Hi Amit! Thanks so much for your question, I appreciate your interest in verifying our underlying calculations. Our team went back and forth quite a bit on publicly sharing the data, but we ultimately decided that there was too great a risk of this data being misinterpreted without all the context and historical knowledge that informs it. Plus our estimate is intentionally more conservative than others (notably Rethink Priorities and ACE), so it didn't feel totally necessary. That said, we are having a webinar where we'll share a high-level overview of the data in a few weeks. If you'd like to attend or view the recording, please reach out to me at [email protected] and I can get you an invitation. Thanks!

I wholeheartedly agree :) Thanks, Pablo! 

Hi Pablo! I wanted to offer two thoughts that are admittedly not answers to your questions, but complicate how I think about questions like this. 

1. I don't typically think of questions like this as either/or questions, but "to what degree" questions. A movement that successfully eliminates animal suffering, ends factory farming, or however you might frame the goal of organizations like THL and GFI will likely require both approaches. The question then is to what degree should each intervention be funded to create an optimal movement ecosystem. 

2. One consideration that I wanted to offer, which may not fit neatly into a model like what you're looking for, is the role of philanthropy as a funding source for that intervention type. From what I understand, an organization like GFI is able to attract non-philanthropic sources of funding, like venture capital and perhaps government funding, as you suggest. An advocacy organization like THL, due to its adversarial role, is not. This increases the importance of philanthropic funding for an organization like THL. 

A marginal $ 5000 should go to:

FAW offers a clearer path to tangible impact than WAW from what I can see. While WAW is massive in scale, the field is still largely in a the research phase, lacking the proven interventions needed to absorb large amounts of funding effectively. FAW has established interventions that are already delivering measurable results. I think my personal bias is more toward tractability, given that both FAW and WAW are neglected IMO.

Thanks Vasco! At this point, we've decided not to do so, for the reasons I mention above and because we don't see someone outside the organization being able to use the data in an effective way. Our perspective was that it was most important to share the calculation and the methodology. If our position on this changes in the future, we will definitely let you know!

Hi Vasco, thanks for these questions!

Yes, we went back and forth quite a bit on sharing data to back up our calculation, as we understand that doing so is the norm. We ultimately decided not to because we felt there was a significant chance of the data being misinterpreted. What would make sense to share is our table of hens impacted and funds spent on an annual basis, which reflects how we track both impact and costs. However, most people we asked to review the data intuitively tried to draw inaccurate conclusions about individual years, when a key piece of our methodology is that costs and impact don’t typically occur in the same year, among other misinterpretations. 

And thanks for the point about acceleration. The way our model is presented allows someone who has this view to then multiply our number by the number of years of suffering they estimate to be averted, whether that's due to a switch to barns for another reason, the end of intensive confinement due to technological advances, or whatever else may accelerate this transition. We don’t take a view on this, but if you do, you can add that layer onto our model.

Hi Abe, thanks for this post, it was really interesting! I largely agree with you, and I want to add some complexity from my decade of fundraising experience.

So it might be significantly easier in principle to convince a philanthropist to move from giving at the 1 unit to the 10 unit level, even if not arguing on the basis of cost-effectiveness: there are just more opportunities to move a donor from 1 to 10 units of value than from 101 to 110."

In principle, sure! But I think you miss the practical reality that this is incredibly difficult. Most philanthropists' giving, especially non-EA philanthropists' giving, is a very complex personal (or institutional) decision informed by a variety of hard-to-influence factors. So while there are many more opportunities to shift philanthropists giving at the 1 unit level, the actual success rate is low. I suspect this is why many advisors focus on shifting EA or near-EA giving.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to shift ineffective funders—most fundraisers I know engage in this work, and do it really well. But in philanthropy, we focus a lot on affinity: how likely is this person to engage with a cause at all? People without any indication of affinity are just very unlikely to support your cause. I think your post gets at this, as you call the New York foundation example a huge victory, which I wholeheartedly agree with. And I often hear an expectation that it should be easier to bring in new donors, when in reality this work is very painstaking, can take years, and you fail far more often than you succeed. 

I'm glad it was helpful! No, the follow-up would not necessarily be online, unfortunately. It's something we track internally for our own strategic purposes and impact assessment. But a lot of progress is made through behind-the-scenes negotiations—we only launch public campaigns if companies don't make progress during the negotiation phase. And if there is a public campaign, sometimes part of the final negotiation is that we agree to take all our public materials down in exchange for the company publicly reporting its progress. 

Trader Joe's is a bit of a weird example—it seems like they are making progress (they have lots of in-store signage, for example) but they haven't publicly reported their cage-free progress. But since we suspect they're already making progress, they wouldn't be a particularly meaningful campaign target. So your suspicion about Trader Joe's is right, there haven't been follow-up campaigns, but you couldn't generalize that to other companies.

Thanks Elijah! Great summary. To your question "Why did they put in effort if not to get customers to see them more positively? I would guess that follow through is much more about avoiding negative publicity than gaining positive reputation." This is basically right. Some companies have been more proactive, even fulfilling their pledges early. Some drag their feet and it takes public pressure for them to move. Groups like The Humane League (which I work for, as a disclaimer) have been running the same types of campaigns used to get the original commitments to ensure that companies actually implement those pledges. These have been successful, but avian flu in the US is a major complicating factor.

As for gaining new commitments, this is now focused outside the US, so maybe that's where your impression came from? For more context, Asia, where the majority of hens live, is focused on getting new commitments. Latin America is a mix of securing new commitments and working on accountability. Parts of Europe are widely cage-free with other parts still advancing this. Africa is securing new commitments, as well as convincing company to stay cage-free as a lot of farming is less industrialized, but companies elsewhere want to export their cages there. 

I'm writing this comment as both a fundraiser and someone who has been involved in leading an organization's participation in an evaluation process. I don't have the knowledge base to engage on whether ACE or Sinergia's claims or evaluations are accurate, but reading your posts makes me worry that you lack some essential understanding of how charities work, which would be greatly improved if you discussed your reviews with charities prior to publishing.

I think you're underestimating how difficult cost-effectiveness estimates are in animal advocacy. The work is highly complex and interdependent, and reliable impact data is not always available.  My organization does not currently publish our own cost-effectiveness estimate because we have found it too complex and time consuming to meet the standard of accuracy we anticipate some supporters or potential supporters might hold—essentially out of fear of reviews like yours—and rely on external evaluators like ACE and Rethink Priorities, though their estimates are not really suitable for a general donor audience as they are not widely accessible. 

As we have been developing our measurement & evaluation capacity, we are working on creating a cost-effectiveness estimate for our work. Seeing your reviews makes me very hesitant to go through with that process, even though I think overall publishing such an estimate would increase our funding and enable us to spare more animals from suffering. We know that our estimate would be imperfect (different reviewers use different methodologies—there is simply disagreement about what matters and the best methodology) and we would plan to publish our assumptions and work, in line with your expectation that "charities to provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence to justify their publicly stated important claims." 

In fact, I think reviewers reaching out to us makes us more likely to publish evidence for our claims, contrary to your Other Reason #1, as we understand the expectation for this and what kind of evidence we might need to collect and publish. On the other hand, anonymous, scathing reviews make us less likely to publish anything at all. In addition, I disagree with the level of seriousness you assign these types of mistakes and the idea that there needs to be some sort of severe public accountability. There is enormous pressure to produce cost-effectiveness estimates because they are such effective fundraising tools, and too make them broadly legible, contrary to what you or an EA reviewer would expect of them. I would conservatively estimate that I've been asked by a potential supporter, meta-charity, or other interested party for a cost-effectiveness estimate at least every month since I started fundraising for an animal advocacy non-profit over 8 years ago. In that time, I've seen plenty of cost-effectiveness estimates be revised, or fall in and out of favor. I'm not defending deliberate misinformation, but without talking to charities I think you have no way of knowing whether those mistakes are deliberate, simply mistakes, or valid philosophical disagreements.