Thanks, Vasco. Yes, we compared their cage-free models against our 2025 estimates for THL and Animal Welfare Observatory before deciding. Some of the differences in our modelling approach include different assumptions about counterfactual years credited, attribution, implementation probability, and costs outside the evaluation window. The path to impact also varies, with THL’s and Sinergia’s modelled impact coming entirely from accountability work, while ÇHKD’s comes mostly from new commitments and completed transitions. With accountability work specifically, we have a lot more uncertainty around our estimates on counterfactual years of impact. When we applied shared assumptions across the four models, the estimates fell within an order of magnitude of each other, with overlapping ranges, and we concluded the differences weren’t robust enough to drive a decision on their own. Cost-effectiveness estimates are also only one input to our decisions, and on the fuller picture our opinion is that both Sinergia and ÇHKD deserved recommendation.

Animal Charity Evaluators Updates

Announcing our 2026 Recommended Charities
 

Today, November 10, we shared our 2026 Recommended Charities. After months of in-depth evaluations examining each charity's programs, evidence, finances, organizational health, and what they'd do with more funding, three charities earned recommendations this year, and five retained their status from 2025:

• New: Greener by Default, which works with institutions to make plant-based meals the default
• Renewed after re-evaluation:
  • Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği, Türkiye's only farmed animal advocacy organization, which runs corporate cage-free campaigns through Kafessiz Türkiye (Türkiye Without Cages) alongside a newer program building the welfare science base for farmed fishes
  • Sinergia Animal, which drives welfare improvements for farmed animals across Latin America and Southeast Asia through corporate outreach, institutional meat reduction, and programs for pigs' welfare
• Retaining their status from 2025: Animal Welfare Observatory, Shrimp Welfare Project, Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira, The Humane League, and Wild Animal Initiative.
   

Our latest influenced giving metrics

In our 2025–2026 fiscal year, we influenced $7.3 million in donations that our Recommended Charities would not have received without ACE’s work and your support. This amount is part of at least $14.7 million in total donations we influenced and represents the highest annual counterfactual impact from ACE-influenced funding for the second year in a row. For every dollar ACE spent on our charity evaluations and recommendations, we generated $7.03 in donations for effective animal charities that wouldn’t otherwise have been given.

Through Movement Grants, we awarded $2.3 million to 54 promising organizations and projects around the world. Of this amount, we estimate that $1.6 million was counterfactual funding, or support these groups wouldn’t have received otherwise.

Greatest Needs Fund: Allocated quarterly to where animals need funding most

Each quarter, our team decides where gifts to our Greatest Needs Fund should go: our Recommended Charity Fund, Movement Grants, or our operating costs (capped at 10%). Rather than setting allocations in advance, the fund lets us direct money to where funding gaps emerge, such as a Recommended Charity with unmet room for more funding, or a time-sensitive opportunity we’d otherwise have to pass up. Starting November 17, a generous legacy donor will match gifts to the fund.

From Animal Charity Evaluators
 

Opportunities: 
 

Movement Grants: Applications open until October 18 (5 pm, PT)

Our latest round of Movement Grants awarded roughly $1 million to 21 different projects. To stay responsive to emerging needs, we’re shifting our focus to neglected gaps in the movement. That’s why, for this round, we’re specifically seeking applications from organizations that meet at least one of the following criteria: 

1. they are under three years old
2. they have a budget below $500,000
3. they incubate other groups, or
4. they are applying specifically for funding for monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) using an external consultant

Requests: 

How would you describe ACE?

We’re working on explaining our work more clearly. If you have a moment, we’d appreciate you sharing how you’d describe ACE in your own words in this short survey.

Where are the biggest gaps?

More funding is arriving in animal advocacy, and it’s becoming more concentrated. We’re considering how ACE’s work should evolve to fill emerging gaps. If you have thoughts on where the biggest gaps are, we’d welcome them. You can reach us at [email protected].

Updates:

New: ACE Research Database

This month we launched the ACE Research Database, which brings together thousands of studies, reviews, reports, and other research relevant to farmed and wild animal advocacy. Created for researchers, advocates, and funders, the Database now has frequent updates, refined filters, and semantic search.

Where our evaluations stand

We’ve completed in-depth evaluations for 2026, are currently writing charity reviews, and are preparing to announce and promote our Recommended Charities during the Giving Season.

We think WAI’s grantmaking criteria—such as Neglectedness, Scope, and Impact—are explicitly designed to prioritize cost-effectiveness and maximize counterfactual impact for large numbers of animals. Beyond that, their distribution may be limited by the types of projects they receive suitable applications from.

Thanks for the positive feedback! 

Shrimp Welfare Project’s ranges are narrower for a few reasons. Because SWP works directly with farmers, they can track and estimate the number of shrimp on partner farms, reducing uncertainty about the animals affected. We also either used point estimates or narrow ranges for other parameters, such as the duration of impact (based on the lifespan of electrical stunners) and the duration of improved water quality. This means the main source of uncertainty in SWP’s CEA lies in the SADs estimates, whereas other charities’ CEAs combine multiple uncertain parameters that multiply into wider ranges.

Adding uncertainty ranges to SADs would be complex, since it would involve modeling variation in welfare ranges, sentience, pain severity, and/or moral weights between pain types. We’ve chosen not to include ranges so far because of time constraints and because the final estimates are already quite broad. If we do so in the future, we’d collaborate with the organizations that produced the original SADs estimates to make sure that uncertainty is modeled appropriately.

We don’t intentionally aim to represent a broad range of approaches among our Recommended Charities. While we take steps to invite a pluralistic pool of applicants—especially from underfunded areas—those considerations don’t factor into our selection for evaluation, our assessments, or our decision making. If we thought that funding a marginal charity would have less impact than supporting the others, we wouldn’t recommend them, even if their inclusion could add more diversity of approaches to our list of Recommended Charities.

The animal advocacy movement faces deep uncertainty about which interventions will prove most effective across different regions and contexts. Supporting a mix of institutional, corporate, policy, and movement-building approaches helps generate information value, mitigates risks, and strengthens the movement’s resilience and adaptability. So while plurality isn’t a recommendation criterion, we see it as a welcome byproduct of our data and evidence-driven process.

For more background, you can see ACE’s Position on Plurality. Please note that some parts are outdated and refer to elements, such as synergy scores, that we no longer use.

Ideally, we would be fully reliant on SADs, which take into account the species' capacity to suffer as well as the intensity and duration of their suffering. However, SADs are still a new method with some speculative inputs and ongoing updates. To account for this methodological uncertainty, our CEAs show results in both SADs averted per dollar and animals helped per dollar. In our decision-making, we look at both of these metrics and more, and interpret them alongside the broader context of the intervention. 

While we have high confidence in the quality of their fellowship program (with fellows reporting high rates of improved leadership skills, increased confidence, and motivation to pursue roles to help animals), as well as in the thorough monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) that New Roots Institute conducts for their programs, we’re not sure about the extent to which fellows are significantly stronger advocates because of the fellowship, and whether they fill key talent bottlenecks. Overall, this leads us to not being convinced that their cost effectiveness is comparable to our recommended charities.

Because the outcomes and impacts of the fellowship will span decade-long careers of the fellows, it is possible that a future evaluation, when the fellows are further into their careers, will bring more insight into the cost-effectiveness of the program. Their evaluated charity review has more details and is available on our website.

Thanks for your comments and your interest in WAI’s work! 

While we agree that an established field should focus on helping the most abundant animals, we also agree with WAI’s reasoning that while building the field, having a singular focus on optimizing for the number of animals would come at the expense of other strategic field-building goals. 

We address this in WAI’s review, e.g., here: “Though not all grants funded have a very high scope, this aligns with WAI’s long-term strategy that balances maximizing immediate impact with building a diverse and engaged scientific field. This dual strategy is based on sound reasoning and endorsed by several experts we spoke to.”

ACE’s Evaluations program has a higher bar for uncertainty than Movement Grants, given that (i) the financial and non-financial benefits we direct toward recommended charities are greater, (ii) our target audiences have different expectations, and (iii) the downside risks are higher. These aversions include, but are not limited to, a lack of track record/wins/achievements, variance in possible outcomes, low probability of very high impact, and unknown probabilities.

We thought that LIC’s cost-effectiveness analysis was very promising, but it was ultimately based on hypothetical future scenarios. Unfortunately, we can’t go into further detail because it involves confidential information that, if public, could undermine their impact.

We also want to note that our understanding of a charity’s impact includes their theory of change. In LIC’s case, we considered their current track record of legal wins to be only moderate evidence that their theory of change would play out as intended, compared to SVB, where we were more convinced.