Evaluation Criteria for Animal Advocacy Charities

Here are the three criteria we used to evaluate charities in 2025. If you’re interested in our methods and criteria from previous years, you can find them in our Process Archive. Our evaluations follow a rigorous process designed to identify charities that are likely to deliver significant benefits for animals in both the short and long term.

Criterion 1: Impact

The Impact criterion comprises two complementary assessments: our theory of change analysis and our cost-effectiveness analysis. Together, these two assessments indicate whether a charity is likely to significantly and cost-effectively reduce the suffering of many animals.

Theory of change analysis

Our theory of change analysis assesses the strength of the charity’s evidence and logical reasoning for how their programs create change for animals. The analysis is customized to each charity depending on the types of work they do, with the following objectives:

1. Understanding how the charity’s activities would, in theory, lead to their desired impact
2. Assessing the strength of evidence, logic, and reasoning underpinning the charity’s most important paths to impact
3. Understanding how the charity uses data and evidence in their programmatic decision making
4. Understanding how the charity identifies and mitigates risks to their impact
5. Understanding how the charity’s different programs interact with each other to bring about change
6. Understanding whether and how the charity collaborates with and contributes to the broader animal advocacy movement

Cost-effectiveness analysis

Our cost-effectiveness analysis assesses the impact per dollar of select programs to allow for quantitative comparison across charities wherever possible. We select the programs that contribute the most to the charity’s impact, those that the charity prioritizes based on their spending and future plans, and those for which we are best able to calculate and/or forecast impact per dollar. Our cost-effectiveness models are tailored to each program and are designed to estimate various metrics based on available information. These metrics may include:

1. The amount of suffering averted per dollar
2. The number of animals helped per dollar
3. The number of (human) individuals or companies engaged per dollar

Criterion 2: Room for More Funding

A recommendation from ACE generally leads to an increase in a charity’s funding, sometimes quite substantial. With this criterion, we assess how much money a charity can effectively use in the next two years (the length of our recommendation period) based on their historical financials and plans for growth. This includes assessing how their work in the next two years would differ under various funding scenarios and gauging whether there will be diminishing returns to their work over time. We also examine their leadership’s strategic decision making to assess their prioritization of resource investment. The results of the criterion ensure that ACE only recommends organizations that will put future funding to effective use and help guide our Recommended Charity Fund distributions to create the most impact for animals.

Criterion 3: Organizational Health

With this criterion, we assess whether any aspects of an organization’s governance or work environment pose a risk to their effectiveness or stability, thereby reducing their potential to help animals. Individuals engaging in misconduct and toxic practices may also negatively affect the reputation of the broader animal advocacy movement, which is highly relevant for a growing social movement, as well as advocates’ wellbeing and willingness to remain in the movement.

Impact: What positive changes is the charity creating for animals?

Our Method

To assess the charity’s overall positive impact on animals, we look at two key factors: (i) the strength of their evidence and logical reasoning for how their programs create change for animals (i.e., their theory of change), and (ii) the cost effectiveness of select programs. Charities that use sound evidence and logic to develop their programs have a higher likelihood of achieving the greatest impact for animals. Cost-effective programs are one indicator that charities use their available resources to make the biggest possible difference for animals.

The purpose of this criterion is to determine if your donation would likely affect many animals and help them significantly. We consider the benefits of the charity’s interventions for animals both in the short term and the long term.

Theory of change analysis

We begin by developing a broad overview of the charity’s work. We do this by constructing a theory of change table with the following components:

• Activities: the work that the charity does
• Early outcomes: the results of their outputs, such as changes in knowledge, skills, behavior, or attitudes
• Final outcomes: the consequences that the early outcomes need to result in to achieve the charity’s end goal
• Impact: the ultimate change for animals that the charity is trying to achieve

The paths in the table that we believe have the most significant impact, and/or those that the charity prioritizes based on their level of investment and future plans, are considered “key paths.” We thoroughly examine the following aspects of each key path.

Cost-effectiveness analysis

We select a subset of the charity’s programs to analyze quantitatively, prioritizing those that we think are responsible for the greatest proportion of their overall impact, those that the charity prioritizes based on their expansion plans and the amount of expenditures they currently invest, and those that allow the most meaningful estimations of impact per dollar.

We calculate the cost effectiveness of a program by dividing the estimated benefit for animals by the cost of doing that work.

Costs

To calculate the cost of a program, we ask charities for the total programmatic expenditures spent on delivering that work in the relevant period (by default, the most recent calendar or fiscal year, unless there’s a strong reason to believe that it’s not representative), including any expenditures that facilitate the impact of that work. We also add a proportional amount of the charity’s overhead costs, such as money spent on administration, fundraising, and governance, to estimate the full cost of that program.

Benefits

To quantify the benefit of a program, we aim to estimate the amount of animal suffering averted in the relevant period. To do this, we adapted Ambitious Impact’s internal system for making quantitative decisions on animal welfare ideas, called Suffering-Adjusted Days (or SADs). The metric roughly represents the number of days of intense pain (both physical and psychological) felt by each animal, with adjustments for the intensity of suffering endured, the likelihood of sentience of their species, and the welfare range of their species (i.e., their relative capacity to experience pain and pleasure. Please note that our SADs values are not directly comparable with those from previous years’ evaluations or ones made by organizations.

To calculate SADs averted by a program, we research and develop input values such as the number of animals impacted by a program, the counterfactual impact of the charity’s work, and how much credit can reasonably be attributed to the charity for the outcomes. All values are contained in the charity’s cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet that forms part of their published review, but we elaborate on the general methods below:

• These values involve various degrees of speculation, and we label each of them with our level of uncertainty.
• For many values, we produce a range with an optimistic estimate, a conservative estimate, and a best guess. While the true value may potentially fall outside of these bounds, based on our evidence and reasoning, we believe it is unlikely that this is the case.
• In situations where the outcomes of the charity’s work are highly uncertain, we forecast the benefits, such as by modeling a case study for a successful research paper, campaign, etc.
• We apply discounts, such as an annual discount for future benefits to account for the higher uncertainty we have in outcomes further in the future, and a discount where other organizations contributed to achieving an outcome.
• We attempt to verify the values that the charity creates, especially when they have a large effect on the result. This includes consulting third-party experts and contacts that the charity provides. In cases where our sources provide conflicting information, we adjust the value based on how convincing we find their respective arguments.

In cases where the uncertainty is particularly high and/or we believe that the true value of an estimate could lie within a range that spans orders of magnitude (resulting in wildly different overall cost-effectiveness estimates), we choose not to estimate this value and instead settle on an intermediate benefit rather than attempting to estimate SADs averted. Examples of intermediate benefits include the number of animals spared, the number of people reached, or the number of research papers published.

Limitations of Our Method

Theory of change analysis

• ACE team members use empirical evidence when available; however, the quantity and quality of evidence are inconsistent for different interventions and across contexts in which charities operate. We often only have small-scale studies or case studies available, with meta-analyses being extremely rare, and sometimes we have to extrapolate from research done in different countries or contexts.
• We are limited by our team’s knowledge and the amount of time we have to consult experts to fill our knowledge gaps.
• We lack the capacity to assess all of a charity’s work in detail; we focus our analysis on a few key paths, which can leave out other potentially impactful activities from our overall analysis. This is especially relevant for larger charities and charities that use many different interventions.
• We make subjective judgments when considering contradictory and/or conflicting information.
• There is one evaluation team member primarily responsible for a charity’s assessment, to streamline communication with the charities. This means that although we standardize our process and check, give feedback on, and stress test each other’s work, there is some subjectivity in the direction of our research and analysis, and there might be some inconsistencies between the assessments of different charities.

Cost-effectiveness analysis

• Our analysis can only cover a proportion of a charity’s work, so our estimates are limited to specific programs or activities. While we attempted rapid back-of-the-envelope calculations to get a sense of the impact of charities’ other programs, we can only draw tentative conclusions about the cost effectiveness of the charity as a whole.
• Each result relies on assumptions and often speculative inputs because of the limited research evidence available and the data that charities can collect. Estimating counterfactual impacts, responsibility for outcomes, and the severity of animal suffering is inherently imprecise. These uncertainties limit our ability to draw meaningful conclusions.
• Many types of programs are not a natural fit for cost-effectiveness analysis because they involve complex, long-term changes that are difficult to quantify (e.g., shifts in public attitudes, policy changes, or systemic transformations that don’t have immediate or directly measurable outcomes). We often have to restrict our analysis to more easily measurable outcomes and exclude less tangible effects.
• Because of limited team capacity, we cannot independently verify every value that charities report to us, and we make subjective judgments about how to proceed with unverified claims.
• The Suffering-Adjusted Days system is new and relies on highly uncertain inputs for sentience, welfare range, and moral weights. Additionally, Ambitious Impact does not have SADs estimates for all welfare situations, and we have to make additional assumptions to create them, which further increases uncertainty.
• In cases where we cannot estimate SADs averted per dollar, intermediate benefits per dollar are much less useful for quantitative comparison, and there is no obvious bar or benchmark that could be used to interpret intermediate estimates.

Room for More Funding: How much additional money can the charity effectively use in the next two years?

A recommendation from ACE generally leads to an increase in a charity’s funding, sometimes quite substantial. With this criterion, we investigate whether a charity would be able to absorb the funding that a new or renewed recommendation may bring, and the extent to which we believe that their future uses of funding will be as effective as their past work.

Our Method

We begin our assessment by inspecting the charity’s current financial situation and asking how their operations and programs would change in the future under different funding scenarios. We then assess the effectiveness and feasibility of the activities for which they would use additional funds. We use this to calculate their room for more funding (RFMF) and funding capacity for the two years that they would retain their recommendation status. We define funding capacity as our best estimate of the total amount of funding we expect the charity to be able to effectively use in a given year. This represents the point at which we’d want to check in with the charity to make sure that they can still absorb additional funding without diminishing returns, and beyond that, we would prefer the funding to go to another charity instead. RFMF is the difference between the charity’s funding capacity and their 2025 level of revenue.

Funding scenarios

We request the charity’s financial and staffing records from 2022 through 2025 and also ask for their plans if their revenue were to stay roughly the same, increase, or decrease, relative to their current revenue. This helps us understand how they internally prioritize their programs and identify what ACE’s funding would go toward in each scenario. This includes plans to expand or shrink their current programs, start new programs, invest in operations, or hire new staff.

In our charity reviews, we only publish charities’ plans in positive revenue scenarios to avoid sharing anything sensitive about staffing. We do not publish the financials or future plans for charities that do not receive our recommendation.

Priorities for additional funds

For each growth plan, we assess its potential for effectiveness from very low to very high. Plans that fall below moderate/high effectiveness are excluded when calculating the charity’s RFMF and funding capacity, representing our reservations about the prospect of funding those plans. The following is a general description of plans that fall into the different scores:

• Very high effectiveness
  • Tractable expansion of a highly impactful program (as assessed in the theory of change and cost-effectiveness analyses).
  • We have little to no reason to believe that the plan will encounter diminishing returns or not play out as expected.

• High effectiveness
  • Expansion of an existing program that we have some uncertainty about, but generally support.
  • A new program that is supported by strong reasoning.
  • An operational investment where we trust the charity’s judgment that it’s needed soon.

• Moderate/high effectiveness
  • Expansion of a program with little or no track record and a low amount of supporting evidence, with only minor uncertainties about the reasoning.
  • The cost of the plan seems high for its likely outcomes.
  • In a grant decision, we would fund it, but perhaps not fully.
  • An operational investment that is nice-to-have.

• Moderate effectiveness
  • Low evidence expansion, with some tangible concerns or uncertainties.
  • Some evidence suggests that the plan may be relatively ineffective.
  • In a grant decision, we would lean toward not funding it.

• Moderate/low effectiveness
  • We disagree with the reasoning for the plan and believe it could be less impactful than other funding opportunities.
  • An operational investment that would likely not impact the charity’s effectiveness if it did not happen in the next two years.
  • In a grant decision, we would likely not fund the work.

• Low effectiveness
  • We suspect that the plans would not be effective, or could even backfire.
  • We disagree with the reasoning for the plan and would not fund the work.

• Very low effectiveness
  • We have higher confidence that the plans would not be effective, or could even backfire.
  • We would definitely not fund this work.

Some other factors we consider as we assess growth plans:

• Programs the charity intends to expand, and whether they are highly promising or cost effective
• Reasons to expect diminishing returns to their work in the next two years
• Feasibility of executing plans in the way that the charity describes (e.g., there may be non-financial bottlenecks to growth)
• Whether success is highly contingent on making a difficult hire (informed by the results of Animal Advocacy Careers’ talent survey)
• The geographical and/or political context of where their work takes place

If growth plans include a new program with no track record, we consider the following factors:

• Quality of reasoning about the need for the proposed plan
• How well positioned the charity is to do the work, and their track record of similar work
• Similar considerations as in the theory of change analysis: reasoning, evidence base, risks, and limitations
• Uncertainty about the cost effectiveness of the work based on the likely costs and benefits

Our focus is to determine whether additional resources will be used for programs with high impact potential or other beneficial organizational changes. The latter may include investments into infrastructure and staff retention, both of which we think are important for sustainable growth.

These questions are relevant not just for newly considered charities but also for currently recommended charities. This is because we have observed that charities tend to receive more ACE-influenced funding over time as they’re recommended repeatedly.

Room for More Funding

We calculate RFMF as the sum of the costs of their future plans that are moderate/high effectiveness or above, and funding capacity as the sum of their RFMF and their 2025 revenue.

While we don’t include room for additional reserves in the RFMF calculation because it is a one-time investment in financial stability rather than an ongoing annual cost, we note the amount in the charity’s Financials and Future Plans spreadsheet and believe that it can be an effective use of funding. It is common practice for charities to hold more funds than needed for their current expenses to be able to withstand changes in the funding cycle or external shocks that may affect their incoming revenue. Such additional funds can also serve as investments in future projects. Thus, it can be effective to provide a charity with additional funding to secure the organization’s stability and/or provide funding for larger projects in the future. If the charity does not have a reserves target, we suggest that they hold reserves equal to at least one year of expenditures.

Finally, we double-check that the charity can use at least the amount of funding we expect to influence toward them. This prevents us from recommending charities that would not use the marginal funding we expect to influence toward them effectively, despite their past work being effective. This amount differs per charity, but we assume it to be at least $200 thousand per year. If the charity is selected as a Recommended Charity, the outputs from this RFMF criterion will also inform their portion of the Recommended Charity Fund distribution so that we make sure that funds go to where they can be most impactful.

Strategic Prioritization

Based on how charities decide which programs to start, scale up, maintain, or scale down, and how they order their expansion plans, we assess whether we have any concerns about their leadership’s strategic decision making. We categorize these as “major concerns,” “minor concerns,” or “no concerns.” Strong prioritization increases our confidence that the charity will continue making decisions sensitive to marginal cost effectiveness if and when circumstances change.

Limitations of Our Method

Because we cannot predict exactly how much charities will fundraise in the future and how their growth plans will unfold, our estimates are speculative. For instance, a charity could lose a major funder or discover a way to use additional funding that they did not anticipate, in which case our RFMF estimate would be too low. Conversely, they could fail to hire an employee with the necessary skills or experience to enable an expansion, in which case our estimate would be too high.

Our RFMF and funding capacity estimates are intended to identify the point in time at which we would want to check in with a charity to ensure that they have used their funds effectively and can still absorb additional funding. Therefore, we check in with our Recommended Charities twice a year, in advance of our Recommended Charity Fund distributions, to update our sense of their RFMF.

Finally, we dedicate more time to the theory of change analyses and cost-effectiveness analyses, because they are more directly relevant to our decision about whether or not to recommend a charity. In the future, we would like to spend more time investigating plans with a minimal track record, such as by consulting experts and developing a system to incorporate expert feedback more systematically.

Organizational Health: Are there any management issues substantial enough to affect the charity’s effectiveness and stability?

With this criterion, we assess whether any aspects of an organization’s governance or work environment pose a risk to their effectiveness or stability, thereby reducing their potential to help animals. Individuals engaging in misconduct and toxic practices could also negatively affect the reputation of the broader animal advocacy movement, which is highly relevant for a growing social movement, as well as advocates’ wellbeing and their willingness to remain in the movement.¹

Our Method

We review aspects of organizational health by examining information provided by the charity and by capturing staff and volunteer perspectives via our engagement survey. We then clarify any questions and potential issues through conversations with the charity’s leadership. Based on this information, we assess whether we have concerns regarding the charity’s organizational health that could limit their future effectiveness or even harm the broader animal advocacy movement.

We are very grateful to Scarlet Spark, a consultancy for animal advocacy groups, and Animal Defense Partnership (ADP) for helping us develop this criterion.

People, policies, and processes

We provide charities with a checklist of policies that are considered strong indicators of organizational health and ask them to indicate which of these they have implemented. We published the full list of policies, including policy templates and other resources provided by Scarlet Spark and ADP. We group the policies into the following categories:

• Compensation
• Workplace safety
• Clarity, transparency, and bias mitigation
• Organizational stability and progress
• Assessments

We take into account that many charities work in contexts (e.g., geographical regions) where certain policies may not be common practice. As we gather aggregated information about the charities we evaluate, we aim to build up a clearer picture over time of which policies are the strongest indicators of organizational health in different contexts.

We also ask about the internal accessibility of policies, i.e., which policies are shared with employees at the organization and in what way. This is because written policies have little use without employees knowing that they exist, understanding them, and believing that the organization enforces them. For example, it is important for employees to understand their entitlement to sick days and how to submit internal reports of harassment and discrimination.

Transparency

We require organizations selected for evaluation to be transparent with ACE throughout the evaluation process. This is essential for us to be confident that we have the necessary information to carry out a full, well-informed evaluation.

We also consider organizations’ public-facing transparency by asking charities to report what information they have available on their website, such as key staff members and financial information. However, we recognize that some organizations may be able to have a greater impact by keeping certain information private. For example, organizations and individuals working in some regions or on particular interventions could be harmed by publicizing certain information about their work. We seek to understand where this is the case based on conversations with the charity’s leadership.

Leadership and governance

We ask about the Board of Directors’ membership and functions so we can understand to what extent these align with the compliance practices set out in BoardSource’s Recommended Governance Practices. For example, we ask how often the board meets, how its performance is evaluated, and what term limits are in place for board members. BoardSource also recommends that, if the law permits, the Executive Director (ED) or equivalent should be an “ex officio, non-voting member of the board.” In this way, the ED can provide input in board meeting deliberation and decision making while avoiding (perceived) conflicts of interest, causing confusion about accountability, or blurring the line between oversight and execution. In cases where the ED is a voting member, we ask charities whether they have a conflict of interest policy that details a requirement for the ED to recuse themselves from decision making related to their role in the organization.

We ask if there have been any recent transitions in leadership and what measures were taken to ensure this transition happened smoothly. Our engagement survey also asks staff to identify the extent to which they are confident in the organization’s leadership, both as an indicator of leadership competence and staff engagement.

International work

We have specific considerations for charities that work internationally. In some international organizations, there can be a particular risk of power imbalances between offices based in different countries, and especially between offices based in the Global North and the Global South. These power imbalances—e.g., resulting from differences in the level of autonomy and decision-making power granted to different regional offices, or from inequalities in the level of funding received by Global North and Global South offices—can occur within the same organization or between organizations working together. Because regional context affects the efficacy of different interventions, we think it is important that charities’ subsidiaries can influence decision making at the international level. We ask leadership to elaborate on their approach to international expansion and report the measures they take to address potential power imbalances.

Staff engagement and satisfaction

We solicit staff perspectives via our engagement survey. We also solicit perspectives of volunteers who work for the organization for at least five hours per week on average.

We require at least 65% of the charity’s staff to respond to the survey to ensure that we have a representative sample of responses. There is no participation threshold for volunteers, recognizing that most organizations do not have a fixed number of volunteers as their participation tends to fluctuate.

If a charity scores particularly low on any aspect of staff engagement, we follow up on these factors with the charity’s leadership to hear their perspective and understand any relevant context. We only share aggregated organizational-level data with leadership and do not share individual survey responses or other confidential information. ACE may recommend that the charity address any outstanding concerns, for example, by:

• conducting their own comprehensive staff survey to assess employee engagement, satisfaction, and areas for improvement;
• seeking external expertise on how to improve staff morale; or
• if low staff morale is being caused by a specific person, carrying out a performance review with that person and agreeing on the specific ways in which their behavior needs to change, including a timeline by which changes must happen.

Our engagement survey contains questions based on 13 statements that are informed by recognized frameworks such as the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, Google’s Project Oxygen, and research by Culture Amp. Respondents are requested to rate each statement on a scale from one (No, I strongly disagree) to five (Yes, I strongly agree).

We ask volunteers a shorter set of questions specifically designed to assess volunteer engagement and satisfaction.

Harassment and discrimination

The engagement survey contains a link to an anonymous Whistleblower Form, developed with support from legal experts at Animal Defense Partnership, for any staff or volunteers who wish to report issues of harassment and discrimination. In most cases, when we decide to take action based on such reports, this consists of sharing relevant non-confidential information with the leadership of the organization in question and hearing their perspective. We do this to improve our understanding of what happened, whether the leadership members were aware, and what measures they took or plan to take, if relevant. We then factor this information into our overall organizational health assessment. We make the Whistleblower Form publicly accessible, in case parties external to the organization have information to report.

Financial health

To identify any potential risks associated with charities’ financial health, we ask leadership about their ratio of liabilities to assets, current and targeted level of reserves, and the proportion of their funding that is recurring. We account for the charity’s specific context when assessing the responses to these questions, given that best practice can vary depending on factors such as the charity’s age, size, and geographic location. A financially healthy charity is more likely to use donations responsibly and transparently.

Limitations of Our Method

While we strive to continually improve our assessment of charities’ organizational health, we recognize that several limitations remain.

Firstly, we are unable to fully investigate harassment and discrimination claims due to a combination of time constraints, lack of expertise, and the often anonymous nature of the reports that we receive. In our Whistleblower Form, we inform claimants of the implications of providing such information, the comprehensiveness of any such information that we receive, and clarity on the level of detail we are able to share with the leadership of the charity in question.

Secondly, our engagement survey only provides a limited window into a charity’s workplace culture and may not fully represent the broad range of experiences within the organization. In particular, we recognize that surveying staff and volunteers can lead to inaccuracies due to selection bias and also may not reflect employees’ true opinions, as respondents are aware that their answers could influence ACE’s evaluation of their employer. We also recognize that our assessment represents a snapshot at a point in time and may not fully capture ongoing cultural shifts within an organization.

Thirdly, there are no universally agreed-upon best practices for organizational health. With a wide range of frameworks, models, and approaches available, it can be challenging to establish a singular standard for evaluation, which may lead to a variety of interpretations and expectations among charities.

Lastly, our assessment may be biased toward certain Western workplace practices. As a U.S.-based organization with staff based predominantly in the U.S. and Western Europe, our understanding of best practices for organizational health is inevitably skewed toward the cultures with which we are most familiar. We will continue to explore how best to improve the applicability of our assessment across all national contexts, including using evidence from the countries where our evaluated charities are based.

1. Schyns & Schilling (2013), Waldman et al. (2012), Wang (2021), Gorski et al. (2018), Harter et al. (2002)