The Humane League (Corporate campaign programs)
Charity

The Humane League

Corporate Animal Welfare Campaigns

THL's corporate campaigns program promotes farmed animal welfare through industry pressure and advocacy

What problem is The Humane League working on?

According to The Humane League, 94% of all animals raised for food are on factory farms. This means that 130 billion farmed land animals suffer every day. Chickens are one of the animal groups most affected, and often suffer in unimaginable ways, including by being kept in very small battery cages.

What does The Humane League do?

Through its corporate campaigns, the Humane League (THL) works relentlessly to end the abuse of chickens raised for food. Specifically:

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of THL?1.

Evidence in favour of the cost-effectiveness of THL’s corporate campaign work includes:

In 2023, we made an exception to our usual approach of evaluating evaluators and directly relying on their recommendations, and included THL’s corporate campaigns in our list of recommendations, despite the program not being recommended by one of our vetted evaluators. We now consider the evidence we relied on for this recommendation to be out of date and decided in our 2024 round of evaluations that we could not justify going beyond the scope of our evaluating evaluators project to potentially renew the THL recommendation.

To be clear that our decision does not reflect any negative update on THL’s work. Instead this is reflective of evidence being out of date and us maintaining the scope of the evaluating evaluators project.

For more on our 2023 decision to recommend The Humane League’s corporate campaigns — and why we made an exception to our usual approach— see our 2023 evaluation report on Animal Charity Evaluators. For more information on our 2024 decision to discontinue our recommendation of THL see our page on our 2024 evaluator research.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.

Although Animal Charity Evaluators' Movement Grants program is now one of our vetted evaluators, Animal Charity Evaluators' Charity Evaluation program (which recommends THL) is not.