A lot of EA is focused on charity evaluation, which involves looking at a charity's strategy and impact and cost-effectiveness.
But to analyze cost-effectiveness well, you have to understand what the charity is actually trying to do. When the charity's strategy is (1) straightforward and (2) pubicly acceptable, this is easy to do. Give Directly gives folks living in extreme poverty money to make their lives better. You can measure what they do (giving people money) and the output (how happy people are) -- it can be complicated to do the latter, but there is a robust research ecosystem dedicated to that, lots of RCTs and other studies to point to, etc.
What happens when a charity doesn't have an intelligible-to-nonexperts or public facing strategy? Consider a hypothetical animal welfare charity trying to influence scientific research to be more animal friendly. I've chosen this example specifically because (AFAIK) there are no strongly EA aligned charities trying to do this; I'm not thinking of any group in particular.
Instead of doing this in an obvious way (telling everyone that they are trying to change scientific practice) they think it's more effective to play some kind of 4D chess. They are planning to ingratiate themselves to scientists, do everything they can to look like insiders, and change the field from the inside. They plan to fund some scientists to do work that harms animals but is less harmful than status quo methods, for example, because they are planning to do some kind of slow-scale modification of practices one step at a time. And because a lot of their staff are scientist themselves, they have a detailed inside knowledge of academia works that feeds into their strategic decisions.
How does this hypothetical charity talk about their work? There are two problems:
- Talking publicly about what they are trying to do is literally antithetical to their strategy. So a random donor or even possibly a charity evaluator who reaches out to them to assess cost effectiveness literally cannot be told the actual mission along which to assess cost effectiveness.
- Even if they are speaking to someone who can safely be told their actual mission, if that person is not an expert in academic culture, they may not understand why the group has made the decision they have. These decisions rely on a deep knowledge of academia and scientists and how scientists choose what methods they use. It would take a significant amount of time to explain to Average Joe Donor why they have chosen the approach they are taking; time that could be spent focusing on their mission.
I bring up this problem because I've had it in my work, and I've seen it in the work of others. I know of an EA charity whose long term mission, if discussed publicly, would not be as effective. They can't post on the EA forum about what they are actually trying to do. I won't say who they are or even which part of EA they are in because I don't want to mess things up for them!
The reason I bring this up is that people have criticized charities for having publicly facing messages that don't always align with what the critic thinks is right. This group Vetted Causes (example) is just one recent example of this sort of pattern.
But a lot of the time, these critics are not necessarily well-positioned to understand what is going on. They might not be enough of an insider to know the strategy of the organization, or they might not have enough context on the space the organization operates in to understand the strategic choices made.
I obviously wish things were different and the world was such we could all have EA transparency norms and do our work well, but it isn't. I'm aware this places the average donor in a difficult position: how can you tell if one of these two things is going on, or if the charity is just bad at it's work? I'm not sure; I definitely don't have great answers here. I would just encourage people to wonder, before they criticize groups whose strategies they don't understand, if they don't really have the full picture.
I think that the animal welfare space is especially opaque for strategic reasons. For example, most of the publicly available descriptions of corporate animal welfare strategy are, in my opinion, not particularly accurate. I think most of the actual strategy becoming public would make it significantly less effective. I don't think it is kept secret with a deep amount of intentionality, but more like there is a shared understanding among many of the best campaigners to not share exactly how they are working outside a circle of collaborators to avoid strategies losing effectiveness.
I think outside organizations' ability to evaluate the effectiveness of individual corporate campaigning organizations (including ACE unfortunately) is really low due to this (I think that evaluating ecosystems of organizations / the intervention as a whole is easier though).
Yeah that's a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn't really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise -- I'm pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don't know how I'd advise other people who aren't in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I'm not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns...
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn't be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn't really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.