The difference between helping animals and doing so effectively lies in the details. The scale of suffering can be overwhelming, but progress depends on careful choices about where effort and funding are directed.
At Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), our focus remained clear: helping people use their time and money in ways that help the most animals. That goal guided how we evaluated charities, awarded grants, raised funds, and communicated evidence throughout 2025.
The progress described in this review was made possible by the people who support and engage with ACE’s work. Because of this collective effort, animals may experience lives with greater freedom, healthier environments, and fewer harms than would otherwise be possible.
For more information on our work in 2025, including reflections from ACE’s Executive Director, you can find the full report below.
Read the full 2025 Year in Review
What follows is a brief, department-level summary of our work over the past year.
Department Snapshots
Programs
In 2025, the Programs department strengthened the rigor, clarity, and reach of our work across charity evaluations, grantmaking, and impact assessment.
Within our Charity Evaluations and Recommendations program, we refined our evaluation methods, comprehensively evaluated nine charities, and recommended five of them, bringing our total number of Recommended Charities to 10. In our Movement Grants program, we improved our grantmaking processes, increased to two funding rounds per year and multi-year funding, disbursed 29 grants across the July and April rounds, and awarded an additional 25 grants in December.
We broadened our impact assessment approach and published updated Influenced Giving Reports across programs.
Biggest Win
Launching Better for Animals, a resource that connects advocates to clear, synthesized evidence on intervention effectiveness.
Biggest Learning
An ongoing feasibility study identified potential alternative approaches to strengthen evaluation quality and increase counterfactual funding impact.
Development
ACE’s resource development efforts focus on sustaining our work and advancing meta-fundraising—directing more resources toward high-impact animal advocacy. In 2025, we reorganized our development work to better support meta-fundraising.
From January–November 2025, we raised $3.4 million for the Recommended Charity Fund (RCF) and Movement Grants combined. This figure does not include donations made to specific Recommended Charities. We met our $300,000 RCF matching challenge goal nearly three weeks earlier than in 2024 and completed the second-largest RCF distribution to-date in February, totaling $1.8 million in funding for our high-impact Recommended Charities.
Alongside this growth, we piloted Impact Gifts, a dedicated giving option to honor someone special, and collaborated with peers in the effective giving and animal philanthropy communities to encourage more informed giving for animals.
Biggest Win
Amid a rapidly-changing animal advocacy landscape, we grew our fundraising and launched the Greatest Need Fund in December, enabling donors to give unrestricted support with confidence that funds are allocated each quarter to the areas of greatest need for animals.
Biggest Learning
Managing multiple fundraising initiatives and new giving options stretched a small and partially-new Development team, requiring tactical adjustments to support successful launches. Sustaining quality will require investment in capacity and efficiency, or careful scaling of ambitions.
Communications
In 2025, the Communications team focused on strengthening systems, expanding our audience, and deepening engagement with existing supporters. We published more than 20 blog posts and launched two new content series—Better for Animals and Monthly Spotlight—while running new drip campaigns and trialing direct donation campaigns across audience segments.
These efforts contributed to over $60,000 raised for our Movement Grants matching challenge, more than $70,000 through Meta ads, and over $80,000 for the Recommended Charity Fund matching challenge. We also increased ACE’s reach and credibility through media placements in The Guardian, The Independent, Vox, and publishing a whole issue on factory farming and philanthropy in the Alliance Magazine.
Our email audience grew by approximately 85% over the prior year, with a net increase of 4,800 contacts, surpassing 10,000 active subscribers by year’s end.
Biggest Win
The interview with ACE advisor Prof. Peter Singer, alongside co-editing an Alliance magazine feature with Zoë Sigle from Senterra Funders, brought evidence-based animal advocacy to a large philanthropic audience and highlighted the strength of our work across the movement.
Biggest Learning
Reaching this year’s goals required ongoing adjustments, underscoring the need to be more intentional about how time, energy, and attention are allocated to sustain quality work in 2026.
Operations
In 2025, the Operations team focused on streamlining how we work—developing scoring systems to identify opportunities to restructure our work for greater impact, auditing our meeting load, and experimenting with AI tools to make better use of time and resources without compromising quality.
We expanded our team capacity with the hiring of an Administrative Assistant (a new role for ACE), Ethan, and a Development Director, Emma, both of whom quickly integrated into their roles. We also saw strong team engagement, with a 100% response rate on our annual engagement survey and an average score of 4.35 out of 5. Alongside this, we improved operational support by making it easier for staff to request help with workflow optimization, project management, and cross-organizational collaboration.
Biggest Win
Bringing our globally-distributed team together in person for our annual staff retreat created valuable space to align on strategy, reflect on our mission, and set ambitious goals for the year ahead.
Biggest Learning
Recruiting and hiring remain time- and resource-intensive, reinforcing the importance of refining how we identify candidates who will both thrive at ACE and meaningfully amplify our impact.
The People Behind ACE
Behind every evaluation, grant, and recommendation is a team of people committed to helping animals more effectively. In 2025, our staff brought thoughtful judgment, care, and collaboration to their work—alongside small moments of joy, personal interests, and shared humanity that sustain a globally-distributed team. These people and their collective effort make ACE’s work possible.
Thank You
We are grateful to everyone who made this work possible in 2025.
Your generosity, engagement, and trust allow us to focus on what matters most: directing resources toward interventions that can meaningfully reduce animal suffering. We are grateful to our donors, partners, advocates, Board of Directors, and staff for the roles you play in strengthening the movement and improving outcomes for animals.
Thank you for helping people help more animals—today and in the years ahead.
If you would like to support our work, we recommend a gift that supports the greatest need for animals in 2026.
Support The Greatest Need
If you would like to support our work, we recommend a gift that supports the greatest need for animals in 2026.
