Giving What We Can

Summary:

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund directs funding to highly effective organisations working to improve animal welfare. When you donate to this fund, the Giving What We Can research team will pool your money with other donors’ contributions and allocate quarterly, working with the evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to maximise impact. Currently, the research team plans to allocate half of this fund to the Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) and half to Animal Charity Evaluators: Movement Grants.

You might want to donate to this fund if:

• You care about reducing animal suffering.
• You want to make a concrete difference in the lives of farmed and wild animals.
• You want to be confident your money will go to highly effective funding opportunities, based on the latest research of the Giving What We Can research team, in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers they’ve vetted.

See this fund's past grant rounds

General information about the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund

What is the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund and how does it work?

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund is one of three funds managed by Giving What We Can. Each of these funds directs donations based on our research team’s latest research on charity evaluators and their recommendations, with the aim to help donors with a variety of worldviews maximise their impact. All of these Giving What We Can managed funds work the same way: Giving What We Can collects your donation, pools it with the donations of other donors, and then allocates the funds to highly effective projects working within the fund’s cause area.

What types of projects does the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund support?

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund supports projects that aim to make a concrete difference in the lives of farmed and wild animals, for instance those living lives of extreme suffering on factory farms, or those suffering as a result of various factors (including disease and parasites) in the wild. Given the early stage of the effective animal advocacy field and the grantmaking and evaluation within it, the projects the fund supports will generally be less well-evidenced and more hits-based than most projects funded by our Global Health and Wellbeing Fund. Additionally, they generally have a more direct path to impact (and one that is more easily measurable) than projects funded by our Risks and Resilience Fund.

Some examples of the kinds of projects the fund might support include efforts to secure cage-free commitments from corporations and governments, research and advocacy projects related to developing and promoting alternative protein sources, movement growth initiatives, such as supporting new animal welfare advocacy groups in high-priority countries, and research projects that aim to better understand how we can best help wild animals.

Can you provide more details about where my money will go?

Grants from the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund may take a variety of forms, based on the funding opportunities our research team believes to be exceptionally impactful given their latest research. These opportunities will be determined in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers identified — through the research team’s evaluator investigations —to be particularly well-suited to helping donors maximise their impact. More specifically, this may include allocations to:

• A fund run by an evaluator the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to the EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund).
• Charities or projects recommended by an evaluator/grantmaker the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to Fish Welfare Initiative, based on the recommendation of EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund).
• Charities or projects the research team has reason to believe are highly impactful, including cases where this reasoning isn’t the result of deferring to a vetted evaluator. (See the relevant section of our 2023 report on ACE for why this fund granted to The Humane League in 2023 and Q1–3 of 2024.)

Where has the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund granted to in the past?

1st grant round

This fund was created in November 2023 and made its first grant round in Q1 of 2024, reflective of the balance received in Q4 2023.

The full Q4 balance was £8,120.28 GBP along with $80,221.88 USD. As expected, 50% of donations to this fund were granted to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and 50% to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work based on our 2023 evaluations of their work. The grant recipients shared the following:

• EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund

The EA AWF will allocate these funds to expand its grant program, thereby enhancing support for some exemplary initiatives aimed at improving animal welfare. This may encompass endeavors dedicated to enhancing the well-being of farmed chickens or fish, while also directing attention towards geographically neglected regions beyond the US and significant parts of Europe. Further, the allocation of these resources should help facilitate collaborative alliances among various animal welfare groups, amplifying their impact overall. You can see the Animal Welfare Fund’s previous grant recipients here and here.

• THL (Corporate Campaigns Program)

Approximately 4 billion hens are trapped in battery cages each year — undergoing one of the worst forms of animal suffering. Thanks to the generosity of donors to GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund, THL is pressuring the world’s largest companies to commit to ending the use of battery cages in their global supply chain. Our current focus is on multinational companies headquartered in Asia—where around 68% of the world’s egg-laying hens live. Building on the momentum from recent victories against major Asian companies like Toridoll and Jollibee, we will continue to advance progress in Asia by pressuring an iconic Japanese mayonnaise manufacturer through corporate negotiations, behind-the-scenes pressure tactics, and, if necessary, a public campaign. If successful, we estimate that a commitment from this company to use cage-free eggs in its mayo would spare 3.5 million hens from suffering in battery cages each year, once implemented.

2nd grant round

The second grant round happened in June/July of 2024, reflective of the balance received in Q1 of 2024.

The full Q1 balance was £69,149.31 GBP along with $58,888.46 USD. As in the previous grant round, 50% of donations to this fund were granted to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and 50% to The Humane League’s corporate campaign work based on our 2023 evaluations of their work. The grant recipients shared the following:

• EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund

The EA Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF) will allocate this funding to expand its grant program and support highly impactful projects in several key areas, such as welfare campaigns for egg-laying hens, broilers, and fish; policy advocacy and litigation; research and interventions for neglected species; and targeted movement building efforts. Through its sourcing and rigorous evaluation process, EA AWF identifies and funds highly cost-effective animal advocacy projects that individual donors might not have access to. Previous grants have contributed to securing corporate commitments that improve the lives of millions and billions of different species of farmed animals, conducting research that uncovered new priority areas, and building movement in key geographies such as Southeast Asia. By strategically supporting a portfolio of carefully vetted initiatives, EA AWF aims to drive large-scale change for farmed and wild animals globally. You can see all the AWF's previous grants here and the most recent payout report here.

• THL (Corporate Campaigns Program)

These donations were used to support a global cage-free campaign against Kewpie, launched in June by THL’s Open Wing Alliance (OWA). With 94 member groups in 75 countries, the OWA leverages its global reach, along with the power of collaboration, to pressure companies to end the worst abuses of chickens on factory farms. After several months of negotiations in which Kewpie failed to update its cage-free commitment to include markets outside the US and EU, the OWA escalated to a hard-hitting public pressure campaign. Kewpie, which is headquartered in Japan, continues THL’s focus on Asian multinational corporations, a strategic priority as 68% of the world’s egg-laying hens live on the continent. If successful, we estimate that a global commitment from this company to use cage-free eggs in its mayo would spare 3.5 million hens from suffering each year, once implemented.

3rd grant round

Due to spinout logistics, this fund will likely make its third round of grants (reflective of the Q2 and Q3 balances) in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025 to ensure we process grants as cost-effectively as we can.

Please note that the Giving What We Can research team may or may not identify new funding opportunities (outside of the EA Animal Welfare Fund and ACE's Movement Grants) in future grantmaking rounds.

Donating to the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund

Why you might donate to this fund

Previously, we recommended several different top-rated funds for each of the cause areas we believe to be particularly impactful. However, donors often weren’t sure how to choose between these top-rated funds working in the same area. The goal of this fund (and the other two funds managed by Giving What We Can) is to provide a single high-impact default fund option for each cause area. We think these funds are a great choice for most donors, as our research team makes allocation decisions in consultation with the evaluators and grantmakers they believe to be best suited for maximising impact in each particular cause area.

Why you might not donate to this fund

Our funds are currently only advised by the grantmakers and evaluators our research team has already looked into as part of their evaluations of evaluators and deemed to be the best candidates for informing our grantmaking. This means there may be other impact-focused evaluators our research team has not yet looked into but that you believe to be better matched to your personal values and worldview

If you prefer to look into impact-focused charity evaluators on your own and follow the recommendations of the one(s) you believe best suit you, or do your own research into individual funds and charities, we recommend you read our research team’s evaluator reports, as they provide information that most donors could not access on their own.

How does donating to this fund compare to similar giving opportunities?

Donating to this fund vs donating to a different animal welfare fund

We currently only recommend EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and ACE's Movement Grants fund as top-rated fund options within animal welfare, and this fund currently expects to split donations between them. You can learn more about each fund (and how they differ from each other) by reading the relevant reports from our evaluator research. (You can also see why we don't currently grant to ACE's Recommended Charities fund by reading our ACE Charity Evaluation program report.)

For animal welfare funds we haven't looked into — this doesn't necessarily mean they are less impactful giving opportunities. What it does mean is that we can’t (yet) be sure how these opportunities differ from donating to the Effective Animal Advocacy Fund managed by our research team, except to say that we are confident the allocations our Effective Animal Advocacy Fund makes will always reflect our research team’s latest research into which evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to help donors maximise their impact. As the research team looks into additional evaluators, we will revisit both our list of recommendations and who we consult with to allocate the donations collected via our funds.

On that note: one notable difference between choosing to donate to only the EA Funds' Animal Welfare Fund or ACE's Movement Grants fund is that the Giving What We Can research team may consult with other expert evaluators (who can recommend grants in areas that might not be covered by the work of these programs) in the future, based on the outcomes of their ongoing research. Thus, donating to this fund allows you to set up a single recurring donation and know that your money will be allocated based on the most up-to-date evaluator research from the Giving What We Can research team.

Donating to this fund vs donating to other programs working on animal welfare

We typically recommend donating to funds over charities as a general rule of thumb; this option capitalises on the free expertise of fund managers and advisors, whose job it is to direct the money received as effectively as possible given the most up-to-date information available to them. Learn more about the advantages of donating through a fund.

The GWWC Effective Animal Advocacy Fund will allocate based on the research team’s latest research into evaluators and their recommendations. However, our research team doesn’t look at every evaluator. Additionally, the evaluators they look at don’t evaluate every charity. (Instead, impact-focused evaluators tend to identify particularly promising programs and then find organisations that implement these programs especially well, though they also don’t have the capacity to evaluate every promising charity.) If you prefer to widen the scope of the organisations you support, or have greater control over which projects you support within animal welfare, you may be interested in investigating some of the other supported programs on our donation platform that we haven’t (for various reasons) included in our recommendations.

The difference between donating to our other supported programs working in animal welfare and donating to this fund is that we are confident in the expected impact of the projects this fund will grant to, while we have varying degrees of confidence in the impact of our other supported programs. (Some may turn out to be more impactful than the projects we’ll grant to, but haven’t yet been looked into by an evaluator our research team has vetted, and some may be significantly less impactful.) You can read more about each supported program on its dedicated page.

As noted in our ACE Charity Evaluation program report, we also think donors with particular worldviews about the most promising approaches/interventions in animal advocacy (and who have time to do additional research) could benefit from checking out ACE's list of top charities and delving into their reports.