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 recommendation 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.

We start by gathering a list of organizations that are currently working to help animals and assessing which ones meet our criteria for basic 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 again to maintain their status.

Application

In the spring, we have an open application for organizations that want to apply to be evaluated. It begins with initial screening questions, helping us filter for charities that meet our basic criteria, such as focusing on cause areas that we consider to be highly effective. Applicants who pass 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, applicants for 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 the short and long term 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 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 context.
• 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 indications that the charity may be especially cost-effective.

We also use a weighted factor model designed to roughly estimate the expected impact of a charity based on the countries they work in, the specific animal group(s) their programs target, and the interventions they use. Specifically, the factors are:

• Animal Group/Country Scale:¹ indicates the potential number of animals that could be directly helped within the country.
• Animal Group Welfare Range:² indicates the potential impact of a charity’s work on each animal affected.
• Country/Intervention Tractability:³ indicates the likelihood of success of a charity’s work in that country.
• Country Neglectedness:⁴ indicates the likelihood of high-impact opportunities in that country.
• Country Global Influence:⁵ indicates the potential for work to have a higher impact by having secondary effects on other countries.

We reflect on the output of the model as we develop qualitative assessments of the charities, which we use to 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). We then produce comprehensive reviews for charities we choose to recommend and summary reviews for other evaluated charities. For more details on how we reach our recommendation decisions, visit our Evaluation Process page.

The finished product of each evaluation is a review or summary review of the charity’s performance on each of ACE’s evaluation criteria. Important components of these reviews include an assessment of the charity’s impact, an estimate of their ability to use additional funding effectively, and an assessment of their organizational health.

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

Recommended Charities

Our Recommended Charities are likely to demonstrate very high levels of effectiveness 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 for donors who want to help as many animals as possible and prevent suffering the most by supporting organizations that will use their resources thoughtfully and efficiently. They work in ways that are likely to produce the greatest gains for animals and can scale their work effectively when presented with unexpected funding.

We promote these organizations and encourage the public to donate to their programs. We use the amount of money that we direct to these organizations as a metric for the impact of our work.

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 significant impact for animals. This means that we are unable to recommend all effective charities we evaluate. While these charities did not receive a recommendation from us in a particular year, to have been selected out of the large pool of applicants, they are still likely to run effective programs and engage in impactful work. However, other charities that we evaluated that year performed better on our evaluation criteria.

1. Where possible, we used Our World in Data (2023). Our World in Data bases their analyses on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). For numbers of laying hens, we used FAO data directly. 

2. See Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Ranges report. 

3. Relevant proxies for each intervention were chosen through a team exercise, with the proxies used in Mercy for Animals’ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index as a starting point. 

4. Level of funding per country, as per Farmed Animal Funders’ 2021 State of the Movement report 

5. Elcano Global Presence Index, as used in Mercy for Animals’ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index