lauren_mee 🔸 comments on AMA: GWWC research team

[lauren_mee 🔸]

I’m just commenting here, but it’s in reference to the evaluating the evaluator’s posts and comments below. There is some confusion as to where GWWC’s recommendation for THL’s corporate campaign work is coming from? Is there some strong evidence for this that was not published? Why is THL considered but no other direct charities?

If we were going off the conclusion of the evaluating the evaluators shouldn’t GWWC just be recommending EAWF?

Thanks for all your hard work on this :)

[Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸]

Thanks Lauren for your question, and thanks Vasco for helping to answer it! I’ve replied to the comment under the post on our evaluations that I believe you’re referring to, and am happy to elaborate on any part of my answer there (and what’s in the report /​ what Vasco shared) if helpful.

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Hi Lauren,

You and other interested readers may want to check this section of GWWC’s evaluation of ACE. Here is the part of the section I see as most relevant to your comment:

ACE helpfully — and on very short notice — provided us with private documentation to elaborate on the cases for three of its 2023 charity recommendations. Unfortunately — potentially in part because of time constraints ACE had — we still didn’t find these cases to provide enough evidence on the marginal cost-effectiveness of the charities to justify relying on them for our recommendations. However, for one of the charities recommended by ACE — The Humane League — we reasoned that a strong enough case would be made by combining ACE’s recommendation with further evidence in favour of the marginal cost-effectiveness of THL’s work on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare:

• A 2018 evaluation by Founders Pledge of THL’s corporate campaigns’ cost-effectiveness at that point in time.

• A 2019 review by Rethink Priorities of the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare more generally.

• A direct referral from Open Philanthropy’s Farm Animal Welfare team — the largest funder in the impact-focused animal welfare space — on THL indeed currently being funding-constrained, i.e. that it has ample room to cost-effectively use marginal funds on corporate campaigns and that there aren’t strong diminishing returns to providing THL with extra funding.

To be clear, there are strong limitations to this recommendation:

• We didn’t ourselves evaluate THL’s work directly, nor did we compare it to other charities (e.g., ACE’s 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 haven’t 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 “low-hanging fruits” in terms of cost-effectiveness are picked first.

Taken together, all of this means we expect funding THL’s current global corporate campaigns to be (much) less cost-effective than the corporate campaigns in 2016-2017, which were evaluated in those reports. However, we still think funding them is likely highly cost-effective, and the most justifiable charity recommendation we can currently make, based on the available evidence and our limited time. We also think that recommending at least one competitive alternative to the AWF in the animal welfare space — if we transparently and justifiably can — is valuable. We hence decided to make this exception to evaluating only evaluators to make an individual charity recommendation, motivated by our overarching principles of usefulness, justifiability, and transparency.