2024 Engagement Survey

Each year, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) thoroughly evaluates animal advocacy organizations to identify and direct funding toward those that are likely to create the most positive change for animals. One of our three charity evaluation criteria is Organizational Health. We assess whether any aspects of an organization’s leadership or workplace culture pose a risk to its effectiveness or stability, thereby reducing its potential to help animals. Problems with leadership and workplace culture could also negatively affect the reputation of the broader animal advocacy movement, as well as employees’ wellbeing and their willingness to remain in the movement.¹

As part of our Organizational Health assessment, we distribute an anonymous engagement survey to all staff working at the charities under evaluation (including volunteers who work on average more than five hours per week). We consider the results of this survey alongside other information provided by the charities’ leadership staff, such as the policies and processes they have in place to support their employees.

This blog post outlines our process for this year’s engagement survey, the potential limitations of our approach, and some of the ways we aim to address these limitations. We have also provided the full list of survey questions.

Process

Leadership staff at each charity distribute ACE’s engagement survey to all paid staff members and volunteers who work at least five hours per week on average. We use Qualtrics to administer the survey, and we translate it into other languages when requested. To protect respondents’ anonymity and encourage honest responses, we do not ask for any identifiable personal details.

We developed the engagement survey in collaboration with organizational consultants Scarlet Spark. To help ensure that our questions for staff are reliable predictors of organizational health, we base them on recognized frameworks such as the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, Google’s Project Oxygen, and cross-cultural research by Culture Amp. We ask volunteers an alternative set of questions specifically designed to assess volunteer engagement and satisfaction.

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

If a charity scores particularly low on any aspect of staff or volunteer engagement, we follow up with the charity’s leadership to hear their perspective and understand any relevant context. To protect respondents’ safety and anonymity, we only share aggregated organizational-level data with leadership and do not share individual survey responses or confidential information. On a case-by-case basis, ACE recommends that the charity address any outstanding concerns, for example by:

• Conducting a comprehensive staff survey to assess employee engagement, satisfaction, and areas for improvement
• Establishing regular channels for communication and feedback, such as open-door policies, suggestion boxes, or anonymous reporting mechanisms
• Developing professional development opportunities and career advancement pathways for staff
• 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

The engagement survey contains a link to a Whistleblower Form,² developed with support from legal experts at Animal Defense Partnership, for any employees or volunteers who wish to report issues of harassment and discrimination. In most cases where we decide to take action based on such reports, our response consists of sharing relevant non-confidential information with the leadership of the organization in question and hearing their perspective. This process exists to help us gain a better understanding of what happened, whether the leadership members were aware, and what measures they took, if any. Depending on the outcome of this discussion, we may evaluate whether the leadership members took, or plan to take, appropriate action and factor this into our overall Organizational Health assessment.

Limitations

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

Firstly, we are currently 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 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 we receive, and clarity on the level of detail we can 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 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 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 purposes, which may lead to various interpretations and expectations among charities.

Lastly, our assessment may be biased toward certain Western workplace practices. As a U.S.-based organization with staff members 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.

Engagement Survey Questions

Below is the complete set of questions used in our 2024 engagement survey. The first question directed respondents to either “Questions for paid staff” or “Questions for volunteers.”

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

2. The publicly accessible version of this form can be found via ACE’s Third-Party Whistleblower Policy on our website.