t exactly match our idea of who we would be most likely to recommend, because by learning about their work, we could find they are surprisingly effective.
Moving on to medium or deep reviews, we target organizations that are doing well on our criteria based on what we already know, and some where there is a knowledge gap that we could imagine being filled in a way that makes the organization look especially effective (We’re more likely to accept a knowledge gap about a small organization that we think could be filled relatively quickly by talking to people who work there. At least right now, our ability to make meaningful recommendations is dependent on our ability to complete a reasonable number of reviews in a fairly short time. As our base of knowledge increases, we should be able to devote more time to filling in gaps in our understanding of how unusual but promising organizations work.).
4. I’m also curious about the budget #.
I’ve explained the budget more in my previous blog comment; I understand that this post was not published until after I responded due to being caught in a spam filter, so please let me know if you’d like more details.
5. Suggestion on scheduling: Complete shallow, medium, and deep investigation for at least 1 org that you think is promising enough to warrant a deep investigation, before moving on to finish the rest of the shallow & medium investigations. This will let you learn more about the investigation process & things you may want to change earlier on. For example, after completing one deep investigation, you might find out a question you want to ask all the other ones in the shallow investigations. I think Allison mentioned that she wished ACE had done something like this for the leafleting survey. (Programmers would call this “Agile” instead of “Waterfall”.)
Allison: One problem with conducting a single review at all levels before beginning another is that it wouldn’t give us anything to compare that review to. While Jon has a good broad understanding of the AR landscape, I’m not familiar with the operational details of any organization, and I think our intuitive understanding of how effective groups are and the rhetoric around that don’t provide a solid baseline to compare a systematic review to. While such a review could be compared to some of the work done by Givewell or Giving What We Can, there are huge philosophical issues in comparing human charities and animal charities.
I think what we’re doing now is a decent compromise between “agile” and “waterfall”. Our May recommendations won’t take into account every group we might have wished to investigate, which means we can be done with them in May, not December (or the December after that). I think we’ll learn things from the process that we wish we could have applied at the beginning of it. Maybe some of those things we would have learned from reviewing a single organization, if it was the right one, but my guess is many will come from our attempts to compare organizations to each other. Our later investigations will benefit from both kinds of information.
We’re not planning to do any deep investigations before May (our revised recommendations at that point will be based on our medium reviews). I don’t know how many groups we’ll want to conduct them on at that point, but doing them serially (or partially serially, as I anticipate a lot of time could be spent waiting for responses from people) is definitely something to consider.
5.1. I see that you’re doing a pilot study for the Pay-per-view video outreach, which is basically my point #5, so thanks!
Yes, we decided that a pilot study would help tremendously!
6. Could you update the Gantt chart to show what has been completed? Will you be updating that regularly?
We hadn’t planned on updating the Gantt chart; it is meant more to guide our work, and serve as a visual cue for when things need to be finished.
7. We think your website is fine, and think there is a greater need for content than additional images.
Good to know! We recently produced ten new pages under foundational research, and we will be regularly discussing them in ACE: Highlights blogs every first and third Thursday of the month.
7.1. Do you believe that you will have robust enough recommendations at the end of this year that it will become more effective to promote your existing recommendations than to do further research?
That’s a good question! Ideally, I would say yes, but we’ll have to wait and see what funding allows us to do. If we don’t get enough funding to hire another researcher, then our research will continue to be limited, and we won’t be able to review as many organizations as we would like. Regardless, we will certainly spend more time promoting our existing recommendations at that point in time, as our confidence will grow as we learn from the process. I don’t see us making a clean split (i.e. focusing entirely on promoting recommendations over any research) at any point, but the balance will shift. It’s possible that our research role will be reduced if other organizations and people start filling the void, but in that situation we’d still need to continue our research work to know if we should modify our recommendations.
8. Is your main goal to evaluate charities or to find effective techniques of activism and share that information with organizations? We ask because your stated goals are mostly about evaluating charities, but a lot of your activities involve more foundational/impact research.
Our stated goals are as follows: 1) Be the global #1 resource in providing the best available advice to donors, charities, and animal advocates on how to be effective. 2) Move at least ten times our annual budget to our recommended charities. 3) Create an environment where organizations strive to find and use the most effective ways to help animals. 4) Spread a meme of greater concern for animals. While we plan on making charity recommendations a key focus of our work, we also have other important areas of focus that are more general, and for which our work about foundational/impact research is applicable. That being said, work in these various areas can be complementary; as we learn more about what is effective through research, that enables us to better review and recommend organizations.
I think this looks very good.
That being said, there are a few things I would like to see addressed in the plan:
1. Target number of submitted charities ACE will review this year.
2. Target number of shallow, medium, and deep investigations (e.g. 20 shallow, 10 medium, 5 deep).
3. How ACE will determine which charities to investigate to which level (shallow, medium, deep).
4. I’m also curious about the budget #.
5. Suggestion on scheduling: Complete shallow, medium, and deep investigation for at least 1 org that you think is promising enough to warrant a deep investigation, before moving on to finish the rest of the shallow & medium investigations. This will let you learn more about the investigation process & things you may want to change earlier on. For example, after completing one deep investigation, you might find out a question you want to ask all the other ones in the shallow investigations. I think Allison mentioned that she wished ACE had done something like this for the leafleting survey. (Programmers would call this “Agile” instead of “Waterfall”.)
5.1. I see that you’re doing a pilot study for the Pay-per-view video outreach, which is basically my point #5, so thanks!
6. Could you update the Gantt chart to show what has been completed? Will you be updating that regularly?
7. We think your website is fine, and think there is a greater need for content than additional images.
7.1. Do you believe that you will have robust enough recommendations at the end of this year that it will become more effective to promote your existing recommendations than to do further research?
8. Is your main goal to evaluate charities or to find effective techniques of activism and share that information with organizations? We ask because your stated goals are mostly about evaluating charities, but a lot of your activities involve more foundational/impact research.
Posting this question here in case others have the same question… Where did the $87,000 number come from for the budget? Does that mean yearly expenses? If so, what does ACE spend it’s money on? How many people are employed, and what are the other major costs besides salaries?
We’ve just posted more details about our budget under the transparency section of our site. Hopefully this will answer your question more specifically.
Hi Gina,
Yes, the $87K is our budget for 2014. Most of our budget ($78K) is allocated to staff (that covers our two full-time and two part-time employees) and employee-related taxes. However, a large percentage of it could also be construed as being used for programs like research, as one of our full-time staff focuses entirely on research and I spend roughly a third of my time on it. The remaining portion of the budget is used on necessary expenditures like insurance for board/staff, fees required for nonprofit operation/solicitation, and research-related expenses (printing materials, incentive raffle awards etc).
We may decide to publish our detailed budget in the future. In the meantime, please feel free to ask additional questions.