CharitiesAnimal Charity Evaluators: Recommended Charity Fund
Animal Charity Evaluators: Recommended Charity Fund
Fund

Animal Charity Evaluators

Recommended Charity Fund

The Recommended Charity Fund aims to improve the wellbeing of animals globally by supporting organisations ACE has rigorously evaluated and believes to be highly-impactful.

Animal welfare

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 recommended charities. Recent grant recipients include:

  • Faunalytics
  • The Good Food Institute
  • The Humane League
  • Wild Animal Initiative
  • Fish Welfare Initiative
  • Sinergia Animal
  • Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği
  • Dansk Vegetarisk Forening
  • Legal Impact for Chickens
  • New Roots Institute
  • Shrimp Welfare Project

Its biannual 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.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of ACE’s Recommended Charity fund?1.

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.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.