Great Question! Similarly to Open Phil, ACE will also be putting out a set of research questions in January, we have solicited views from several groups in the movement to help inform our own research direction over the next year.
One particular question I’m interested in, is the trade-off that seems to exist between promising interventions and more neglected regions. i.e. countries where animal advocacy is less developed typically have organizations that are working on less effective interventions, but a grant there to build the movement may be substantially more impactful in the longer term than funding to more established regions. The combination of uncertainty of impact in different regions and across different interventions can be hard to separate out, which is why I think we’re taking the right approach currently by funding a spread of smaller opportunities.
So I would say profiles of promising countries (e.g. at ACE we’re currently looking into the BRIC countries) to better understand the opportunities and limitations of advocacy in different regions would be really useful, as well as further intervention-specific research.
Another issue is identifying good funding opportunities. In my own experience, I’ve found utilizing existing networks to be more fruitful than searching from scratch when identifying promising new funding opportunities, however I’m aware that this can lead to a bias particularly towards opportunities in N America/Europe.
Jamie_Spurgeon
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Thanks!
To add to Lewis’ response, I think this is a crucial part of the grant-making process, especially as we are granting to some organizations with more novel approaches, or in as yet neglected regions. At ACE we use 6 months as the point at which to check in with grant recipients, typically through a survey or call, and I would expect a similar process would work well for the Animal Welfare Fund.
Animal Welfare Fund AMA
Thanks for your feedback! I’ve passed this on to our development team.
Also on your point about reducing cognitive load, we found that some answers ended up too long if we included the full question, and if shortened they wouldn’t accurately convey the meaning of the question. So we opted to leave them abbreviated.
Thanks Kevin! The funds are similar in that they are both trying to identify promising EAA funding opportunities, and I would expect ACE’s EAA Fund to have a somewhat similar focus on capacity/movement building opportunities. However, there are a few differences that I can think of: (i) the ACE fund will select opportunities predominantly via an open application process (currently open). (ii) I would expect that any excess funds remaining, after smaller opportunities have been identified, would be allocated to Top and Standout charities, in the case of the ACE EAAF, or saved for future grant rounds, in the case of the AWF. (iii) The ACE EAAF will operate on a 6 month basis.
I imagine there will be more differences that become apparent once the EAAF has gone through it’s first funding round, but I hope that answers your question for now.