While much of ACE’s review of our work is positive and constructive, there are also suggestions that we’re not entirely aligned on. From our perspective, ACE’s current evaluation framework doesn’t fully capture the long-term, collective value of research, and there are certain recommendations that, in our view, may not be the most impactful ways to spend our time and limited donor dollars. We think it is essential to touch on these points openly, both to clarify our perspective and because they reflect broader issues for research and capacity-building organizations.

1. The Bottom Line: Cost-Effectiveness: “While we recognize their valuable contributions to the field, our assessment suggests that marginal donations to other organizations in our current recommendations are likely to produce greater impact per dollar at this time.”
   
   Frameworks inspired by effective altruism often emphasize quantifiable outcomes — for example, animals saved or cost per unit of direct impact. These are useful metrics, but they tend to favor direct, short‑term interventions over those that may be slower to show results but have a multiplier effect across many organizations. As a research organization, we don’t measure lives we save, but rather how well we inform, equip, and support others working on behalf of animals. Furthermore, changes to advocacy tactics or strategies are often mediated not only by research but by multiple factors, which makes this work all the more challenging to measure via an impact per dollar approach. The downstream effects are real, but hard to trace and harder to claim sole credit for.

   
   Our research also makes an impact over longer time periods, instead of just in the immediate aftermath of a study or resource’s publication. For example, our Animal Product Impact Scales were first published in 2020 (with updates in 2021 and 2023), and were subsequently used by Anima International in 2024 to inform a systematic impact analysis that led them to shift their organization’s intervention. Cases like this demonstrate that research can have an important impact over the course of many years, often by adding to growing bodies of evidence, and this kind of impact won’t be captured if we only examine immediate impact.

   Additionally, there are trade-offs an organization can make if the goal is only to increase impact per dollar, but not all trade-offs are better long-term. As we’ve fundraised more, we’ve not only invested in more research and services for advocates (indeed, we’ve published 11 original studies and analyses already this year alone, a record for us!), but we’ve also invested in core mission support. We’ve invested in making staff salaries more equitable and livable, in improving internal systems and infrastructure, in employee development, etc. If we’d only invested in research outputs, that might have yielded greater impact per dollar in the short-term. But we believe in doing better in addition to doing more because investments like these pay off long-term, in performance and employee retention (which increases brand engagement), profits, and ultimately in greater and more sustainable impact.

2. Limited Evidence on Research: “We are convinced that Faunalytics’ programs are likely to create positive change for animals.”
   
   However, ACE’s uncertainty in this assessment is moderate to high due to the “highly indirect nature of research work in terms of achieving impact for animals” and the “limited evidence regarding the effectiveness of research and skill-building activities in general.”

   
   We were surprised by ACE’s uncertainty about research overall, given that research is a core component of their work. That said, we respect ACE’s evidence-based approach, as it’s exactly the kind of thinking research is meant to support.

   Yet there’s an unavoidable irony here: to rigorously evaluate whether research improves advocacy outcomes, we first need to do research. Like asking for evidence that using evidence works, asking whether research is effective is itself a research question and it’s precisely because we don’t have all the answers that research is valuable. We’re glad to have contributed to the growing evidence* on research as an advocacy intervention, but we’ll never be able to expand that evidence base without investment in research.

   *Please refer to the FAQs at the bottom of this blog for a list of studies on the impact of research and skill-building.

3. Researching Effective Advocacy vs Researching Research: “Faunalytics could reduce these uncertainties by developing case studies illustrating how advocates use these resources to create tangible change within their organizations and estimating the counterfactual impact of their products, i.e., the impact the resources can have on animals if they had not used Faunalytics resources.”

   
   Understanding and improving effectiveness is what our mission is all about, so we’ll be among the first to agree that, in an ideal world, we’d expand our monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) activities. After all, research can’t prove its value without investment in evaluation systems.

   That said, Faunalytics is not a huge organization. Like most groups in our movement, we’re constrained by capacity and funding, and the resources available to farmed animal advocacy research in particular are quite limited. So we can’t help but ask ourselves — what is the most meaningful use of our time?

   ACE’s review recommends more follow‑ups, more case studies, more tracking of downstream impact. We agree this is valuable (we’re data nerds!). But the resources required to 1) trace downstream effects across all the organizations we serve and all the resources we produce, 2) separate our contributions from other factors, and 3) investigate counterfactual effects are substantial. Additionally, our stakeholders themselves have limited bandwidth. We’re conscientious of survey fatigue, as repeated follow‐up requests can reduce responsiveness and risk straining our relationships with advocates.

   That said, doing what we can to expand our impact evaluation efforts is one of our 10 upcoming Strategic Initiatives. As resources become available we’ll strive to develop new ways to understand our impact, in addition to what we’ve already been doing (an annual Community Survey, program/resource-specific surveys, follow-up surveys, qualitative feedback* collection, quantitative metric gathering, case study development with Mission Motor, and conducting our own research on knowledge use and transfer in the movement).

   However, we want to be transparent: Our primary focus is on actually supporting the advocates who turn to us every year, and not get too lost in empirically proving exactly how many lives research saves. The advocates who use our work tell us, constantly, repeatedly, how much they value Faunalytics. And for us, that feedback is evidence.

   *Check out the Testimonials carousel at the bottom of this blog to read what advocates have to say about Faunalytics.