[Update: I no longer stand by the main point I expressed in this post. Now, I only wish ACE were less committed to using woke ideology in their evaluations, or that there were another EAA meta charity who could serve donors from the ~half of the general population who are put off by woke ideology or consider it counterproductive.]
I love Animal Charity Evaluators, and I deeply value what they are doing for animals as a meta charity. I want ACE to be as effective as possible. While I will criticize an aspect of ACE, it’s meant in the spirit of “we need a better ACE, but we definitely don’t want less ACE”.
ACE is woke, and in this post I won’t attempt to convince them to change that. I will take it as a given that ACE leadership is and will remain committed to those ideas.
However, even if they are committed to woke ideas, they still need not advertise themselves as woke, but they do. Woke ideas are highly controversial, at least half the US population finds them somewhere on the side of the spectrum from “somewhat offputting” to “absolutely abhorrent”. Therefore, even if ACE is committed to them, it’s in the interest of animals that they stop shouting it from the rooftop, so as to avoid actively alienating half the population.
ACE should not advertise a public posture on highly controversial topics that have nothing to do with animals, like abortion, whether any god exists, or the Israel/Palestinian conflict, because animals need help from all people, whatever their views on those controversial topics. And just like that, ACE should not have a public posture on the culture war, even if it has a strongly woke internal posture.
There are many examples of ACE advertising its wokeness I can recall over the years, like endorsing Ibram X Kendi’s book in a blog post (an endorsement that fortunately has now been edited out), but to take something more recent, a few months ago they published the blog post 2024 Staff Diversity Survey Results. The mere phrase “diversity survey” should have no place in a public communication because it’s such a giveaway. It’s fine if ACE wants to conduct internal staff diversity surveys, but ACE should not publish them, it should be an internal affair.
Such clear woke signaling risks alienating a substantial pool of potential donors, volunteers, and advocates who might otherwise be strong supporters of animal welfare but disagree with or are put off by these ideological stances.
ACE should not have a public posture on transgender people, homosexuality, race, indigenous peoples, or any of the other topics that are part of the culture war. While there is a benefit in publicizing intersectional views to attract support from individuals in other social justice movements, in my view this is outweighed by the significant risk of alienating a larger segment of the population whose support is also needed by animals.
(I express no opinion on whether ACE's recommendations in 2025 are being influenced by "woke ideology" in a way a meaningful number of donors would find objectionable, so I wrote the comment below about an evaluator more generically.)
Pressuring an organization to commit to flagging cases in which "woke ideology" (or similar controversial factor) upgraded or downgraded a classification might be more viable. That's imperfect, but so is the idea of a secondary organization trying to identify and flag those cases.
An evaluator's best defense against claims of bias might be that it's a private organization that can consider whatever it wants (as long as it is sufficiently transparent about that so would-be donors are not misled). I could respect that, but I think that rationale would affect the extent to which other community actors should be deferring to the evaluator absent flagging. For instance, when effective-giving organizations defer to an evaluator to decide which organizations can receive donations on their website, it is implicitly ratifying the evaluator's idiosyncrasies in a sense. That strikes me as more problematic than the direct effect of evaluator's recommendations -- it closes off third-party opportunities for disfavored organizations, gives one organization's views on a controversial topic too much weight, and makes interorganizational cooperation unreasonably difficult.