Animal Charity Evaluators: Fair or Biased?
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an organization that writes reviews of animal charities. Although ACE markets itself as an independent evaluator, serious concerns have been raised regarding ACE's relationships with the charities they evaluate. This includes concerns raised by former ACE employees, who have accused ACE of:
- Promoting "organizations run by their friends";
- Lying about their relationships with the charities they endorse; and
- Making biased recommendations that have "nothing to do with evidence."
After looking into these accusations, we identified relationships between ACE and charities it recommends that we find concerning.
Example: ACE's Director Used to Work for an ACE Top Charity
One of the charities ACE recommends is called Sinergia Animal.
On November 10, 2024, Sinergia advertised that they help 1.7 million animals annually, citing calculations ACE made in 2020.
But just 3 weeks later, Sinergia advertised that they help 113 million animals annually (a 6500% increase), this time citing calculations ACE made in 2024 under a new methodology.
We found this massive jump concerning, so we looked into the relationship between ACE and Sinergia. We then discovered that ACE's executive director (Stien van der Ploeg) was a fundraising consultant for Sinergia less than a year before becoming ACE's executive director. This 6500% increase occurred in the very first evaluation of Sinergia to begin under Stien van der Ploeg's leadership, and it resulted in massive metrics for Sinergia to advertise:
Even under ACE's 2024 methodology, these cost-effectiveness metrics are exceptionally high. For comparison, in 2024 ACE calculated that the charity ÇHKD helps fewer than 7 hens per dollar. This is significantly lower than what ACE calculated for Sinergia, despite the fact that ÇHKD and Sinergia both used the same strategy to help hens (corporate outreach), and are both recommended by ACE.
Closing Thoughts
Sinergia is not the only ACE-recommended charity where concerns like this exist. For years, similar concerns have been raised by various members of the animal protection community.
Although ACE markets itself as independent, we disagree with this characterization.
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References
Key Quote: “Recommendations to Trust[:] ACE builds on more than a decade of experience in assessing charities' effectiveness. Our independent researchers are specialized in animal welfare issues and evidence-based solutions to ensure your donation helps animals as much as possible.”
Key Quote: Sadly, the more power and money this organization gets, the worse the animal movement will become, as they will continue to promote very bad research / evaluations and organizations run by their friends.
Reviews are incredibly biased and help bigger organizations that know what to say. Staff routinely spoke of being "close" with CEOs of different organizations that were reviewed, but then would deny these relationships when convenient and routinely rate these organizations highly [...] A culture of lying, nepotism and defending the indefensible.
Decisions were made in a completely arbitrary way, that had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. The focus was more on what looked good to funders, rather than what the evidence actually showed. A huge amount of nepotism and people meeting up with folks from charities that ACE recommended casually / being friends with them, without viewing this as a conflict of interest [...] Overall, in no way does what it says it's doing (using evidence to make unbiased recommendations).