Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria for Animal Advocacy Charities
Here are the three criteria we used to evaluate charities in 2024. If you’re interested in methods and criteria from previous years, you can find them in our Process Archive. Our evaluations follow a rigorous selection 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 reduce suffering to a high degree for many animals.
Theory of Change Analysis
Our Theory of Change Analysis assesses the strength of the charity’s logical reasoning and evidence 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:
- Assessing the strength of evidence and reasoning underpinning the charity’s programs
- Identifying key risks and limitations of the charity’s work and their plan to mitigate those risks
- Assessing the charity’s self-awareness and transparency about potential risks and limitations of their work
- Understanding how the charity’s different programs interact with each other to bring about change
- Understanding 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 spending, and those for which we can calculate 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:
- The amount of suffering averted per dollar
- The number of animals helped per dollar
- The number of individuals or companies engaged per dollar
Criterion 2: Room for More Funding
A recommendation from ACE could lead to a large increase in a charity’s funding. 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. 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 its effectiveness or stability, thereby reducing its potential to help animals. Bad actors 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 logical reasoning and evidence 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 logic and evidence 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 per dollar.
The purpose of this criterion is to determine if your donation would likely affect many animals and help them significantly. We consider how suffering is reduced in the short term, as well as the effects of the charity’s interventions in the long term.
Theory of Change Analysis
We begin by developing a broad overview of the charity’s work by constructing a theory of change table with the following components:
- Activities: the work that the charity does
- Outputs: the product of the charity’s activities
- Early outcomes: the results of their outputs, such as changes in knowledge, skills, behavior, or attitudes
- Final outcomes: the consequences the early outcomes need to result in to achieve the charity’s end goal
- Impact: the ultimate change for animals the charity is trying to achieve
The activities that we believe have the most significant impact and/or those that the charity prioritizes based on their level of investment and expenditures are considered “key activities.” These activities are thoroughly examined for the following:
- The charity’s reasoning for choosing the activity
- Past track record and achievements
- Amount of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the activity
- Robustness of the evidence (e.g., sample size, sampling method, outcome measurement, use of methods that allow for causal inference, participant characteristics, study location, potential biases, publication recency, etc.)
- Reliability of the research (e.g., meta-analyses, opinion pieces, etc.) and available sources
- Small Animal Replacement Problem: The charity’s work could lead people to switch out certain animal products that cause relatively low suffering, like beef, for those that cause relatively high suffering for more individuals, like chicken and fish.
- Potential to prop up the animal agriculture industry: The charity’s work could improve animal welfare at the expense of significantly increasing the industry’s profit margins and/or societal acceptance, resulting in more animals being farmed.
- Potential for public backlash: The charity carries out controversial tactics that might be met with significant backlash from the public, government, other animal advocacy organizations, or other audiences, which outweighs the likely benefits of their work.
- Potential for industry backlash: The charity’s work might upset the industry to the extent that it seeks to clamp down, such as by calling for ag-gag laws.
- Undermining of the movement’s credibility: The charity’s work relies on misinformation, manipulation, or low-quality science that could undermine the credibility of their work and the work of the wider movement.
- Potential risks to advocates: The charity’s work might put their employees or other people at undue risk of harm.
- High-uncertainty interventions: The charity relies on interventions that have a low chance of success (such as corporate litigation, citizen initiatives, or policy outreach), even if the potential pay-off is large.
- Regulatory barriers: The charity’s impact is likely to be constrained by the adverse political climate in their region.
- Public perception: The charity is unlikely to achieve sufficient public awareness and engagement for their program to be successful.
- Technological limitations: The charity is likely to face significant scientific bottlenecks (e.g., programs focused on the rapid scale-up of cultured meat production).
- Industry resistance: The charity depends on industry buy-in (e.g., producer outreach focused on chick culling alternatives).
Our research approach varies depending on the specific key activity but generally involves searching for external evidence, such as peer-reviewed literature on interventions and countries, as well as research posts or articles from credible researchers. We also review evidence provided by the charity, consult with experts knowledgeable in their field(s), verify publicly available information, and discuss with the charity themselves the risks and limitations, as well as their mitigating actions.
We assess each key activity based on the strength of the logic and/or evidence. We then aggregate these assessments with any additional overarching considerations (e.g., the robustness of their Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning strategy, the way they communicate their work to their audiences, etc.) to arrive at an overall assessment of the charity’s theory of change using the following scale:
- Strong: There are minimal concerns about the charity’s ability to advance their desired outcomes; mitigating actions appear broadly sufficient to overcome risks and/or limitations associated with their work.
- Moderate-to-strong
- Moderate: Some obstacles limit the charity’s ability to fully advance their desired outcomes; mitigating actions appear sufficient to overcome some of the risks and/or limitations associated with their work but not all.
- Weak-to-moderate
- Weak: Many obstacles prevent the charity from advancing their desired outcomes; mitigating actions appear insufficient to overcome risks and/or limitations associated with their work.
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 the amount of expenditures they invest in them, and the feasibility of creating meaningful “back-of-the-envelope” calculations of impact per dollar.
We calculate the cost-effectiveness of a program by dividing the 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 true 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 use 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 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, per Rethink Priorities’ ‘Welfare Ranges’ report). SADs are adjusted to “disabling” levels of pain on the Welfare Footprint pain scale, so one day spent in disabling pain for one human would be equal to one SAD.
To calculate SADs averted by a program, we researched and developed 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 (low, medium, or high).
- For many values, we produce a range with an upper bound, a lower bound, 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 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 possibility that the impact will not persist, and a discount where other organizations were involved in achieving an outcome.
- We attempt to verify the values that the charity provides, 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 corporate commitments secured. Our reasoning for this approach is that one of ACE’s guiding principles is to follow a rigorous process and use logical reasoning and empirical evidence to make decisions, so while in some circumstances it can be a useful thought experiment for our team to make guesses, we are unwilling to base our assessment of charities on highly speculative and potentially misleading cost-effectiveness analyses.
Interpreting results
We arrive at an impact-per-dollar estimate for each program by dividing the quantified benefit by the cost. For programs where we were able to calculate SADs averted per dollar, we use Ambitious Impact’s scale (based on their years of experience incubating effective animal charities) to interpret the results:
- <10 SADs averted per dollar = low cost effectiveness
- 10–30 SADs averted per dollar = moderate cost effectiveness
- 30–100 SADs averted per dollar = moderate-high cost effectiveness
- >100 SADs averted per dollar = very high cost effectiveness
Limitations of Our Method
Theory of Change Analysis
- ACE team members use empirical evidence when available; however, the quantity and quality of evidence is inconsistent for different interventions and country contexts. 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 have limited time to conduct charity-specific research (e.g., review the available evidence on questions about the effectiveness of interventions in particular countries) because of the structure of our evaluation process.
- We are limited by our team’s knowledge and the amount of time we have to consult experts to fill our knowledge gaps. Ideally, we would have a system to incorporate expert feedback more systematically.
- We focus our analysis on a few key activities, 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 competing information.
- There is usually one evaluation team member primarily responsible for a charity’s Theory of Change Analysis, streamlining communication. This means that although we standardize our process and check, give feedback, and stress-test each other’s work, there is some subjectivity in the direction of our research and analysis.
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. We are unable to draw wider conclusions about the cost effectiveness of the charity as a whole.
- Each result relies on assumptions and often speculative inputs because of limited research evidence and the lack of 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 values.
- 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 (such as for electrical stunning of fishes and shrimps), and we have to make additional assumptions to create them. This further increases uncertainty.
- We do not have time to conduct a significant sensitivity analysis (e.g., calculating what value key variables would need to have for a program to have moderate cost-effectiveness).
- 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 could lead to a large increase in a charity’s funding. 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 as well as 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 absolute 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 2023 level of revenue.
Funding scenarios
We request the charity’s financial and staffing records from 2021 through 2024 and also ask for their plans if their revenue were to stay roughly the same, increase, or decrease (relative to their 2023 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 their financials or future plans for charities that are not recommended.
Priorities for additional funds
For each growth plan, we assess our uncertainty in its effectiveness and feasibility from very low to very high. Each of these assessments is accompanied by a percentage discount on the full cost of that work when calculating a charity’s RFMF and funding capacity, representing our reservations about the prospect of immediately fully funding it. The following is a general description of plans that fall into the different scores:
- Very low uncertainty (no discount)
- Easily feasible expansion of one of the charity’s most impactful programs
- Little to no reason to believe that the plan will encounter diminishing returns or not play out as expected
- Low uncertainty (no discount)
- Expansion of an existing program that we have some uncertainty about but generally support
- A new program that is supported by strong reasoning but not much evidence
- An operational investment that is needed soon
- Moderate/low uncertainty (20% discount)
- Low evidence expansion of a program with minor uncertainties about the reasoning
- Evidence suggests that the plan may not be effective, but it makes sense in the charity’s particular context
- The cost of the plan seems high for its likely outcomes
- In a grant decision, we would fund it but not fully
- An operational investment that is nice-to-have
- Moderate uncertainty (40% discount)
- Low evidence expansion, with some tangible concerns/uncertainties
- Some evidence suggests that the plan may be ineffective
- In a grant decision, we would fund roughly half of it
- An operational investment that would likely not impact the charity’s effectiveness if it did not happen in the next two years
- Moderate/high uncertainty (60% RFMF discount)
- We disagree with the reasoning for the plan and believe it is likely to be less impactful than the charity’s other work
- In a grant decision, we would fund less than half of it
- High uncertainty (80% RFMF discount)
- We disagree with the reasoning for the plan and believe it is very likely to be less impactful than the charity’s other work
- Very high uncertainty (100% RFMF discount)
- We do not want to 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 bottleneck 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 explanation 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 likely cost 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 discounted costs of their future plans and funding capacity as the sum of their RFMF and their 2023 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 is 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 $200,000. If the charity is selected as a recommended charity, the outputs from this criterion will also help inform their share of the Recommended Charity Fund distribution so that we make sure that funds go to where they can be most impactful.
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—not definitive. 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 estimates 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 estimates 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 leading up to our Recommended Charity Fund distributions to update our sense of their RFMF.
Finally, we prioritize our time on Theory of Change Analysis and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis 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 its effectiveness or stability, thereby reducing its potential to help animals. Bad actors 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 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 its future effectiveness or 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 to 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. The full list of policies, including policy templates and other resources provided by Scarlet Spark and ADP, is available on the ACE website. Policies are grouped 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 these 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 people policies and processes, 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’s 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, questions concerning 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.
- 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 1 (No, I strongly disagree) to 5 (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.
Financial health
To identify any potential risks associated with charities’ financial health, we ask leadership about their ratio of liabilities to assets, current and planned 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. To help address this, we have developed a comprehensive Whistleblower Form with Animal Defense Partnership. We hope this helps ensure claimants’ understanding 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 is no universally agreed-upon “best practice” 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, using evidence from the countries where our evaluated charities are based.