Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) evaluates animal advocacy organizations to find those that can do the most good with additional donations. We recognize that successful approaches to helping animals can take many forms. We aim to compare these different approaches by assessing the amount of animal suffering they can prevent or reduce.

Our charity evaluation process involves several sequential stages, with new recommendations being released each year in November. Our goal is to identify the most impactful giving opportunities, not to rate or grade all organizations. We consider a large number of organizations in the early stages of our process, then a smaller number at each stage that follows, until we recommend a few donation opportunities that we are very confident are highly effective.

Figure 1: Number of charities considered at each phase in 2025

We start by gathering a list of organizations that are working to help animals and assessing which ones meet our basic criteria for consideration. We then open the application and invite particularly promising charities from our list to apply to participate in our evaluation process. During the evaluation period, we request information to get a fuller picture of each organization’s activities and how well they perform on our evaluation criteria. Finally, after a rigorous research process, we select the best donation opportunities among those organizations as Recommended Charities. Any organization we recommend retains their status for two years, after which they will need to apply to be re-evaluated. We deliberately keep our list of Recommended Charities very short to encourage channeling limited animal advocacy funds to the few organizations that clearly demonstrate the most significant impact for animals.

Application

In the spring, we have an open application for organizations that want to be evaluated. It begins with initial screening questions, helping us filter to charities that meet our basic criteria, such as those focusing on cause areas that we consider to be highest priority. Applicants who meet the basic criteria then answer more detailed questions about their activities and programs.

We promote the application globally and invite charities that we think have a reasonable chance of being recommended. These include organizations suggested by community members, previous applicants for our Movement Grants, and charities working to help high-priority animal groups in high-priority countries. We base this on our research, which helps us identify which charities may be doing highly cost-effective work. We welcome suggestions for charities to consider for our next round of evaluations.

Selection

To find the most promising charities in the applicant pool, we assess whether their activities seem likely to deliver significant benefits for animals over short- and long-term timelines and whether their responses give us confidence that they carry out these activities effectively. Some indicators of a strong applicant:

• Their explanation of how they expect to create positive change for animals (their theory of change) is well reasoned, evidence based, and realistic.
• They gather data and use logic to guide their decision making.
• They are aware of external factors relevant to their work, such as political or cultural contexts.
• They provide a plausible explanation of how their short-term work will translate into long-term impact.
• There are clear indications that their work is scalable, and they explain how it can be scaled.
• They have realistic, sustainable growth plans.
• There are indicators that the charity may be especially cost effective.

We use back-of-the-envelope calculations to roughly estimate the number of animals we expect each charity to help, which we use alongside qualitative considerations about the charity’s theory of change and likely impact, to compare and iteratively filter down the list of applicants. After several rounds of discussion and voting, we arrive at a list of charities to evaluate. Once they agree, we move on to the comprehensive evaluation stage.

Evaluation

During our evaluation, we examine publicly available information, solicit materials and information from participating charities, and conduct research into the interventions charities use and the countries they work in (including consulting experts familiar with each charity’s specific context). For details on how we reach our recommendation decisions, visit our Evaluation Process page.

The finished product of each evaluation is a comprehensive review (for Recommended Charities) or summary review (for the other evaluated charities) of the charity’s performance on each of ACE’s evaluation criteria. The key components of these reviews are: an assessment of the charity’s impact, an estimate of the additional funding they could use effectively, and check for vulnerabilities or concerns with their organizational health.

Before publishing a review (along with relevant supporting materials), we share it with the charity for feedback and approval. If we are unable to produce a review that accurately reflects our views and is acceptable to the evaluated organization, we indicate on our website that the organization withdrew from evaluation.

Recommended Charities

Our Recommended Charities are likely to be highly effective in terms of the quality and impact of their work, and they perform very well overall on our evaluation criteria (Impact, Room for More Funding, and Organizational Health). Recommended Charities are excellent giving opportunities that will use donors’ resources thoughtfully and efficiently to help as many animals as possible. They work in ways that are likely to produce the greatest gains for animals and can scale their work effectively when presented with unanticipated funding.

We promote these organizations and encourage the public to donate to their programs.

Evaluated Charities

This category consists of organizations that were selected for and participated in our evaluation process, but did not receive a new or renewed recommendation. ACE intentionally limits the number of charities we recommend to encourage channeling relatively scarce animal advocacy funds to the few organizations that clearly demonstrate the most significant impact for animals and have the ability to absorb the additional funding. This means that we are unable to recommend all effective charities we evaluate. We choose to include on our website all the charities we evaluated in a given year, because while some did not receive a recommendation, to have been selected for evaluation out of the large pool of applicants indicates they likely run effective programs and engage in impactful work.