GWWC’s 2024 evaluations of evaluators
Introduction
The Giving What We Can research team is excited to share the results of our 2024 round of evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers!
In this round, we completed three evaluations that will inform our donation recommendations for the 2024 giving season. As with our 2023 round, there are substantial limitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that they are a significant improvement to a landscape in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work.
In this post, we share the key takeaways from each of our 2024 evaluations and link to the full reports. We also include an update explaining our decision to remove The Humane League from our list of recommended programs. Our website has now been updated to reflect the new fund and charity recommendations that came out of these evaluations.
Please also see our website for more context on why and how we evaluate evaluators.
We look forward to your questions and comments!
Key takeaways from each of our 2024 evaluations
The three evaluators that we evaluated in our 2024 round of the evaluating evaluators project were:
Global health and wellbeing
Founders Pledge Global Health and Development Fund (FP GHDF)
Based on our evaluation, we have decided not to currently include FP GHDF in our list of recommended charities and funds and do not plan to allocate a portion of GWWC’s Global Health and Wellbeing Fund budget to the FP GHDF at this point. However, we still think FP GHDF is worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host the program on the GWWC donation platform.
Some takeaways that inform this decision include:
Our belief that FP GHDF evaluations do not robustly demonstrate that the opportunities they fund exceed their stated bar of 10x GiveDirectly in expectation, due to the presence of errors and insufficiently justified subjective inputs we found in some of their BOTECs that could cause the estimated cost-effectiveness to fall below this threshold.
Our uncertainty about the future quality of evaluations following the recent departure of the senior researcher responsible for managing the fund and our belief that there are currently insufficient peer review processes, such as red-teaming, in place to reassure us that the fund quality will remain at least consistent following this transition.
Taken together, these issues left us unable to justifiably conclude that the FP GHDF is currently competitive with GiveWell’s recommendations.
While our decision is not to recommend FP GHDF at this time, we would like to emphasise that we did not conclude that the marginal cost-effectiveness of the GHDF is unambiguously not competitive with GiveWell’s recommended charities and funds — in fact, we think the GHDF might be competitive with GiveWell now or in the near future. Instead, our finding is that we can’t currently justifiably conclude that the fund is competitive with GiveWell in expectation, based on the evidence we have seen in our evaluation and the uncertainty surrounding staffing changes.
We also highlight positive findings from our evaluation. For example, we think that FP GHDF’s strategy of funding promising early-stage organisations plausibly has significant positive externalities, and the fact that FP GHDF has made several grants to organisations before GiveWell indicates they have some track record for identifying these promising funding opportunities.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for FP GHDF.
Animal welfare
Animal Charity Evaluators’ Movement Grants (ACE MG)
Based on our evaluation, we have decided to include ACE MG in our list of recommended charities and funds and we expect to allocate half of GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to ACE MG.
The key finding informing this decision is that ACE MG’s recent marginal grants and overall grant decision-making look to be of sufficiently high quality to be competitive with our current top recommendation in animal welfare: EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF) — by our evaluation of EA AWF in 2023. This is in large part due to our view that ACE MG has improved meaningfully since our previous evaluation, when we concluded that ACE MG performed slightly less strongly on several proxies for the marginal cost-effectiveness of its grants. In particular, we noted improvements in the quality of ACE MG’s:
Marginal grantmaking
Weighting of geographical neglectedness
Approach to grant selection and sizing
We did find what we think to be room for improvement in ACE MG’s approach to more clearly integrating scope, particularly when comparing between applicants implementing different types of interventions. However, we don’t think this room for improvement affects the ACE MG’s position as being — to our knowledge — among the best places to recommend to donors.
We do not believe that our investigation identified ACE MG to be justifiably better or worse than EA AWF in terms of marginal cost-effectiveness — based on our 2023 evaluation of EA AWF — and so we continue to recommend EA AWF as a donation option alongside ACE MG, and to allocate half of our Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to EA AWF.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for ACE MG.
Animal Charity Evaluators’ Charity Evaluation Program
Based on our evaluation, we have decided not to currently include ACE’s Recommended Charities or the Recommended Charity Fund (RCF) in our list of recommended charities and funds nor to allocate a portion of GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to these programs at this point in time. However, we still think ACE’s Recommended Charities are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we may consider inviting some of these programs to apply to become supported programs on the GWWC donation platform in early 2025.
Some takeaways that informed our decision include:
While ACE has made improvements to its approach for capturing scope and cost-effectiveness since our 2023 evaluation, we are not yet convinced that these play a sufficient role in ACE’s ultimate charity recommendation decisions for us to be confident that ACE reliably makes scope sensitive recommendations.
We believe that ACE’s Charity Evaluation Program’s current approach does not sufficiently emphasise marginal cost-effectiveness as the most decision-relevant factor in evaluation decisions. For example, ACE primarily evaluates on the basis of organisations’ existing programs, rather than explicitly focusing their evaluation on those programs that are most likely to be funded on the margin. This is in direct contrast to ACE’s Movement Grants, which explicitly evaluates programs that ACE would be influencing funding to on the margin.
Additionally, while our decision is not to rely on ACE’s Charity Evaluation program, we would like to emphasise that we are not making the case that the marginal cost-effectiveness of (any particular) ACE Recommended Charity is clearly not competitive with ACE MG or the EA AWF. In fact, we think it is plausible that some of these charities are competitive with our recommended funds, and may be great options to consider for donors with particular worldviews and who have time to delve deeper into ACE’s materials. Instead, our conclusion is that we can’t justifiably conclude that the charity evaluation program consistently identifies charities competitive with the funding opportunities supported by our current recommendations (ACE MG and EA AWF), based on the evidence we have seen in our evaluation.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for ACE’s Charity Evaluation Program.
Additional recommendation updates
The Humane League’s corporate campaigns program
As part of our review of our recommended programs for the 2024 Giving Season, we have made the decision to remove The Humane League’s (THL) corporate campaigns program from our list of recommended programs. Our reason for this is that we believe we can no longer justifiably recommend THL’s program alongside our existing recommendations in animal welfare.
While our decision was to no longer recommend THL’s program, we want to be clear that our decision does not reflect any negative update on THL’s work. Instead, this is reflective of evidence being out of date, us maintaining the scope of the evaluating evaluators project, and keeping to our principles of usefulness, justifiability and transparency.
Specifically, this conclusion is predominantly based on the following:
We generally base our charity and fund recommendations on our evaluating evaluators project, for reasons explained here. This year, the evaluators and grantmakers we’ll rely on – based on our evaluations – will be EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and ACE’s Movement Grants, and neither of these currently recommends THL as a charity (as neither makes charity recommendations).
In THL’s case last year, as explained in our report, we went beyond the scope of our usual project by using evidence provided by three further evaluators (Founders Pledge, Rethink Priorities and Open Philanthropy) to supplement the recommendation of an evaluator we had evaluated but decided not to rely on at that point (ACE) in order to ultimately recommend THL’s program. This was based on our overarching principles of usefulness, transparency and justifiability, via our judgement that providing a competitive alternative to the EA AWF – if we transparently and justifiably could – would be valuable.
However, because we expect the approach of grantmakers/evaluators to change more slowly than the work/programs of an individual charity, we are not comfortable relying on the information we used last year without undertaking a reinvestigation,[1] which we don’t expect to do (see below)
Given we now have two recommendations in animal welfare, we consider it somewhat less useful to look further into THL (or any other individual program in animal welfare) and we don’t think we can currently justify going beyond the scope of our evaluating evaluators project in the same way as we could last year.
THL’s corporate campaigns remain a supported program on our platform for donors who wish to continue supporting their work, and though we can no longer justifiably recommend them, we still think they are an option worth considering for impact-focused donors with particular worldviews and time to engage with the evidence supporting their corporate campaigns program.
Conclusion
We have created a webpage for those interested in learning more about our 2024 iteration of evaluating evaluators.
In the future, we plan to continue to evaluate evaluators – extending the list beyond the seven we’ve covered across our first two rounds, improving our methodology, and reinvestigating evaluators we’ve previously looked into to see how their approach/work has or has not changed.
- ^
Note that we do maintain our recommendation of EA AWF, as (like we stated above) we expect the quality of evaluations of a grantmaker – and by extension, the quality of the programs it funds when provided with an extra dollar – to change more slowly than the program funded by providing an extra dollar to any individual charity.
We would like to extend our gratitude to Giving What We Can (GWWC) for conducting the “Evaluating the Evaluators” exercise for a second consecutive year. We value the constructive dialogue with GWWC and their insights into our work. While we are disappointed that GWWC has decided not to defer to our charity recommendations this year, we are thrilled that they have recognized our Movement Grants program as an effective giving opportunity alongside the EA Animal Welfare Fund.
Movement Grants
After reflecting on GWWC’s 2023 evaluation of our Movement Grants (MG) program we made several adjustments, all of which are noted in GWWC’s 2024 report. We’re delighted to see that the refinements we made to our program this year have led to grantmaking decisions that meet GWWC’s bar for marginal cost-effectiveness and that they will recommend our MG program on their platform and allocate half of their Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to Movement Grants.
As noted by GWWC, ACE’s MG program is unique in its aims to fund underserved segments of the global animal advocacy movement and address two key limitations to effectiveness within the movement:
Limited evidence about which interventions are effective and in which contexts
Disproportionate attention devoted to some regions and animal groups
For impact-focused donors seeking opportunities to build an evidence-based and resilient global animal advocacy movement, our Movement Grants program is an effective giving opportunity which supports brilliant animal advocates all over the world.
Alongside their recommendation of our MG program, GWWC has outlined several areas for improvement that we are grateful for and will reflect on.
We agree with these suggestions by GWWC:
Improving the MG model to reflect our movement-building strategy—we have already started to revise our theory of change for the MG program to explicitly separate the pathways to impact for grants that are made primarily on the basis of movement-building and which are made on a more ‘direct impact’ basis. This will help us better account for movement building in our model and make future assessments about whether we want to maintain this approach to our grantmaking.
Revising our use of Impact Potential (IP) scores in the MG model—the IP scores played a minimal role in our final grant decisions this year. Before the GWWC evaluation, we had already decided to revise our use of these scores because they do not model scope in a sufficiently useful way and they run the risk of combining parameters in our model in such a way that clouds the decision-relevant information.
Better integrating scope comparisons—while our current MG model has scope baked into some of the factors (e.g. theory of change, long-term impact), we agree with GWWC that a more robust approach would be to make scope a factor that our grant reviewers score separately. We intend to make this adjustment in our next round of Movement Grants and we appreciate the specific logistical suggestions from GWWC on how we might do this.
Improving the documentation of our reasoning for making grant decisions—this is mainly related to our internal processes that don’t have any bearing on our grant decisions; however, we agree with GWWC that despite our diligent record keeping for how our thinking evolves through the grant review process, we need a better record that summarizes, in one place, the main rationale and cruxes for each grant decision. This is something we intend to implement in our next granting round.
We also want to note the following challenge:
GWWC recommends that we introduce a clearer framework for prioritizing between interventions. We agree with this recommendation—of the possible interventions available to help animals, some are already excluded from applying or rejected at an early stage from our grantmaking based on the scope of impact. However, while we intend to make further improvements in scope comparison between interventions, there remain challenges due to the many externalities that affect intervention effectiveness and our ability to estimate them. GWWC notes in the report that we appear resistant to doing this because it would be unhelpfully speculative. We want to clarify that we are willing to make speculations where we think they will be useful while highlighting the challenges. There is a difference between the more speculative forward-looking cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) we would be undertaking as a grantmaker compared with the CEAs the Charity Evaluations team undertakes on completed work. To overcome this, we may also consider comparing the known cost-effectiveness of the most similar organizations’ previous work or leveraging CEAs that have used the total available information on an intervention (e.g. this estimate). However, we remain cautious about spending time and resources on trying to find comparable cost estimates between interventions when doing so might not sufficiently increase the overall marginal cost-effectiveness of our grant decisions. We also want to note that this is a challenge for any animal advocacy funder, not just ACE. This is an area where we expect to continue to try different approaches and improve year-on-year, balancing available information and our team’s capacity.
We are grateful for the rare opportunity to reflect deeply on our work and to learn from GWWC’s perspectives so that we can award grants that are the most impactful for animals. We are especially thankful too for the larger GWWC and EA community that is willing to support highly promising projects to help some of the most neglected individuals who suffer greatly.
Charity Evaluations
On the other hand, we are disappointed that GWWC does not find our Charity Evaluations program justifiably competitive with MG (and the EA Animal Welfare Fund) and believe that donors might miss out on some of the most impactful donation opportunities because of GWWC’s decision. We will elaborate on the relationship between our Charity Evaluations and Movement Grants below, but first address some points specific to Charity Evaluations.
We agree with some of GWWC’s conclusions and suggestions for improvement, which appear in their 2024 report. We think that focusing on these will improve the quality of our recommendations moving forward:
Devote more resources to quantitatively modeling cost-effectiveness, including better defining upper and lower bounds and exploring new ways to assess speculative programs (such as using a mix of qualitative and quantitative arguments).
Explicitly assess charities’ strategic prioritization, such as their own focus on cost-effectiveness. While we develop a sense of this internally as we evaluate charities, we think it could be helpful to take it into account more systematically.
Explore other methods for more comprehensively capturing the magnitude of impact and limiting factors. This might mean adapting the theory of change analysis to include systematically assessing the weakest-seeming and most fundamental assumptions.
Reconsider the minimum and maximum sizes of grants we’re willing to make through the Recommended Charity Fund (RCF), for example by potentially reconsidering the safeguards in the disbursement model that lead to more consistent grant amounts over time.
However, there are also areas where we disagree with GWWC’s conclusions. While we acknowledge these parts of our methods have room for improvement, we think the changes that they suggest may not make a meaningful difference to the quality of our recommendations:
Include all decision-relevant factors in the published charity reviews. GWWC has highlighted their concerns based on our public reviews, such as recommendation decisions that seemed to insufficiently take into account scope (e.g., comparing ÇHKD and Sinergia’s cost-effectiveness results, arguments for longer-term paths to impact, etc.). While we agree that it’d be ideal to more clearly publicly demonstrate and formalize cross-charity comparisons and the other thinking that leads to our decisions, we also want to note that we already consider much of what GWWC suggests in our internal decision-making. We’ve made significant adjustments to our charity reviews in the past year and will continue to refine them to ensure they are transparent and informative while remaining accessible and encouraging effective giving. We think it’s possible that the Charity Evaluations program may have been disadvantaged in this evaluation by our in-depth charity reviews since GWWC’s comments seem to be informed more by what we published rather than the quality of our internal decisions.
Update the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, it’s possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.
Increase emphasis on the marginal dollar. We think our current methods adequately track where influenced funding would go. With the exception of granting restricted funding, we already implement GWWC’s suggestions. For example, we consider how charities’ programs are likely to change with gaining or losing an ACE recommendation and we also take into account charities’ strategic prioritization (although we don’t assess it systematically, as noted above, and some of this information is kept confidential so it doesn’t appear in our charity reviews). Additionally, this consideration only comes into play relatively infrequently; in most cases, ACE-influenced funding does not go toward novel programs but toward expansions of current programs, investments in the charity as a whole, or funding gaps.
Give more consideration to cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) in decisions not to recommend charities. Similar to GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators, ACE looks for evidence to justifiably conclude that a charity should be recommended, and we do not recommend charities in the absence of that evidence. When we say that a CEA did not play a meaningful role in our decision not to recommend a charity, we mean that it was insufficient to justify a recommendation. From that perspective, CEAs play just as much of a role to recommend as to not recommend a particular charity. While there are improvements we can make to our CEAs so that they are more indicative of cost-effectiveness (or lack thereof), we don’t see this as an indicator of a lack of scope sensitivity.
GWWC also suggests some broader strategic shifts in our programs that we plan to consider as a part of upcoming strategic planning. While these changes would help align our Charity Evaluations program more closely with GWWC’s criteria, we’re currently unsure if they would do the most good for the animal advocacy movement and for animals. These include:
Making restricted recommendations to specific programs, granting restricted funding, and removing the constraint that the fund grants to all current Recommended Charities each round. We need to carefully consider any trade-offs between the benefits of this idea and downstream considerations such as the needs of our donor base and losing the benefits of allowing Recommended Charities the flexibility to pursue what they need the most to maximize their impact. Also, restricting funding likely introduces some degree of funging, reducing any cost-effectiveness gains.
Allowing Recommended Charities to apply for Movement Grants. Theoretically, this would mean Recommended Charities could apply for targeted Movement Grants funding for their marginal programs (which we don’t currently permit). However, this might risk negatively impacting the movement-building goals of the Movement Grants program.
Changing the evaluation cycle from two years to one year. In theory, this would allow for a more precise assessment of charities’ upcoming programs, which is why ACE used a one-year cycle until 2021. However, we changed to a two-year cycle largely based on feedback from the charities we evaluated that annual evaluations were overly demanding/time-consuming. We’ll carefully consider the balance between timely evaluations, the burden on charities that we evaluate, and our team capacity (for comparison, ACE has an evaluations team of 5.5 FTE compared to GiveWell’s ~39 researchers).
Moving forward, we will continue evolving the Charity Evaluations program to find the organizations that can do the most good with additional donations and we thank GWWC for critically engaging with our work. We also appreciate that they acknowledge the difficulties of our work and the inherent differences between evaluators and funders in the animal advocacy space. However, given those difficulties, we’re currently not sure whether ACE nor any other evaluator that recommends whole charities in this space would be seen by GWWC as competitive with charitable funds that give restricted grants. Because of this, we’re not sure whether we think that GWWC’s current approach leads to the best outcomes for animals.
How ACE views Movement Grants vs. Charity Recommendations
We want to acknowledge that the language GWWC uses implies that they see our Movement Grants (MGs) and Charity Evaluations programs as “competitive” with each other. This is not a view we share—we see them as complementary.
Although there’s some overlap between charities that are a fit for each program, they serve different purposes:
The Recommended Charity Fund (RCF)
provides high-impact evidence-based donation opportunities, and
ensures critical organizations can do their underfunded and neglected work.
The Movement Grants program
funds highly promising projects,
is more likely to fund hits-based opportunities, and
focuses on movement-building.
The programs are complementary and supplement each other:
MGs support charities that may go on to become Recommended Charities (RCs)—this is evidenced by the fact that the majority of our current RCs are former MG recipients.
Some charities are ineligible for our Charity Evaluations because RCs need to be able to absorb more funding and have more of a track record, and ACE needs to have confidence in them over a longer time horizon (the entire two-year recommendation cycle). This means that the RCF misses some of the highest-impact funding opportunities because it doesn’t fund independent projects, brand-new charities, or only specific projects at a charity that might do a mixture of more and less cost-effective work.
We don’t give MGs to RCs for the duration of their recommendation, so the MG program also misses some of the highest-impact funding opportunities.
MGs can support former RCs if they re-enter an exploratory phase and need project- or program-specific funding to test out their ideas.
They also serve different donors:
In our view neither clearly has a higher expected value than the other. However, since the MG program funds projects with a smaller track record or projects that can have a longer-term impact in building the movement, which leads to more uncertainty and variance in outcomes, it is more suited to donors with a higher risk tolerance. On the other hand, the RCF includes more established, highly cost-effective organizations with a strong track record and a clear path to impact and appeals to more risk-averse donors.
Funds work well for individual donors but some users of ACE’s and GWWC’s services, such as certain Effective Giving Initiatives and other third parties, cannot collect donations for regranting funds. They must either set up their own fund composed of established, well-researched charities that can take in large amounts of unrestricted additional donations, and/or direct donations to specific charities.
The effective animal advocacy space is still deeply neglected and mostly funded by existing animal advocates. Therefore, we see ACE’s unique role as critical in securing counterfactually new donations to high-impact charities. We aim to engage audiences who are currently unfamiliar with both effective giving and EAA, and who might never change their individual behavior (for instance by changing their diet). To convert them to support farmed and wild animal welfare requires more accessible and simple solutions. Individual Recommended Charities are more intuitive and easy to understand and may be more appealing to this audience.
We are proud to support all of our current Recommended Charities and Movement Grantees, and would like to take this opportunity to celebrate the impactful work they do to help make the world a kinder place for animals.
- ACE Team
Thanks, Aidan and Sjir! I really like this project.
I do not understand why you “think the GHDF might be competitive with GiveWell now”. From your report, it seems quite clear to me that donating to GiveWell’s funds is better now. You “looked into [3] grants that were relatively large (by FP GHDF standards), which we expect to be higher effort/quality”, and found major errors in 2 grants, and a major methodological oversight in the other.
Worth pointing out that FP staff who could reply on this is on Thanksgiving break, so will probably take until next week.
Hey Vasco, these are my personal thoughts and not FP’s (anything FP says should take precedence). I have pretty limited capacity to respond, but a few quick notes—
First, I think it’s totally true that there are some BOTEC errors, many/ most of them mine (thank you GWWC for spotting them— it’s so crucial to a well-functioning ecosystem, and more selfishly, to improving my skills as a grantmaker. I really value this!)
At the same time—these are hugely rough BOTECs, that were never meant to be CEA’s in the rigorous GiveWell sense: they were being used as decision-making tools to enable quick decision-making under limited capacity (i do not take the actual numbers seriously: i expect they’re wrong in both directions), with many factors beyond the BOTEC going into grantmaking decisions.
I don’t want to make judgments about whether or not the fund (while I was there) was surpassing GiveWell or not— super happy to leave this to GWWC. I was focused on funders who would not counterfactually give to GW, meaning that this was less decision-relevant for me. I will note that it is (imo) insanely difficult to compete with GiveWell.
I think it’s helpful to look at the grant history from FP GHDF. Here’s all the grants that I think have been made by FP GHDF since Jan 2023, apologies if i’ve missed any:
* 4 were GW supported before FP granted to them (New Incentives, Sightsavers, Pure Earth, Evidence Action)
* 3 have already subsequently been GW supported (r.i.c.e, FEM, Suvita)
* 4 are ecosystem multiplier-y grants (Giving Multiplier, TLYCS, Effective Altruism Australia, Effektiv Spenden)
* 1 was an advocacy grant to 1DaySooner, 1 was an advocacy grant to LEEP
* 5 are recent young orgs, that we think are promising but ofc supporting young orgs is hit and miss (Ansh, Taimaka, Essential, IMPALA, HealthLearn)
* 1 was deworming research grant
* 1 was an anti-corruption journalism grant which we think is promising due to economic growth impacts (OCCRP)
I think it’s plausible that i spent too little time on these grant evals, and this probably contributed to BOTEC errors. But I feel pretty good about the actual decision-making, although I am very biased:
* At least 2 or 3 of these struck me as being really time-sensitive (all grants are time-sensitive in a way, but I’m talking about ‘might have to shut down some or all operations’ or ‘there is a time-sensitive scaling opportunity’).
* I think there is a bit of a gap for early-ish funding, and benefits to opening up more room for funding by scaling these orgs (i.e. funding orgs beyond seed funding, but before orgs can absorb or have the track record for multi million grants). I think analyses that look at the trajectories of this (in terms of moving counterfactual money) would be really interesting.
* Having a few high EV, ‘big if true’ grants feels reasonable to me (advocacy, economic growth, R and D).
I hope this context is useful. I value the engagement- thanks.
Thank you Sjir and Aidan for this excellent work! I think it’s quite valuable for community epistemics to have someone doing this kind of high-quality meta-evaluation. And it seems like your dialogue with ACE has been very productive.
Selfishly as somone who makes a number of donations in the animal welfare space, I’m also excited by the possibility of some more top animal charities becoming supported programs on the donation platform :)
I think the rate of change is overwhelmingly a function of size, and not on whether it respects grantmakers/evaluators or work/programs. I would expect THL’s work/program to change more slowly than the Animal Welfare Fund. In any case, I agree with your decision of not recommending THL. As you say, it is more consistent with the scope of your project:
From your 2024 evaluator research page:
I think you did great based on the time you spent. Have you considered fundraising specifically for your evaluator research? I would be interested in supporting you as long as some (e.g. 1⁄3) of the additional funds go towards evaluating animal welfare evaluators.
From your evaluation of ACE MG:
Which diet change interventions are more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns? Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem, and I suspect many diet change interventions are harmful due to leading to the replacement of beef and pork with poultry meat, eggs (which can be part of a vegetarian diet), fish and other seafood.