Giving What We Can

Summary:

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund directs funding to highly effective organisations working to improve animal welfare. When you donate to this fund, the Giving What We Can research team will pool your money with other donors’ contributions and allocate quarterly, working with the evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to maximise impact. Currently, the research team plans to allocate half of this fund to the Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) and half to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work.

You might want to donate to this fund if:

• You care about reducing animal suffering.
• You want to make a concrete difference in the lives of farmed and wild animals.
• You want to be confident your money will go to highly effective funding opportunities, based on the latest research of the Giving What We Can research team, in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers they’ve vetted.

Learn more about the types of problems donors help solve when they donate to this fund.

General information about the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund

What is the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund and how does it work?

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund is one of three funds managed by Giving What We Can. Each of these funds directs donations based on our research team’s latest research on charity evaluators and their recommendations, with the aim to help donors with a variety of worldviews maximise their impact. All of these Giving What We Can managed funds work the same way: Giving What We Can collects your donation, pools it with the donations of other donors, and then allocates the funds to highly effective projects working within the fund’s cause area.

What types of projects does the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund support?

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund supports projects that aim to make a concrete difference in the lives of farmed and wild animals, for instance those living lives of extreme suffering on factory farms, or those suffering as a result of various factors (including disease and parasites) in the wild. Given the early stage of the effective animal advocacy field and the grantmaking and evaluation within it, the projects the fund supports will generally be less well-evidenced and more hits-based than most projects funded by our Global Health and Wellbeing Fund. Additionally, they generally have a more direct path to impact (and one that is more easily measurable) than projects funded by our Risks and Resilience Fund.

Some examples of the kinds of projects the fund might support include efforts to secure cage-free commitments from corporations and governments, research and advocacy projects related to developing and promoting alternative protein sources, movement growth initiatives, such as supporting new animal welfare advocacy groups in high-priority countries, and research projects that aim to better understand how we can best help wild animals.

Can you provide more details about where my money will go?

Grants from the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund may take a variety of forms, based on the funding opportunities our research team believes to be exceptionally impactful given their latest research. These opportunities will be determined in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers identified — through the research team’s evaluator investigations —to be particularly well-suited to helping donors maximise their impact. More specifically, this may include allocations to:

• A fund run by an evaluator the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to the EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund).
• Charities or projects recommended by an evaluator/grantmaker the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to Fish Welfare Initiative, based on the recommendation of EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund).
• Charities or projects the research team has reason to believe are highly impactful, including cases where this reasoning isn’t the result of deferring to a vetted evaluator. (See the relevant section of our report on ACE for why this fund is planning to grant to The Humane League).

Where has the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund granted to in the past?

This is a new fund as of November 2023; it made its first round of quarterly grants in Q1 of 2024, reflective of the balance received in Q4 2023. The full Q4 balance was £8,120.28 GBP along with $80,221.88 USD. As expected, 50% of donations to this fund were granted to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and 50% to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work based on our recent evaluations of their work. The grant recipients shared the following:

• EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund
  The EA AWF will allocate these funds to expand its grant program, thereby enhancing support for some exemplary initiatives aimed at improving animal welfare. This may encompass endeavors dedicated to enhancing the well-being of farmed chickens or fish, while also directing attention towards geographically neglected regions beyond the US and significant parts of Europe. Further, the allocation of these resources should help facilitate collaborative alliances among various animal welfare groups, amplifying their impact overall. You can see the Animal Welfare Fund’s previous grant recipients here and here.
  
• THL (Corporate Campaigns Program)
  Approximately 4 billion hens are trapped in battery cages each year — undergoing one of the worst forms of animal suffering. Thanks to the generosity of donors to GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund, THL is pressuring the world’s largest companies to commit to ending the use of battery cages in their global supply chain. Our current focus is on multinational companies headquartered in Asia—where around 68% of the world’s egg-laying hens live. Building on the momentum from recent victories against major Asian companies like Toridoll and Jollibee, we will continue to advance progress in Asia by pressuring an iconic Japanese mayonnaise manufacturer through corporate negotiations, behind-the-scenes pressure tactics, and, if necessary, a public campaign. If successful, we estimate that a commitment from this company to use cage-free eggs in its mayo would spare 3.5 million hens from suffering in battery cages each year, once implemented.
  
  Please note that the Giving What We Can research team may or may not identify new funding opportunities (outside of The Humane League’s corporate campaign work and those recommended by the Animal Welfare Fund) in future grantmaking rounds.

Donating to the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund

Why you might donate to this fund

Previously, we recommended several different top-rated funds for each of the cause areas we believe to be particularly impactful. However, donors often weren’t sure how to choose between these top-rated funds working in the same area. The goal of this fund (and the other two funds managed by Giving What We Can) is to provide a single high-impact default fund option for each cause area. We think these funds are a great choice for most donors, as our research team makes allocation decisions in consultation with the evaluators and grantmakers they believe to be best suited for maximising impact in each particular cause area.

Why you might not donate to this fund

Our funds are currently only advised by the grantmakers and evaluators our research team has already looked into as part of their 2023 evaluations of evaluators and deemed to be the best candidates for informing our grantmaking. This means there may be other impact-focused evaluators our research team has not yet looked into but that you believe to be better matched to your personal values and worldview

If you prefer to look into impact-focused charity evaluators on your own and follow the recommendations of the one(s) you believe best suit you, or do your own research into individual funds and charities, we recommend you read our research team’s evaluator reports, as they provide information that most donors could not access on their own.

How does donating to this fund compare to similar giving opportunities?

Donating to this fund vs donating to the Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds)

Currently, we plan to allocate half of this fund to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund which supports a range of projects the fund managers believe to be particularly impactful in the animal welfare space. You can read more about the Animal Welfare Fund in our report. We plan to allocate the other half of this fund to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work. You can read more about our decision to do so in our report on Animal Charity Evaluators.

One other notable difference is that the Giving What We Can research team may consult with other expert evaluators (who can recommend grants in areas that might not be covered by the Animal Welfare Fund’s work) in the future, based on the outcomes of their ongoing research. Thus, donating to this fund allows you to set up a single recurring donation and know that your money will be allocated based on the most up-to-date evaluator research from the Giving What We Can research team.

Donating to this fund vs donating to one of Animal Charity Evaluators’ funds

To understand how the approach taken by this fund differs from Animal Charity Evaluators’ Recommended Charities and Movement Grants funds, we recommend reading our Animal Charity Evaluators report.

Donating to this fund vs donating to a different animal welfare fund

We currently only recommend EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund as a top-rated fund option within animal welfare. (See above for how donating to the Animal Welfare Fund differs from this fund.) However, we may add additional recommended funds in the future. In other words, the fact that another animal welfare fund doesn’t appear on our list of recommendations does not necessarily mean it’s not an impactful giving opportunity, but may mean that our research team hasn’t yet looked into it as part of their recent evaluations. As such, we can’t (yet) be sure how these opportunities differ from donating to the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund managed by our research team, except to say that we are confident the allocations our Effective Animal Advocacy Fund makes will always reflect our research team’s latest research into which evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to help donors maximise their impact. As the research team looks into additional evaluators, we will revisit both our list of recommendations and who we consult with to allocate the donations collected via our funds.

Donating to this fund vs donating to the Humane League’s corporate campaign work

We typically recommend donating to funds over charities as a general rule of thumb; this option capitalises on the free expertise of fund managers and advisors, whose job it is to direct the money received as effectively as possible given the most up-to-date information available to them.

Additionally, we plan to allocate half of this fund to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and half to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work, which means you’ll be able to support a broader range of projects by donating to this fund than directly to The Humane League.

An added benefit of choosing a Giving What We Can fund over selecting from our individual top-rated charities is that you won’t need to manually change your selections later if we update our recommendations. That said, if you prefer to have greater control over which projects you support within a particular cause area, we recommend selecting from our top-rated charities, which are currently limited to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work.

Learn more about the advantages of donating through a fund.

Donating to this fund vs donating to other supported programs working on animal welfare

This fund will allocate based on the research team’s latest research into evaluators and their recommendations. However, our research team doesn’t look at every evaluator. Additionally, the evaluators they look at don’t evaluate every charity. (Instead, impact-focused evaluators tend to identify particularly promising programs and then find organisations that implement these programs especially well, though they also don’t have the capacity to evaluate every promising charity.) If you prefer to widen the scope of the organisations you support, you may be interested in investigating some of the other supported programs on our donation platform that we haven’t (for various reasons) included in our recommendations.

The difference between donating to our other supported programs working in animal welfare and donating to this fund is that we are confident in the expected impact of the projects this fund will grant to, while we have varying degrees of confidence in the impact of our other supported programs. (Some may turn out to be more impactful than the projects we’ll grant to, but haven’t yet been looked into by an evaluator our research team has vetted, and some may be significantly less impactful.) You can read more about each supported program on its dedicated page.