Really appreciate you putting out your honest thinking behind the way you market recommended charities to people not involved in EA.
My amateur sense is that ACE is now striking the right balance between factual correctness and appeal/accessibility. My worry in the past was that ACE staff members were allowing image considerations to seep into the actual analyis that they were doing (sidenote: I’d be interested to what extent ACE now uses Bayesian reasoning in their estimates, e.g. by adjusting impact by how likely small sample studies are false positives).
When someone is already committed to EA, it tends to become difficult for them to imagine what got them originally excited about effectiveness in helping others and what might motivate new people who are not part of the ‘early adopter crowd’. There is a reason why EA pitches to newcomers also tend to be simple, snappy and focus on one ‘identifiable victim’ before expanding across populations, probabilities and time (my point being that these principles also apply to ACE’s outreach). You cannot expect people to relate to abstract analysis and take action if they have not bridged that gap yet.
However, I hope that ACE’s stance on matching donations will cause other organisations in the effective animal advocacy community to follow their lead. The newsletter by Good Food Institute in December 2017 also had a misleading header saying ‘Twice your impact’. This is an easy thing to slip into when you are focused on raising money.
I heard this might have been a mistake by less experienced communication staff members as ACE is usually more careful (though it was concerning that outsiders had to mention it to someone working for ACE to start internal Slack discussions). You can find Marianne and I’s original conversation on that below, which we passed on to ACE:
Marianne van der Werf: Animal Charity Evaluators has released their new charity recommendations!
Updated Charity Recommendations: >December 2017 | Animal Charity Evaluators
ACE updates our recommendations each year by December 1. This year, we are publishing our recommendations a few days early in order to have our most…
ANIMALCHARITYEVALUATORS.ORG
Remmelt Ellen: This statement is intellectually dishonest.🙁
“A generous donor will match donations to ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund, starting today.
DONATE TO THE RECOMMENDED CHARITY FUND
This means that you can double the impact of your donation from now through the end of the year by donating to our Recommended Charity Fund. We will distribute all of the funds raised through the end of the year to our recommended charities in January. You can find more details about the Fund, including how donations will be divided among charities, here.”
Remmelt Ellen: I’m not happy with the way they’ve stated that. It doesn’t make me feel as confident that they’ve shifted their marketing-orientation to more rigour.
Remmelt Ellen: Mind you, I’d still recommend donating to one of their recommended charities if you want to donate to prevent factory farming.
Marianne van der Werf: In general that’s a good point, but in the case of ACE they’re aware of the dishonesty of donation drives and make a point of only doing them when the money is not going to be donated anyway. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/about/background/faq/
Marianne van der Werf ACE should probably mention it in their posts sometimes, because last year people thought less of ACE because of this as well.
Remmelt Ellen: Hmm, but even in this case ‘double your impact’ is a disingenuous claim to make. That donor would have made a donation to a charity anyway, and probably one in the factory farming space.
Therefore counterfactually-speaking, you can say that the donor probably wouldn’t have donated to the recommended charity fund otherwise, not that another donor has doubled their impact.
Remmelt Ellen: “You’re donation is being matched –> you’ve just doubled your impact” is a bold claim to make that’s almost impossible to live up to – especially when done by a charity evaluator that should know better.
Marianne van der Werf: Good points Remmelt, you should share this conversation with ACE or ask them about their messaging in their upcoming Reddit AMA. I agree that the doubling your impact claim is overly simplistic. It would have been more accurate to just talk about doubling the donations and have people draw their own conclusions about how it influences their impact, because that also depends on people’s personal values.
sidenote: I’d be interested to what extent ACE now uses Bayesian reasoning in their estimates, e.g. by adjusting impact by how likely small sample studies are false positives.
Our current methodology uses an alternative approach of treating cost-effectiveness estimates as only one input into our decisions. We then take care to “notice when we are confused” by remaining aware that if a cost-effectiveness estimate is much higher than we would expect based on the other things we know about an intervention or charity, that may be due to an error in our estimate rather than to truly exceptional cost effectiveness.
Really appreciate you putting out your honest thinking behind the way you market recommended charities to people not involved in EA.
My amateur sense is that ACE is now striking the right balance between factual correctness and appeal/accessibility. My worry in the past was that ACE staff members were allowing image considerations to seep into the actual analyis that they were doing (sidenote: I’d be interested to what extent ACE now uses Bayesian reasoning in their estimates, e.g. by adjusting impact by how likely small sample studies are false positives).
When someone is already committed to EA, it tends to become difficult for them to imagine what got them originally excited about effectiveness in helping others and what might motivate new people who are not part of the ‘early adopter crowd’. There is a reason why EA pitches to newcomers also tend to be simple, snappy and focus on one ‘identifiable victim’ before expanding across populations, probabilities and time (my point being that these principles also apply to ACE’s outreach). You cannot expect people to relate to abstract analysis and take action if they have not bridged that gap yet.
However, I hope that ACE’s stance on matching donations will cause other organisations in the effective animal advocacy community to follow their lead. The newsletter by Good Food Institute in December 2017 also had a misleading header saying ‘Twice your impact’. This is an easy thing to slip into when you are focused on raising money.
This was ACE’s marketing material that originally mentioned ‘double your impact’: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/updated-charity-recommendations-december-2017/
I heard this might have been a mistake by less experienced communication staff members as ACE is usually more careful (though it was concerning that outsiders had to mention it to someone working for ACE to start internal Slack discussions). You can find Marianne and I’s original conversation on that below, which we passed on to ACE:
Our current methodology uses an alternative approach of treating cost-effectiveness estimates as only one input into our decisions. We then take care to “notice when we are confused” by remaining aware that if a cost-effectiveness estimate is much higher than we would expect based on the other things we know about an intervention or charity, that may be due to an error in our estimate rather than to truly exceptional cost effectiveness.
We admit that Bayesian techniques would more accurately adjust for uncertainty, but this would require additional work in developing appropriate priors for each reference class, and this process may not generate worthwhile differences in our evaluations, given our data set. See this section of our Cost-Effectiveness Estimates page for details on our thinking about this.