I don't have any insight into why this grantee wanted to remain anonymous.

I do know of some situations in the animal advocacy space, and advocacy space in general, where it is strategic to not have on the public record (or as little as possible) where one is receiving funding from. Reasons for this might include:

• Increased government scrutiny and harassment as a 'foreign agent' by receiving money from abroad.
• Exposing how groups and initiatives might be connected can damage how their targets interact with them. Ie bad and good cop initiatives having the same funding source can often damage the ability of the good cop to carry out their role.
• A local organisation, with large amounts of funding from abroad, can easily be criticised for not representing local interests.
• Sometimes it is simply just really useful for adversaries and people, organisations you want to influence to know as little about you as possible.
• Probably more reasons I'm not thinking of right now

I hear the concern you raise and also see there are cases where the tradeoff with transparency on distributed funds and setting the grantees up for success may be in conflict. Might some insight into why the grant is anonymous help bridge that gap? 

For example:

One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants as doing so is likely to negatively impact their ability to carry out their work by exposing publicly how they are connected to other organisations.

Love this post, I think animal welfare could benefit significantly, both from an impact perspective and in developing their funding streams by putting more effort in Measure, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and the mission motor is working on this. I'm not sure what their funding situation is like, but it might be an area that appeals to you.

Also, up front I work at THL.

When I started reading about animal charity evaluations, I was struck by how different it was from global health & development. There's no longer RCTs and high-quality studies, no longer organizations with a long, proven track record. There's usually no clear estimate of how many animals are impacted, and where there is, the figure is speculative

I think what you are getting at here - the "professionalism" of the global health & development space vs that of the animal space, was a significant factor for me to work in the animal space rather than in the climate space, where I was currently working. It seemed work on factory farming was so neglected and with more focus and attention, significant change could be made here.

When it comes to corporate outreach work on cage-free and broilers my experience has been different to what your partner and I experienced in the climate space. I think this stems from the climate space being much more developed and it being a very 'standard' thing executives need to work on. Farm animal welfare for the most part has not been on these companies radars and the organisations doing corporate work have driven this change. For many of the companies Open Wing Alliance members work with, cage-free is often the first animal welfare policy a company ever makes and subsequent change for animals has then been easier to advocate for and in some cases has often then come from the company themself, ie Carrefour making a quail cage-free egg policy. 

With fulfilment work, my personal experience has shown that attention on the fulfilment of the commitments is definitely needed and we would not be seeing the high fulfilment rates we see in this report without this happening. 

From what I can tell the main crux here is how much the change is driven by a company and their associates vs a charity. My perspective from the inside is that there are genuinely people in these companies that care about the work we are doing, but these companies have a lot of things on their priority list and keeping animal welfare at the top of it is a task that requires a lot of effort from charities. I'm not sure how might align on that difference?

Note on the THL numbers, the reported 3.4M is the number of hen spaces that we estimate a company no longer has in cages in 2024 between their previous reported numbers. This differs from Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar where I believe it is also making an estimate of how long would it take for a company to make these changes without these campaigns "Mean years of impact". Which I think can also give some insight into the role charities play in bringing about this change.

Thanks for shining the spotlight on MEL and animal welfare charities.

Thanks! Working on cage-free and broiler campaigns, I can attest to grit being an essential ingredient for progress.

Love this!

Soldiers win wars. The most accurate map made by the most virtuous scout is worth nothing without soldiers to do something with it.

My experience in animal protection has shown me the immense value of soldiers and FWIW I think some of the most resolute soldiers I know are also the scouts I most look up to. Campaigning is probably the most mentally challenging work I have ever done. I think part of that is constantly iterating through the OODA loop, which is cycling through scout and soldier mindsets.

Most animal activists I know in the EA world, were activists first and EA second. It would be interesting to see more EAs tapping into activist actions, which often are a relatively low lift. And I think embracing the soldier mindset is part of that happening.

Thanks for writing this Jeff. You inspired Caroline and I to write this post. 

Thanks thanks for breaking it down Tyler!

In adjusting the portfolio, I think it is also important to consider how important we think US policy is in total for overall change for animals in the US vs the other areas we could dig more into. If we think it is very important, then the current situation might be the reason we need to invest more into US policy work and think more deeply about why the situation is perhaps playing out differently to Europe. FWIW I  also am optimistic about policy in the the EU.

For example, a difference I see in animal organizations in the EU compared to the US is I think many of the EU organizations are more focussed on externally appearing as politically neutral than they are in the US. And at the same time it is really interesting how you've shown how the ballot initiatives have panned out in the liberal cities here.

Personally being more focussed on corporate engagement work, I notice that US companies need more effort to be held accountable than EU companies. So the US passing legislation would probably reduce the effort needed on corporate accountability work. Whereas, EU legislation will have a smaller impact on corporate accountability work success. Probably not the strongest reason to focus on policy work, but one thing that would make me nervous about us stepping too far away from policy work in a portfolio adjustment.

This is another great piece of writing from you Engin, thanks!

Thank you for writing this, I think it was 2hrs well spent.

Agree! All exceptional activists.

Yes, I think it is exactly that sort of thing Saulius. From what I have heard it is often the research about how animals are kept that people want from their region/country.