Animal Charity Evaluators
Recommended Charity Fund
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) Recommended Charity Fund supports the highest-value funding opportunities among its recommended charities, which are those that have the greatest impact helping animals per dollar.
What problem is ACE's Recommended Charity Fund working on?
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is dedicated to finding and promoting the most effective ways to help animals. Through evidence-based research, it assists generous donors, compassionate volunteers, and dedicated advocates in making informed decisions on how to help as many animals as possible.
The Recommended Charity Fund is for anyone who wishes to support ACE’s recommended charities through a single donation, simplifying the process so that you can easily give to effective animal charities.
What projects does the ACE Recommended Charity Fund support?
The Fund supports ACE’s current Top Charities and Standout Charities. Recent grant recipients include:
- Faunalytics
- Good Food Institute
- The Humane League
- Wild Animal Initiative
- Compassion In World Farming USA
- Fish Welfare Initiative
- Sinergia Animal
- xiaobuVEGAN (Vegans of Shanghai)
Its disbursements are determined by ACE’s research team. For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients and frequently asked questions on the ACE website.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of ACE’s Recommended Charity fund?
The Giving What We Can research team looked into ACE as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations, and decided to not currently rely on their charity recommendations. However, we still expect choosing ACE recommended programs to be significantly more impactful than choosing animal welfare programs without an impact-focused evaluation behind them, and we remain open to (some of) ACE's recommendations being among the most cost-effective donation opportunities in animal welfare.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.