Thank you for your input regarding our Sinergia review.
I would just encourage people to wonder, before they criticize groups whose strategies they don’t understand, if they don’t really have the full picture.
We have criticized Sinergia for providing false information to the public. For example, here is some of the false information Sinergia provided related to Alibem:
On page 30 of Alibem’s 2023 Sustainability Report, Alibem states they will “Maintain immunocastration instead of surgical castration – a procedure that was voluntarily eliminated from the Company’s protocolsin 2010.”
However, on page 20 of Sinergia’s Pigs in Focus 2023 Report, Sinergia indicates that in 2022 Alibem had not banned surgical castration, but in 2023 Alibem had banned surgical castration. Further, Sinergia took credit for getting Alibem to ban surgical castration “by 2023” (see Cell K4).
Even if providing this false information to the public leads to strategic advantages (such as more funding for Sinergia), we do not think it is acceptable; especially since this false information is being used to promote Sinergia and encourage donations. We are curious if you disagree.
Sorry if it came across like this post was intended to be feedback for you specifically—your post was just one of the most recent examples that came to mind of charity evaluation being done publicly. I meant to find more examples but decided doing so would lead me to procrastinate on posting. I have no idea if anything I’m saying here applies in the case of Sinergia.
If you think it is always unacceptable to provide false information to the public, even if that’s a part of an organization’s theory of change, I do disagree. Using the example of corporate campaigns the commenter above shared, if a nonprofit was trying to target a specific company to change their welfare standards, communicating at least slightly inaccurate information to the public might in some cases be extremely effective (I have no idea if this is true or not, I’m not a campaigner—I just share it to illustrate my point).
In the context of not-otherwise-strategic self-promotion, it was 100% certain that shared information was false and solely put forward on the website because they wanted to drum up donations and for no reason of strategy, I wouldn’t think that was good. Although I also presume that sort of thing is relatively common (depending on the scale of the falsehood) and not necessarily correlated one way or the other with effectiveness.
But given that I don’t actually know what Sinergia’s full strategy is, and the fact that Sinergia has several types of programs where I could easily imagine there being value in certain kinds of false statements, I’d need to do a lot more research to come to even a low-confidence opinion. And even then, I’d still want to be conscious of the possibility that (1) I’m not an insider to Sinergia, so there could be relevant info I don’t have access to or they can’t share and (2) I’m not an insider on farmed animal welfare in general, so there could be broad strategic considerations I don’t understand.
What would that mean for my actions? IDK! I’m not a charity evaluator. But for me personally that consciousness would widen the error bars on my opinion of Sinergia, certainly. I think charity evaluation is extremely difficult, for reasons like this.
Sorry if it came across like this post was intended to be feedback for you specifically—your post was just one of the most recent examples that came to mind of charity evaluation being done publicly. I have no idea if anything I’m saying here applies in the case of Sinergia.
No worries! The reason we thought you were saying this applies to Sinergia (and our review of them) is because your post says:
people have criticized charities for having publicly facing messages that don’t always align with what the critic thinks is right. This group Vetted Causes (example) is just one recent example of this sort of pattern.
Could you clarify what you meant when you said Vetted Causes is an example of this pattern?
If you think it is always unacceptable to provide false information to the public, even if that’s a part of an organization’s theory of change, I do disagree.
What we asked was if you think it is acceptable for Sinergia to provide the false information that they did about Alibem’s surgical castration practices. Could you please clarify this specific point before we move on to broader points?
To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don’t have sufficient context to know if they’re accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven’t followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia—I’d need to be an insider to know that.
So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes’ review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization’s potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals—I’m raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia’s private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!
While I think you’re last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I’m nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible).
Hello,
Thank you for your input regarding our Sinergia review.
We have criticized Sinergia for providing false information to the public. For example, here is some of the false information Sinergia provided related to Alibem:
On page 30 of Alibem’s 2023 Sustainability Report, Alibem states they will “Maintain immunocastration instead of surgical castration – a procedure that was voluntarily eliminated from the Company’s protocols in 2010.”
However, on page 20 of Sinergia’s Pigs in Focus 2023 Report, Sinergia indicates that in 2022 Alibem had not banned surgical castration, but in 2023 Alibem had banned surgical castration. Further, Sinergia took credit for getting Alibem to ban surgical castration “by 2023” (see Cell K4).
Even if providing this false information to the public leads to strategic advantages (such as more funding for Sinergia), we do not think it is acceptable; especially since this false information is being used to promote Sinergia and encourage donations. We are curious if you disagree.
Sorry if it came across like this post was intended to be feedback for you specifically—your post was just one of the most recent examples that came to mind of charity evaluation being done publicly. I meant to find more examples but decided doing so would lead me to procrastinate on posting. I have no idea if anything I’m saying here applies in the case of Sinergia.
If you think it is always unacceptable to provide false information to the public, even if that’s a part of an organization’s theory of change, I do disagree. Using the example of corporate campaigns the commenter above shared, if a nonprofit was trying to target a specific company to change their welfare standards, communicating at least slightly inaccurate information to the public might in some cases be extremely effective (I have no idea if this is true or not, I’m not a campaigner—I just share it to illustrate my point).
In the context of not-otherwise-strategic self-promotion, it was 100% certain that shared information was false and solely put forward on the website because they wanted to drum up donations and for no reason of strategy, I wouldn’t think that was good. Although I also presume that sort of thing is relatively common (depending on the scale of the falsehood) and not necessarily correlated one way or the other with effectiveness.
But given that I don’t actually know what Sinergia’s full strategy is, and the fact that Sinergia has several types of programs where I could easily imagine there being value in certain kinds of false statements, I’d need to do a lot more research to come to even a low-confidence opinion. And even then, I’d still want to be conscious of the possibility that (1) I’m not an insider to Sinergia, so there could be relevant info I don’t have access to or they can’t share and (2) I’m not an insider on farmed animal welfare in general, so there could be broad strategic considerations I don’t understand.
What would that mean for my actions? IDK! I’m not a charity evaluator. But for me personally that consciousness would widen the error bars on my opinion of Sinergia, certainly. I think charity evaluation is extremely difficult, for reasons like this.
No worries! The reason we thought you were saying this applies to Sinergia (and our review of them) is because your post says:
Could you clarify what you meant when you said Vetted Causes is an example of this pattern?
What we asked was if you think it is acceptable for Sinergia to provide the false information that they did about Alibem’s surgical castration practices. Could you please clarify this specific point before we move on to broader points?
To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don’t have sufficient context to know if they’re accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven’t followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia—I’d need to be an insider to know that.
So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes’ review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization’s potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals—I’m raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia’s private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!
While I think you’re last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I’m nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible).