I think that the animal welfare space is especially opaque for strategic reasons. For example, most of the publicly available descriptions of corporate animal welfare strategy are, in my opinion, not particularly accurate. I think most of the actual strategy becoming public would make it significantly less effective. I don’t think it is kept secret with a deep amount of intentionality, but more like there is a shared understanding among many of the best campaigners to not share exactly how they are working outside a circle of collaborators to avoid strategies losing effectiveness.
I think outside organizations’ ability to evaluate the effectiveness of individual corporate campaigning organizations (including ACE unfortunately) is really low due to this (I think that evaluating ecosystems of organizations / the intervention as a whole is easier though).
Yeah that’s a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn’t really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise—I’m pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don’t know how I’d advise other people who aren’t in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I’m not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns…
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn’t be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn’t really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.
I think that the animal welfare space is especially opaque for strategic reasons. For example, most of the publicly available descriptions of corporate animal welfare strategy are, in my opinion, not particularly accurate. I think most of the actual strategy becoming public would make it significantly less effective. I don’t think it is kept secret with a deep amount of intentionality, but more like there is a shared understanding among many of the best campaigners to not share exactly how they are working outside a circle of collaborators to avoid strategies losing effectiveness.
I think outside organizations’ ability to evaluate the effectiveness of individual corporate campaigning organizations (including ACE unfortunately) is really low due to this (I think that evaluating ecosystems of organizations / the intervention as a whole is easier though).
Yeah that’s a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn’t really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise—I’m pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don’t know how I’d advise other people who aren’t in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I’m not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns…
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn’t be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn’t really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.