Charity evaluators should think about their impact as partially just “moving money around,” not counterfactual donations.
In simple terms, I see Animal Charity Evaluators doing two things related to this topic:
Get donors to say no to good grants so they can say yes to great ones (the moving money around on the margin stuff)
Creating impact from being the only reason good work happens (the counterfactual stuff)
As an evaluator that aims to help people help more animals, I currently think this approach will accelerate the journey to a better future. And the faster we get to that kinder world, the more suffering is reduced. It’s been tricky to assess though when working on the first becomes opportunity cost to the second to a degree that we’re doing less good than we otherwise would.
Examples of work under one:
Increasing the quality and rigor of evaluations.
Strengthening grantmaking decisions and distribution size criteria.
Examples of work under two:
Influencing conventional animal donors to dedicate a portion of their giving portfolio to effective animal advocacy.
Getting conservation-minded animal grantmakers to incorporate wild animal welfare considerations.
Encouraging traditional grantmakers to incorporate effective giving principles within their cause area.
Though you can only get so far with certain traditional funders in terms of scale (some people just really love pretty predators or donkeys), recently I’ve seen many are actually craving ways that allow them to do more within their field and to clarify their decision-making internally and to their grantees.
An additional benefit of interacting more with conventional donors is that besides their giving behavior, their moral circle might expand. Which seems particularly relevant for animal advocacy.
(BTW not just GiveWell is trying to calculate their counterfactual, ACE is making an attempt too. The report of the most recently completed fiscal year will actually be posted in the next few weeks, the last one can be read here. But yeah, we found it’s pretty difficult to do.)
Nice! That’s super exciting. And I feel very excited about the work ACE is doing to bring conventional animal donors / conservation donors into this work, because that seems incredibly valuable! I think where I disagree with many people’s views about ACE is that I think ACE doing perfectly rigorous charity evaluation is much less important than ACE expanding the pool of donors, because I think most of ACE’s impact comes via expanding the pool of donors, like you describe.
Thanks for writing this Abraham!
In simple terms, I see Animal Charity Evaluators doing two things related to this topic:
Get donors to say no to good grants so they can say yes to great ones (the moving money around on the margin stuff)
Creating impact from being the only reason good work happens (the counterfactual stuff)
As an evaluator that aims to help people help more animals, I currently think this approach will accelerate the journey to a better future. And the faster we get to that kinder world, the more suffering is reduced. It’s been tricky to assess though when working on the first becomes opportunity cost to the second to a degree that we’re doing less good than we otherwise would.
Examples of work under one:
Increasing the quality and rigor of evaluations.
Strengthening grantmaking decisions and distribution size criteria.
Examples of work under two:
Influencing conventional animal donors to dedicate a portion of their giving portfolio to effective animal advocacy.
Getting conservation-minded animal grantmakers to incorporate wild animal welfare considerations.
Encouraging traditional grantmakers to incorporate effective giving principles within their cause area.
Though you can only get so far with certain traditional funders in terms of scale (some people just really love pretty predators or donkeys), recently I’ve seen many are actually craving ways that allow them to do more within their field and to clarify their decision-making internally and to their grantees.
An additional benefit of interacting more with conventional donors is that besides their giving behavior, their moral circle might expand. Which seems particularly relevant for animal advocacy.
(BTW not just GiveWell is trying to calculate their counterfactual, ACE is making an attempt too. The report of the most recently completed fiscal year will actually be posted in the next few weeks, the last one can be read here. But yeah, we found it’s pretty difficult to do.)
Nice! That’s super exciting. And I feel very excited about the work ACE is doing to bring conventional animal donors / conservation donors into this work, because that seems incredibly valuable! I think where I disagree with many people’s views about ACE is that I think ACE doing perfectly rigorous charity evaluation is much less important than ACE expanding the pool of donors, because I think most of ACE’s impact comes via expanding the pool of donors, like you describe.