Stien Van Der Ploeg on finding the most effective animal charities

How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Stien is the executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators, also known as ACE. Stien, wants to help people help animals and ACE tries to do that by finding and promoting the most effective ways to help animals.

In this episode we speak with Stien Van Der Ploeg who is their fairly newly appointed executive director. We talk through the latest release of the recommendations for this year and go into some detail on why certain charities and their interventions were selected. We talk about why their work is so important, the difficulties in the recommendation process and their developing strategy for the upcoming year.

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

• Recommended charity fund and matching offer (to Dec 6th)
  • ACE 2023 recommendations
  • ACE Team emails
• Menu of interventions
  • Intervention scores spreadsheet
  • Menu of outcomes
• Faunalytics review
• Legal Impact for Chickens review
• GWWC evaluation
• ACE Strategy Doc
• Other organisations discussed in the episode
  • Rethink Priorities
  • Scarlet Spark
  • Animal Legal Defense Fund
  • The Mission Motor
  • [Amy’s organisation] User-Friendly: Messaging Workshop
• Lead Together, by Tania Luna
• Podcast: Knowing Animals
  • Knowing Animals: Episode 210: Saving Animals (and Ourselves) with Jeff Sebo (libsyn.com)
  • Knowing Animals: Episode 168: Speaking with animals with Eva Meijer (libsyn.com)

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at [e-mail]. Enjoy!

Kapitel

1. Episode preview (00:00:00)

2. Intro (00:00:24)

3. An animal related view that Stien changed her mind on recently (00:01:57)

4. Stien's personal journey into animal advocacy (00:03:54)

5. What makes Animal Charity Evaluators' work so challenging (00:06:15)

6. ACE's evaluation process and theory of change (00:10:22)

7. Fundraising for charities vs evaluating (00:14:18)

8. How are ACE's processes evolving (00:18:25)

9. Feedback from evaluated orgs (00:20:52)

10. Short term vs long term interventions (00:21:55)

11. Evaluating existing interventions vs experimenting with new ones (00:27:45)

12. Movement grants (00:31:02)

13. Strength of evidence vs expected impact (00:32:12)

14. Latest ACE recommandations (00:36:52)

15. How these recommendations are different (00:40:14)

16. Assessing organisational health and culture (00:44:32)

17. Challenges with confidentiality (00:49:06)

18. Faunalytics (00:51:03)

19. Legal Impact for Chickens (00:57:14)

20. ACE being evaluated by GWWC (01:01:22)

21. Self-evaluation (01:04:44)

22. Future plans (01:07:00)

23. Closing questions (01:09:07)