Upcoming Recommendation Changes
While ACE plans on updating our recommendations annually on December 1, this year we’ve additionally chosen to revise our recommendations on May 14. As we haven’t updated since our original top charity selections, we didn’t want to wait another full year before revising our top charities using our new criteria.
ACE has undergone a large transition period over the past six months, as we’ve added new people to leadership positions, rebranded with a new name, and created an entirely new website. These changes, while pivotal to our success as an organization, have consumed a great deal of our time, and we have thus only been able to spend the last few months working on our recommendation process. Now that we have a firmer foundation, we’ll dedicate more time to the process in the future.
Many people have asked about international charities – will we consider them, and if so, when? ACE plans on considering international charities, as we believe there are likely some very effective groups outside the United States. We are limited by our time and resources; the number of charities we investigate will likely be directly tied to the amount of money we are able to raise. We would like to hire an additional Researcher to allow us to consider more charities as efficiently as possible, and that’s the first move we will make with additional marginal funding.
In the meantime, we’re working as hard as we can on the current round of recommendations. We plan to use shallow, medium, and deep reviews to reach our conclusions on which charities produce the greatest impact per dollar donated. For this round in May, our revised recommendations will be based on medium reviews, as we won’t have had time to explore deep reviews. That being said, our recommendations will be well-thought out, and enable donors to be as effective as possible with their donations.
We plan on being as transparent as possible with all the materials that we’ve collected through the review process. To maintain good relationships with organizations, we’ve asked them for permission to publish reviews and supplemental materials, and we’ll provide as much as we’re allowed to publish.
We will post our new recommendations no later than May 14. We look forward to comments and suggestions on how we conducted the reviews, as we plan on continuing to refine and improve our process as we grow.
