Thank you for your comment! While there is limited hard evidence on the effectiveness of ballot measures, there have been some successful cases of them improving animal welfare standards over the last few decades in the U.S. (Schukraft, 2020). We agree that citizen initiatives such as ballot measures and other types of policy work are promising interventions, and hopefully, we will see more studies backing this up soon.

- Alina

Hi Nuño, we've now published our blog post on our approach to assessing Cost Effectiveness, including a charity’s approaches to implementing interventions, their recent achievements, and the costs associated with those achievements. Thanks, Holly

Hi Ben! Thanks for question, and I'm glad you're excited about our recommendations.

The situation was as you noted: a significant portion of New Harvest's assets were in the stock of companies that had not gone public. In retrospect, when we last evaluated New Harvest in mid-late 2021, it would have been more accurate for ACE not to count assets that may be difficult to liquidate quickly, because they are not truly available to maintain operations. As you'll see in the upcoming "Our Room for More Funding Approach in 2022" blog post, we have since updated our methodology to ask charities whether they hold these types of assets.

Additionally, as New Harvest noted in their town hall, they received less in donations than expected in the first half of the year (attributed to the market downturn), which contributed to a decline in assets leading up to their post in June 2022. Thankfully, last we heard from them, they have been able to extend their runway through 2023.

- Vince

Thank you for this initial feedback, Nuño - we appreciate you taking the time. In the coming weeks, we'll be publishing one blog post for each of the evaluation criteria that we use when reviewing charities (for a total of 4 posts). The blog posts will give more detail on how we made our assessments, how this year's approach differs from previous years, and any limitations we see. The Cost Effectiveness blog post will be published on Dec 15th, so we look forward to sharing more details then.

- Elisabeth

We continuously work to improve and strengthen our evaluations process and appreciate your thoughtful and constructive critique of it. As our research team expands under new leadership, we welcome the opportunity for you to contact our team to discuss the points above as we consider improvements to our processes. We would also be more than happy to clear up any misunderstandings you’ve outlined regarding the current evaluations process we have in place. Best of luck with your submission!