(I express no opinion on whether ACE’s recommendations in 2025 are being influenced by “woke ideology” in a way a meaningful number of donors would find objectionable, so I wrote the comment below about an evaluator more generically.)
Pressuring an organization to commit to flagging cases in which “woke ideology” (or similar controversial factor) upgraded or downgraded a classification might be more viable. That’s imperfect, but so is the idea of a secondary organization trying to identify and flag those cases.
An evaluator’s best defense against claims of bias might be that it’s a private organization that can consider whatever it wants (as long as it is sufficiently transparent about that so would-be donors are not misled). I could respect that, but I think that rationale would affect the extent to which other community actors should be deferring to the evaluator absent flagging. For instance, when effective-giving organizations defer to an evaluator to decide which organizations can receive donations on their website, it is implicitly ratifying the evaluator’s idiosyncrasies in a sense. That strikes me as more problematic than the direct effect of evaluator’s recommendations—it closes off third-party opportunities for disfavored organizations, gives one organization’s views on a controversial topic too much weight, and makes interorganizational cooperation unreasonably difficult.
(I express no opinion on whether ACE’s recommendations in 2025 are being influenced by “woke ideology” in a way a meaningful number of donors would find objectionable, so I wrote the comment below about an evaluator more generically.)
Pressuring an organization to commit to flagging cases in which “woke ideology” (or similar controversial factor) upgraded or downgraded a classification might be more viable. That’s imperfect, but so is the idea of a secondary organization trying to identify and flag those cases.
An evaluator’s best defense against claims of bias might be that it’s a private organization that can consider whatever it wants (as long as it is sufficiently transparent about that so would-be donors are not misled). I could respect that, but I think that rationale would affect the extent to which other community actors should be deferring to the evaluator absent flagging. For instance, when effective-giving organizations defer to an evaluator to decide which organizations can receive donations on their website, it is implicitly ratifying the evaluator’s idiosyncrasies in a sense. That strikes me as more problematic than the direct effect of evaluator’s recommendations—it closes off third-party opportunities for disfavored organizations, gives one organization’s views on a controversial topic too much weight, and makes interorganizational cooperation unreasonably difficult.