How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Stien Van Der Ploeg on finding the most effective animal charities

November 30, 2023 Amy Odene & James Ozden
How I Learned to Love Shrimp
Stien Van Der Ploeg on finding the most effective animal charities
Show Notes Chapter Markers

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:

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Episode preview
Intro
An animal related view that Stien changed her mind on recently
Stien's personal journey into animal advocacy
What makes Animal Charity Evaluators' work so challenging
ACE's evaluation process and theory of change
Fundraising for charities vs evaluating
How are ACE's processes evolving
Feedback from evaluated orgs
Short term vs long term interventions
Evaluating existing interventions vs experimenting with new ones
Movement grants
Strength of evidence vs expected impact
Latest ACE recommandations
How these recommendations are different
Assessing organisational health and culture
Challenges with confidentiality
Faunalytics
Legal Impact for Chickens
ACE being evaluated by GWWC
Self-evaluation
Future plans
Closing questions