First of all, thank you for the extensive comments!
I can give more context during our AMA next week if helpful (I wonât have much time to engage in the coming few days unfortunately), but wanted to just quickly react to avoid a misunderstanding about our views here. Iâve copy-pasted from the relevant section from the report below:
To be clear, there are strong limitations to this recommendation:
We didnât ourselves evaluate THLâs work directly, nor did we compare it to other charities (e.g., ACEâs other recommendations).
The availability of evidence here may be high relative to other interventions in animal welfare, but is still low compared to interventions we recommend in global health and wellbeing. We havenât directly evaluated Open Philanthropy, Rethink Priorities, or Founders Pledge as evaluators.
We have questions about the external validity of the evidence for corporate campaigns, i.e. whether they are as cost-effective when applied in new contexts (e.g. low- and middle-income countries in Africa) as they seem to have been where the initial evidence was collected (mainly in the US and Europe).
We also have questions about the extent to which the evidence for corporate campaigns is out of date, as the Founders Pledge and Rethink Priorities reports are from more than four years ago and we would expect there to be diminishing returns to corporate campaigns over time, as the âlow-hanging fruitsâ in terms of cost-effectiveness are picked first.
Taken together, all of this means we expect funding THLâs current global corporate campaigns to be (much) less cost-effective than the corporate campaigns in 2016-2017, which were evaluated in those reports.^1
^1 It is worth noting that Open Philanthropy confirmed to us that it thinks so as well: its referral is not a claim that funding THLâs corporate campaigns will be exactly as cost-effective as it probably was a couple of years ago, when THL achieved big wins on a small budget, but a claim that funding them is likely still among the most cost-effective options in the space, and that THL can productively use a lot of extra funding without strongly diminishing marginal returns to funding currently provided.
So in short, we share your impression that THLâs work is (much) less cost-effective than it was a few years ago. We are aware of Open Philâs views on this, and their referral of THLâs work to us took these diminished expected returns into account. The FP and RP reports weigh (much) less heavily in our recommendation of THLâs current work than ACEâs and OPâs recommendations, but we think those reports still provide a useful (and publicly accessible) reference on corporate campaigns as an intervention more generally.
First of all, thank you for the extensive comments!
I can give more context during our AMA next week if helpful (I wonât have much time to engage in the coming few days unfortunately), but wanted to just quickly react to avoid a misunderstanding about our views here. Iâve copy-pasted from the relevant section from the report below:
So in short, we share your impression that THLâs work is (much) less cost-effective than it was a few years ago. We are aware of Open Philâs views on this, and their referral of THLâs work to us took these diminished expected returns into account. The FP and RP reports weigh (much) less heavily in our recommendation of THLâs current work than ACEâs and OPâs recommendations, but we think those reports still provide a useful (and publicly accessible) reference on corporate campaigns as an intervention more generally.