Hey there! Thank you so much for your work! A couple of questions:
- Do you have an explicit method on how you arrive at whether a charity is being recommended based on the "scores"/evaluations they receive on your different criteria? I.e., do they need to clear a certain bar in every criteria, are some criteria (say, Impact) weighted more than others (say Organizational Health), is there a "total sum" that needs to be exceeded, etc.?
- Are there/do you intend to publish more detailed reviews of the charities that were not recommended?
- After having revised the methodology quite a bit, what are some areas in your new methodology that you are uncertain about and why?
Thank you for the great questions! It looks like we've answered all of them so we'll be signing off for now. Feel free to submit more questions if you have them—we'll keep an eye on this thread and try to respond later in the week. As always, if you have any questions about our work, you can also reach out to us on email via our website.
If you’re looking for impactful giving opportunities for animals this giving season, for a limited time, all donations to our Recommended Charity Fund will be matched! Your support will help all 11 of our Recommended Charities that we estimate will have an exceptional impact for animals with additional donations.
How many counterfactual donations have the recommended charities received in the last year? Do you know how much change the recommendation makes to their budgets, and therefore how significant it is to be placed or dropped out from the list?
Hey Ula, great question! This year we conducted an influenced-giving analysis to assess ACE’s counterfactual impact on funding via our Charity Evaluations and Movement Grants programs. We aim to publish the full reports on November 29th.
During our last fiscal year (April 2023-March 2024) the total reported ACE-influenced donations to the charities recommended during that time was $8.5 million, and we estimate that $3.7 million of this would not have been donated if not for ACE’s influence. The upcoming report will thoroughly explain how this was calculated.
Our charity recommendations last for two years. We don’t guarantee that any charity is re-evaluated or re-recommended, so charities know to prepare for that when their two-year recommendation cycle ends. For some charities, being recommended by ACE might be their first introduction to certain donors. Anecdotally we’ve also found that some donors choose to continue donating to formerly recommended charities.
We expect that being recommended for the first time, leads to a greater increase in funding than retaining a recommendation. The same seems likely for a recommendation for a newer intervention or animal group, or for a younger charity compared to the budget impact of a recommendation for a well-known charity. According to a recent survey, ACE’s annual influence per charity has varied anywhere from about $150,000 to $1,000,000+. Some of those gifts might not be fully counterfactual (this will also be further explained in the report coming out next week). Assessing budget impact and change in recommendation status is something we need to examine further though, so we’ll be expanding our impact assessment work this year to include more than just our quantitative counterfactual impact on funding.
Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund because these gifts are currently being matched. Donations will help all 11 of our Recommended Charities that we estimate will have an exceptional impact for animals with additional donations.
Do you ever wish there was a benchmark charity with a near infinite funding gap like Give Directly on the global health side to always be able to compare to? Is there anything akin to GD in the animal space?
Thanks Steven, great question! In short: yes we do, and no there isn’t :-) We think GiveWell’s approach of using GiveDirectly as a benchmark makes sense for GiveWell, and we’ve had several team discussions about whether we could take a similar approach. One step in this direction is to seek to get to the same unit of animals helped/suffering averted for each charity to make it easier to compare across charities, and we’ve sought to do that this year through our use of AIM’s Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) model. (You can read more about our 2024 cost-effectiveness assessments here.) However, while we found this helpful for this year’s Evaluations, it’s not always possible to reach a meaningful SADs estimate given limitations such as the long-term or speculative nature of some charities’ programs, a lack of reliable data around charities’ achievements, a lack of evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of different animal advocacy interventions, and the diverse range of programs conducted by the charities we evaluate. We’re also not aware of any charities in the animal advocacy space that share GiveDirectly’s room for additional funding and potential for scaleability.
Instead, we currently base our recommendation decisions on a set of decision guidelines that align with our evaluation criteria (see here for the guidelines and additional context), and use these to score charities against one another. It’s possible that in future a sufficiently scalable charity will emerge, and the animal advocacy movement will have sufficient evidence and data for us to produce reliable cost-effectiveness assessments for all the charities we evaluate, but at the moment this doesn’t seem realistic.
Currently, our Recommended Charities are those we’ve identified as the most impactful giving opportunities for animals based on the information we have available. Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, for those looking for impactful donation opportunities, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund that supports all 11 of our Recommended Charities and where gifts are currently being matched.
Great, thank you! One follow-up question to Number 2 and the SADs: How do you calculate cost-effectiveness for orgs who indirectly impact animal suffering? For example, I looked at the Good Food Fund's overview and there was no CE posted, but they have a detailed Theory of Change analysis. Is there a different calculation to recommend charities whose goal is to create systems change that will indirectly reduce suffering, but for which SADs are not as appropriate to calculate?
That’s a great question and one that we spent a lot of time considering in this year’s round of evaluations. We aimed to use SADs in all cost-effectiveness analyses and attempted to find a way to quantify each charity’s impact using the SADs unit. We have found that for more indirect work, such as GFF’s programs, quantifying the number of animals affected is largely speculative and requires a number of assumptions. For these cases, we decided to not make the assumptions needed to estimate the SADs averted but to stop at an intermediate unit in the analysis. For GFF, this was the number of people reached through their programs per dollar. Our reasoning for avoiding highly speculative assumptions is based on one of our guiding principles, which is to follow a rigorous process and use logical reasoning and evidence to make decisions. For cases like GFF, we focused more on their Theory of Change analysis to guide our decision-making. We are excited about their work because China farms around 50% of the world’s farmed animals, and GFF has made inroads with getting animal welfare on the government’s agenda, which could have significant expected value in the long term (although we didn’t model this explicitly).
Overall, we believe that interventions with a long theory of change (such as some policy interventions) and meta-interventions are often too speculative to estimate the number of animals affected and therefore the SADs averted. This appears to be consistent with the existing research in the animal advocacy movement, where the existing cost-effectiveness estimates focus on direct interventions (corporate campaigns, institutional outreach) and avoid quantifying indirect interventions (research, movement building). We will review our methods in the coming months and will reconsider how we compare charities that do more indirect work.
On your recommendation list, there are charities that are clearly cost-effective charities, that you tested with your new methodology, and that stand the test and came across to you as highly impactful opportunities.
On the other hand, there are somewhat more speculative charities, that have a less clear Theory of Change and at the moment could have less impact for animals (which e.g. was not tested with your new methodology, because some of them are recommended a second year in a row).
Are you not concerned that having those double standards this year (some charities evaluated with new, more rigorous methodology, and some not) might lead to directing money to these speculative, and possibly less impactful opportunities, rather than directing them to organizations that create tangible impact for animals?
Thank you for your question. We refine our methods each year and we don’t think that recent changes mean that we can no longer rely on the decisions we made in 2023.
Specifically about cost-effectiveness, in the past ACE has identified limitations of direct cost-effectiveness analyses and found it less helpful to directly estimate the number of animals helped per dollar. Instead, we began exploring ways to model cost-effectiveness, such as achievement scores and the Impact Potential criterion. Since then, the animal advocacy movement (namely Welfare Footprint Project, Ambitious Impact, and Rethink Priorities) has invested in research that enables quantifying animal suffering averted per dollar and in turn, we’ve evolved our methods. However, we think it is still remarkably challenging to do these calculations and draw conclusions from them, and that using proxies is still a reasonable approach.
Additionally, while we’ve introduced a theory of change criterion to formalize our assessment of charities’ assumptions, limitations, and risks, we have already been taking these factors into account during our decision-making in the past. Our other two criteria, room for more funding and organizational health, were included in our methods in both years.
In summary, while we see recent improvements as a step forward, we wouldn’t claim that 2023 charities were evaluated with a less rigorous methodology.
Hi, great (and topical) question! Yes, some ACE staff use generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude to help generate ideas or to help draft lower-priority internal documents. However, we don’t use such models for external or high-priority documents given the various limitations of AI models (such as the risk of factual errors, biases, and plagiarism), and we also don’t input information that could be potentially sensitive.
We apply a similar principle to image generation models. Given the risk of AI-generated images being seen as misleading in certain contexts, potentially casting doubt on, e.g.. photographic evidence of farm investigations, we instead use images from public-domain sources, prioritizing ethically aligned sources such as We Animals Media.
Personally, the most useful AI tool in my day-to-day work is Perplexity, which cites its responses and can be really helpful for locating research papers. I also find ChatGPT and Claude helpful for summarizing research, cleaning up documents, and advising on spreadsheet formulas. A newer tool is Google’s NotebookLM, which seems very useful for distilling information from a wide range of sources.
For more information you can check out ACE’s Responsible AI Usage policy. We also have an internal document where staff share AI use cases with one another, so you could consider introducing something similar at your own organization if that sounds helpful!
Thanks for your questions! This year we decided to use Ambitious Impact’s new unit SADs (Suffering Adjusted Days) in our cost-effectiveness analysis. This allowed us to provide the estimate in a unit that could directly compare the suffering across different interventions and animal species. For example, we could compare in the same unit the welfare improvement of cage-free campaigns, crate-free campaigns, and institutional meat replacement campaigns (see Sinergia’s review). We found SADs especially useful for more direct interventions, where the welfare improvement and the number of animals affected can be quantified with some certainty. Note that because SADs are a recent methodology that hasn’t been finalized yet, we expect that some of the estimates we used might change. Although we found SADs very useful in our cost-effectiveness analysis, we plan to discuss in our coming strategic sessions whether we will keep using this methodology in our evaluations, and for which interventions it might be more or less suitable. Depending on our strategic priorities and capacity, we will consider refining and updating the current estimates, as well as producing estimates for more interventions and species.
Do you ever wish there was a benchmark charity with a near infinite funding gap like Give Directly on the global health side to always be able to compare to? Is there anything akin to GD in the animal space?
Thanks for the question! None of our current Recommended Charities work on cultivated protein sources, though we have previously recommended charities working on this (such as Good Food Institute and New Harvest) and awarded Movement Grants to projects in this area (such as Cellular Agriculture Australia). We’d certainly be open to considering charities and Movement Grant applicants working on this in the future.
At ACE we currently prioritize farmed and wild animals, so none of our Recommended Charities work to reduce the use of animals for scientific purposes (i.e. research, testing, and science education).
If you’re interested in organizations and institutions that are focused on this area, here are few great options to explore:
The exact details of our 2025 evaluation process and methods are still to be determined but, barring any major strategic shifts in our Charity Evaluation program, we expect to keep our methods largely the same as 2024’s, with refinements based on what we’ve learned. We’ll still ask charities for information that will allow us to do the theory of change analysis, create cost-effectiveness estimates, assess funding capacity, and examine organizational health. The process will begin with charities applying to be evaluated, as it did in 2024.
You can refer to the cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheets for this year’s evaluated charities to get a sense of the information we needed to make the calculations. We’ll likely still be asking for charities’ past achievements. If we stick with this year’s approach (which we think is likely at this point), we will aim to determine the suffering adjusted days (SADs) averted by those achievements per dollar spent, which requires knowing the benefits of charities’ programs as well as the expenses spent to achieve those benefits.
We have a Recommended Charity Fund disbursement model where we consider each recommended charity’s funding and what ACE’s marginal funding would be used for. Then, we have an internal discussion about where we should prioritize the funding going, based on considerations of funding capacity, quantitative factors (marginal cost-effectiveness), and qualitative factors (theory of change). This year we expect to refine how we allocate funds and publish a blog post about refinements so we can stay transparent about it. If you’re interested in supporting our Recommended Charities, all donations to our Recommended Charity Fund are currently being matched for a limited time!
By using theory of change analysis more formally, we understand a charity’s work and its assumptions, limitations, and risks. This reduces our uncertainty about the scope of a charity’s work and their overall likelihood of achieving their desired impact. By doing a cost-effectiveness analysis that looks at the benefits to animals of a charity’s work divided by the cost of doing that work, we assess the current cost-effectiveness of a charity’s work (usually for select programs). Then when combined with our room for more funding assessment (which asks charities about their future plans), we assess our level of uncertainty about whether the plans are likely to be as cost-effective as the charity’s current work. Taken together, the three criteria together give us a good sense of marginal cost-effectiveness (i.e., where the next additional dollar would be best spent).
We expect that evaluation applications will open in March and stay open for a month. Once a charity has applied and is successful, they move onto stage two where we ask more detailed questions. We typically give charities around three weeks to gather the information requested to answer those questions.
Great, thank you! One follow-up question to Number 2 and the SADs: How do you calculate cost-effectiveness for orgs who indirectly impact animal suffering? For example, I looked at the Good Food Fund's overview and there was no CE posted, but they have a detailed Theory of Change analysis. Is there a different calculation to recommend charities whose goal is to create systems change that will indirectly reduce suffering, but for which SADs are not as appropriate to calculate?
How many counterfactual donations have the recommended charities received in the last year? Do you know how much change the recommendation makes to their budgets, and therefore how significant it is to be placed or dropped out from the list?
On your recommendation list, there are charities that are clearly cost-effective charities, that you tested with your new methodology, and that stand the test and came across to you as highly impactful opportunities.
On the other hand, there are somewhat more speculative charities, that have a less clear Theory of Change and at the moment could have less impact for animals (which e.g. was not tested with your new methodology, because some of them are recommended a second year in a row).
Are you not concerned that having those double standards this year (some charities evaluated with new, more rigorous methodology, and some not) might lead to directing money to these speculative, and possibly less impactful opportunities, rather than directing them to organizations that create tangible impact for animals?
What can we expect to change in the evaluations or evaluation process for charities from 2023?
What new/different information will charities be asked to provide with the new cost-effectiveness calculation? Will achievements still have a role?
How are the allocations from ACE's charity fund determined?
What does the new decision-making process look like in terms of better accounting for the marginal cost effectiveness of funding?
When will questions and layout for applications be made available for 2025? How much time will charities have to provide information once these are made available?
The exact details of our 2025 evaluation process and methods are still to be determined but, barring any major strategic shifts in our Charity Evaluation program, we expect to keep our methods largely the same as 2024’s, with refinements based on what we’ve learned. We’ll still ask charities for information that will allow us to do the theory of change analysis, create cost-effectiveness estimates, assess funding capacity, and examine organizational health. The process will begin with charities applying to be evaluated, as it did in 2024.
You can refer to the cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheets for this year’s evaluated charities to get a sense of the information we needed to make the calculations. We’ll likely still be asking for charities’ past achievements. If we stick with this year’s approach (which we think is likely at this point), we will aim to determine the suffering adjusted days (SADs) averted by those achievements per dollar spent, which requires knowing the benefits of charities’ programs as well as the expenses spent to achieve those benefits.
We have a Recommended Charity Fund disbursement model where we consider each recommended charity’s funding and what ACE’s marginal funding would be used for. Then, we have an internal discussion about where we should prioritize the funding going, based on considerations of funding capacity, quantitative factors (marginal cost-effectiveness), and qualitative factors (theory of change). This year we expect to refine how we allocate funds and publish a blog post about refinements so we can stay transparent about it. If you’re interested in supporting our Recommended Charities, all donations to our Recommended Charity Fund are currently being matched for a limited time!
By using theory of change analysis more formally, we understand a charity’s work and its assumptions, limitations, and risks. This reduces our uncertainty about the scope of a charity’s work and their overall likelihood of achieving their desired impact. By doing a cost-effectiveness analysis that looks at the benefits to animals of a charity’s work divided by the cost of doing that work, we assess the current cost-effectiveness of a charity’s work (usually for select programs). Then when combined with our room for more funding assessment (which asks charities about their future plans), we assess our level of uncertainty about whether the plans are likely to be as cost-effective as the charity’s current work. Taken together, the three criteria together give us a good sense of marginal cost-effectiveness (i.e., where the next additional dollar would be best spent).
We expect that evaluation applications will open in March and stay open for a month. Once a charity has applied and is successful, they move onto stage two where we ask more detailed questions. We typically give charities around three weeks to gather the information requested to answer those questions.
Does your evaluation process shift at all each year in regards to any regions or interventions that are prioritized?
Could you give us a brief overview of how ACE's evaluation process has evolved over time? What are some major differences between the evaluation process in your founding year versus 2024?
1. We refine the methods of our evaluation process every year based on internal and external feedback in order to improve on the previous year and be more accurate in our assessments. We also update our position on the likely effectiveness of interventions based on new research and consider the particular situation of each country in our assessments. However, this year we didn’t explicitly score or prioritize certain interventions and countries. Instead, we analyzed the impact of the specific work of each charity using our new evaluation criteria (see below). In general (with some exceptions), we continue to prioritize work on farmed animals and wild animals, interventions that are more institutional in scope, and countries that are more neglected or have higher levels of animal suffering.
2. ACE’s methods to evaluate charities have changed a lot over the years. We used to have more criteria to evaluate charities and we have reduced that number of criteria over the years, focusing on the most important factors for making recommendation decisions. The biggest changes we made this year were introducing a process allowing interested charities to apply for evaluation (rather than ACE inviting charities to be evaluated), and updating our evaluation criteria. Specifically, we:
updated our cost-effectiveness methods (conducting more direct cost-effectiveness analyses, compared to last year’s scoring system that was based on less direct proxies for cost-effectiveness);
introduced a qualitative theory of change analysis that explores the evidence, reasoning, and limitations around charities’ programs in more detail; and
updated our room for more funding criterion to place more focus on the likely impact of charities’ future funding plans.
You can read more about our latest charity evaluation process here.
Does your evaluation process shift at all each year in regards to any regions or interventions that are prioritized?
Could you give us a brief overview of how ACE's evaluation process has evolved over time? What are some major differences between the evaluation process in your founding year versus 2024?
What can we expect to change in the evaluations or evaluation process for charities from 2023?
What new/different information will charities be asked to provide with the new cost-effectiveness calculation? Will achievements still have a role?
How are the allocations from ACE's charity fund determined?
What does the new decision-making process look like in terms of better accounting for the marginal cost effectiveness of funding?
When will questions and layout for applications be made available for 2025? How much time will charities have to provide information once these are made available?
Thank you, Amie and Caryn, for this great summary of the discussion! Stray Dog Institute is so grateful to have had the privilege of bringing this topic to the AVA mainstage with such incredible panelists!
Hi, we are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We hope to have the new candidate starting in September though and thus would keep the application open until August. :)
Hi, we are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We hope to have the new candidate starting in September though and thus would keep the application open until August. :)
If anyone reading this gets involved in shareholder activism, please let me know.
There's another little extra way you can help animals if you own shares in a company, in addition to doing shareholder activism. Learn a little more here: legalimpactforchickens.org/investors, or reach out to me!
Thank you, Amie and Caryn, for this great summary of the discussion! Stray Dog Institute is so grateful to have had the privilege of bringing this topic to the AVA mainstage with such incredible panelists!
1-. Sweet Freeze Bakery announces its 100% commitment for December 2024. Engagement link: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4GcIyVO371/?igsh=NW0zeWFvMWVic3By
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in February 2024, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: There were none from the beginning, communication was very good.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners, linking them directly with cage-free producers in the area. Phone calls and WhatsApp messages.
Scalability: Sweet Freeze Bakery is a company in the pastry business with excellent acceptance in the districts with the most inhabitants in Lima.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
2- Red Coffee Shop, announces its cage free commitment to be 100% complete by 2025 Commitment link https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE4MDIxNjUzMDI3MTU3MjIz?story_media_id=3358582698278345950&igsh=a2Q1dGVmZjdsZzh5
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in December 2023, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: There were none, from the beginning communication was very good.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners to directly contact cage-free producers in the area. In-person visit, phone calls and WhatsApp messages.
Scalability: Company in the pastry - cafeteria sector with excellent acceptance in a district that still has no commitment.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
3- Mascookie Pet Snack, a pet cookie brand, announces its commitment to be 100% complete by the end of 2024.
Engagement link https://sites.google.com/view/mascookiegalletas/noticias
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in February February 2024, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: They liked the idea of making the change after a week of conversations.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners, linking them directly with cage-free producers in the area. The commitment is aligned with your objective and vision as a company.
Scalability: This important brand has massive distribution in veterinaries, pet shops and soon in supermarkets, it is the first pet food brand to make a cage-free commitment in Peru.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
If anyone reading this gets involved in shareholder activism, please let me know.
There's another little extra way you can help animals if you own shares in a company, in addition to doing shareholder activism. Learn a little more here: legalimpactforchickens.org/investors, or reach out to me!
Exciting news! Stray Dog Institute is releasing a groundbreaking report on plant-based alternative proteins in the US. Join their webinar on February 29th for insights and recommendations. Register now! 🌱📊
Peru is one of the countries with the highest consumption of eggs and chicken in Latin America, with a high percentage of informal industry that is not visible or transparent through the Peruvian state and its ministry of agriculture.
Hi Sam! I want to apologize for taking so long to respond. I'll try to be quicker in the future if there is more to discuss after my response here. I also really appreciate you taking the time to respond in such detail. Here are some poorly organized thoughts:
I appreciate you outlining the specific use cases you have for AI in this space. I certainly like the idea of bots that automatically provide factual information. I'm not sure 100% automation will be possible without a good deal of regrettable or borderline false positives or hallucinations, but it could at least automate surfacing misleading information with high visibility. I think the social media use case makes a ton of sense, but it's less clear to me that this won't be solved by a private company.
Thanks for clarifying the limitations of fine-tuning! I hadn't realized that. I'm still a little unsure about the feasibility of training your own models to be capable AI chatbots, though. How big of a non-speciesist corpus do you expect to be able to assemble, and how does it compare to the size and quality of the training data from foundation models? You might have found a way of amassing a ton of data, in which case, kudos. If not, however, I wonder if it would make more sense to focus on developing techniques to clean speciesist data out of corpuses, which could be used by the bigger AI labs. Overall, I'm still not entirely sold on the theory of change with AI powered chatbots, but I'm also not sure exactly what kind of world we're heading into. My sense is that people mostly change their habits/views out of self-interest or under influence from their close peers. I do think personalized messaging/ads could improve the quality of outreach efforts, but where do you get the prerequisite data on the individuals?
I also like your point that advocacy is most impactful when you can point to specific solutions. My sense is that suggesting techniques for pruning their corpuses of speciesist data is more tractable than showing them presumably less capable models trained on a different dataset. This paper might also be inspirational.
No problem, I likewise apologise for taking so long to get this response back to you as well!
I certainly agree that hallucinations are a huge limitation for using current LLMs in chatbots or automated actions of any kind. Hallucinations are far more likely to occur on questions outside of an LLMs training data, so training an LLM specifically on data relevant to animal advocacy should reduce the frequency of hallucinations.
In addition, the database we build will be used for retrieval augmented generation to ground the responses in fact and provide citations for sources in addition to using it as training data.
These two approaches combined with training techniques designed to reduce hallucinations (such as converting graphs showing relationships between objects to text for training data and using data augmentation to increase diversity in the dataset) will make the LLM we train far more reliable and less likely to hallucinate on animal rights issues.
I should clarify that when I say we are training an LLM, we won't be doing this entirely from scratch. We will begin with a pre-trained state of the art open source model, then continue pre-training, before fine-tuning and finally building it into specific tools for specific use cases. This requires far less data and compute power compared to training an LLM from the ground up.
As for how much data we can collect, we've surveyed more than 100 leaders and employees of animal charities and the willingness to share data is very high, more than 70% are willing to share data for training.
Your point about developing techniques to clean speciesist data out of corpuses is an excellent one and we absolutely are planning to do this as well. After we collect data from animal advocacy organisations, the next step is having volunteers provide human feedback on how different responses affect animals. We will use this data to create speciesism detection and ranking models (as well as a diverse range of models predicting other relevant information, such as how logically impactful, culturally sensitive or generally persuasive a message is), which we will open source to allow anyone to use them to clean any dataset of content that is harmful to animals.
Thank you for sharing that paper about the WMDP benchmark, there are certainly a lot of benchmarks that could be adapted to measuring the impact of content on animals. There's also recently been work on developing benchmarks specifically for detecting speciesism, like the AnimaLLM proof-of-concept evaluation from the paper "The Case for Animal-Friendly AI": https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01199
I definitely agree that benchmarks and evaluations in general will play a huge role in aligning AI with the interests of animals and this is something we aim to contribute to through our work as well wherever we can.
Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes
I just wanted to share this excellent research from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the article by the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/30/tyson-foods-toxic-pollutants-lakes-rivers
Hi @Alene! Thank you for working on this! We at Animal Ask just published an extensive report on shareholder activism. If interested, you can access it here, in case you missed it. :)
And a huge congratulations to Giulia Malerbi, Aquatic Life Institute's Global Policy Lead, for driving this opportunity forward with our key partners, and coordinating numerous activities in the background.
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Are there any features on the WHOVA app that we should check out that is generally not used enough that you think would provide attendees value?
For those who can only go to 1 or 2 conferences a year: what would you say is the defining difference between AVA Summit conferences and other conferences in our movement?
Lastly, but most importantly, is there a reason the AVA Summit has made the decision to not include these snacks at every table?
Talking about features of the Whova app, one may wonder, when and how can Whova be accessed?
We are publishing Whova for event communications in mid-April. Everyone will receive an email notification to the same email address that they used to register when it has been published, which is the same email everyone will need to use in order to login and access the AVA DC event.
For any further questions, I invite all who are interested to join our AVA International Slack channel -- we are always there to chat and answer questions!
Hi Dan, Amie here. Thank you so much for this question. I was hoping someone would ask it!
We are publishing the official program TODAY between 12-2 pm PT. We are just finishing up adding it to our website and will announce it across social media as soon as it is complete!
Feel free to check that link above any time after 2 pm PT today and it will be there!
As Taylor mentioned you can find those details and more on our AVA Policies Page.
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Guest Name - AVA Summit Hilton Alexandria Mark Center 5000 Seminary Rd Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Due to the limited storage space, packages may be delivered to the Hotel three working days prior to the date of the function. Please note the below charges will reflect on your guest room or invoice. Please follow the below instructions to ensure your packages arrive in the correct place!
Incoming Packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and are held at the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each.
Outgoing packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and can be sent from the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each. Handling charges cannot be collected by the shipper’s account number, therefore please pay handling charges with one of the following methods: cash, check, or credit card.
There is a printer if you need to print off labels, but there is no shipping office at the hotel. We recommend bringing pre-paid labels if possible and scheduling a pick-up with your shipping provider.
Swag Shipping - The first 500 attendees will receive a swag bag at registration. If you are a Silver Sponsor or above or have otherwise arranged to include an item in our attendee Swag Bag, please make sure your swag items arrive by Tuesday, May 14th. We will build the bags on the 15th. Items received after the 14th are not guaranteed to be included in the bags.
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
AVA SWAG - Your Org
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
5000 Seminary Rd
Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Exhibit Needs
If you purchased a WiFi/Power Upgrade, or are a Sponsor at any level, your A/V needs should be taken care of already! Additional requests may result in charges from the hotel.
→ Please contact Amanda@AVASummit.com for further hotel related questions
There is an absolutely amazing Ethiopian restaurant within walking distance! Although I definitely recommend following Amanda's advice, Planted Society have some fantastic collaborations.
Hi Dan, Amie here. Thank you so much for this question. I was hoping someone would ask it!
We are publishing the official program TODAY between 12-2 pm PT. We are just finishing up adding it to our website and will announce it across social media as soon as it is complete!
Feel free to check that link above any time after 2 pm PT today and it will be there!
Hi David, I’m sorry I got you addicted to Cheddalicious Plant Based Snacks. I’m glad to know you’ll be giving them away at the VH Exhibit Table at AVA D.C.
You will still want to arrive on time on Thursday morning to participate in the many Meet Up and Networking Sessions on Thursday. You can learn more about them here.
I’m truly excited about all of our speakers, but particularly excited about Ed Winters’ (Earthling Ed) presence this year during our Closing Ceremony. I’ve been following, reading, and have been generally greatly inspired by Ed’s advocacy and excellent ability to debate and navigate challenging topics while keeping calm and centered.
I’m also very excited for the session with Leah Garces and Brialle Ringer, Personal Transformation for Collective Liberation, where we will explore avenues of increased empowerment and strategies to elevate leadership from a place of wellness.
Why? Because it is all essential for movement progress! And I am particularly interested in navigating challenging conversations, collective liberation, and personal transformation.
Hi Alexia! Taylor here, Grantee Day runs from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m on Thursday, May 16th. However, the appointments will depend on a variety of factors! Selected organizations will receive their appointment(s) in a few weeks. If selected, you'll know your appointment well in advance.
You will still want to arrive on time on Thursday morning to participate in the many Meet Up and Networking Sessions on Thursday. You can learn more about them here.
Hi, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. I'm very excited about the fact that we are (mostly) setting up discussion panels instead of standalone keynotes this year. We also had great creative workshop submissions!
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant? Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant? Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Hi Alexia! Taylor here, Grantee Day runs from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m on Thursday, May 16th. However, the appointments will depend on a variety of factors! Selected organizations will receive their appointment(s) in a few weeks. If selected, you'll know your appointment well in advance.
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
Amie here! In addition to this information, inevitably, this block will also sell out. Rooms tend to go super fast! When in doubt, you can always head to our DC event page to find the latest updates and news about the hotel (and everything else event-related!)
Also, please join us on our AVA International Slack channel for any/all upcoming wonders you may have! We are always there to provide information and help.
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant? Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Hi Franka, Amie here. In addition to the policy page and Amanda's provided information below, we also have this information (and so much more!) on our DC event FAQ page. Also, I invite you to connect with us on our Slack channel at any time for any/all questions you may have.
Join us on our AVA International Slack here: https://impactfulanimal.slack.com/archives/C059QEFMWUF
Hi Vikram! Hi! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our event is technically in Alexandria Virginia, just over the bridge from the Capital. We have partnered with Planted Society to bring their Plant Based Initiative to Alexandria! Keep your eyes out for news about our exciting restaurant offers!
As far as where to stay, our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Are there any features on the WHOVA app that we should check out that is generally not used enough that you think would provide attendees value?
For those who can only go to 1 or 2 conferences a year: what would you say is the defining difference between AVA Summit conferences and other conferences in our movement?
Lastly, but most importantly, is there a reason the AVA Summit has made the decision to not include these snacks at every table?
Hi David, we’ve actually gotten pretty good feedback on Whova in general from our attendees – most of them are using it to see who is coming and arrange 1:1 meetings with other attendees.
The defining difference between AVA Events and other conferences is that our audience consists of dedicated individuals working or looking to work in the animal and vegan advocacy movement professionally. Our audience consists of >80% full-time advocates working for organizations (using all kinds of strategies) towards our shared goals. We are an “internal facing” event, not targeting the mainstream. The beauty of this — and that’s what most of our speakers tell us — is that we can truly speak as animal advocates, use the term vegan, and don’t "need to" wrap up our content for a more mainstream audience.
Another thing that makes us unique is the amount of international attendees and speakers. We’ve had 48 nations represented at our last US Summit!
Hi Gabriele, this is Amie—what a great question! It is too hard, if not impossible, for me to choose just one to attend. Each event is unique to the respective culture and region, which is what makes our events so relevant and special. So, each event is equally my favorite for its own unique reasons and regional movement elevation potential.
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Are there any features on the WHOVA app that we should check out that is generally not used enough that you think would provide attendees value?
For those who can only go to 1 or 2 conferences a year: what would you say is the defining difference between AVA Summit conferences and other conferences in our movement?
Lastly, but most importantly, is there a reason the AVA Summit has made the decision to not include these snacks at every table?
Hi David, I’m sorry I got you addicted to Cheddalicious Plant Based Snacks. I’m glad to know you’ll be giving them away at the VH Exhibit Table at AVA D.C.
Hi James, Amie here! One interesting piece of information that might surprise an average attendee is that our attendees come from all over the world; in our last US event alone (Los Angeles 2023), we had attendees from 48 countries!
One of the things I am looking forward to most this year in AVA DC is coming together in community from around the world, and feeling rejuvenated and inspired from all of the incredible advocates working together in this space. It is sincerely one of my favorite aspects of our events!
As Taylor mentioned you can find those details and more on our AVA Policies Page.
For ease, you can see all the details below: Exhibitor registration and load-in will begin at 2pm on Thursday, May 16th. Please make every effort to finish setting up by 6pm.
Exhibitor tear-down will begin at 2PM on the 19th.
While we encourage you to table any time from 8 - 5 PM on the 17-18th, and 8 - 2 PM on the 18th. peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Please follow the exact details below to ship your exhibit supplies. If you are sending swag, please make sure it is shipped and labeled separately per the instructions.
While we encourage you to table any time from 7 - 1:00 PM on the 17-19th, peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Registered exhibitors have access to all AVA Summit provided meals.
Please note nothing can be affixed to the hotel walls. If you have signage, please come prepared with pipes or easels.
Preferred Printer
Save time, shipping costs, and carbon emissions by using our preferred printer! The AVA Summit has teamed up with a local print shop, Digi Quick Print, to offer you a 10% discount on printing services, free delivery to the hotel, and a go-to plan for any last minute needs.
To qualify for this deal please contact both brian@digiqp.com and matt@digiqp.com and mention the AVA Summit.
Note: For simple jobs please give 2-5 business days notice. For larger and more complicated jobs please allow 7-10 business days. *If your project is for the Swag Bags please take special note of the instructions listed below.
Shipping to the hotel
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
Guest Name - AVA Summit Hilton Alexandria Mark Center 5000 Seminary Rd Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Due to the limited storage space, packages may be delivered to the Hotel three working days prior to the date of the function. Please note the below charges will reflect on your guest room or invoice. Please follow the below instructions to ensure your packages arrive in the correct place!
Incoming Packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and are held at the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each.
Outgoing packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and can be sent from the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each. Handling charges cannot be collected by the shipper’s account number, therefore please pay handling charges with one of the following methods: cash, check, or credit card.
There is a printer if you need to print off labels, but there is no shipping office at the hotel. We recommend bringing pre-paid labels if possible and scheduling a pick-up with your shipping provider.
Swag Shipping - The first 500 attendees will receive a swag bag at registration. If you are a Silver Sponsor or above or have otherwise arranged to include an item in our attendee Swag Bag, please make sure your swag items arrive by Tuesday, May 14th. We will build the bags on the 15th. Items received after the 14th are not guaranteed to be included in the bags.
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
AVA SWAG - Your Org
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
5000 Seminary Rd
Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Exhibit Needs
If you purchased a WiFi/Power Upgrade, or are a Sponsor at any level, your A/V needs should be taken care of already! Additional requests may result in charges from the hotel.
→ Please contact Amanda@AVASummit.com for further hotel related questions
Hi Franka, Taylor here! You can see all the exhibitor information and shipping information in our Policies page, and the Exhibitor Instruction emails being sent on April 5th and May 3rd!
Hi Annika, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. We do but we don’t want to give away too much just now :) Let’s say – if funding permits – we will be returning to the US West Coast, we’re looking at India for our next event in Asia, we’re considering a Spanish speaking country for Latin America, and… potentially adding a smaller conference with some partners on the African continent which we are really excited about!
Hi Joaquín! Taylor here. I am so excited about all the new speakers coming this year who haven’t had a chance to speak yet! I am most excited about pattrice jones and our Uniting Voices series!
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Are there any features on the WHOVA app that we should check out that is generally not used enough that you think would provide attendees value?
For those who can only go to 1 or 2 conferences a year: what would you say is the defining difference between AVA Summit conferences and other conferences in our movement?
Lastly, but most importantly, is there a reason the AVA Summit has made the decision to not include these snacks at every table?
Hi Vikram! Hi! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our event is technically in Alexandria Virginia, just over the bridge from the Capital. We have partnered with Planted Society to bring their Plant Based Initiative to Alexandria! Keep your eyes out for news about our exciting restaurant offers!
As far as where to stay, our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hi, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. If you don’t have any specific travel preferences or if your role is not directly related to any of the regions, I would recommend checking out AVA Latin America because we are trying out a new concept: A collaboration with the huge Sao Paulo VegFest this year! They had over 8,000 attendees in 2023 and tons of interesting exhibitors. (Shoutout to our partners at SVB!)
Hi Gabriele, Taylor here! That’s too hard to choose! I would lean towards the one which would add the most to my projects and roles. Both Brazil and Viet Nam offer incredible networking and learnings for folx working on projects in those regions.
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
The AVA hotel is fully booked for all dates, it seems. Will you be opening another block of rooms and/or do you have a list of nearby hotels you would recommend?
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
The AVA hotel is fully booked for all dates, it seems. Will you be opening another block of rooms and/or do you have a list of nearby hotels you would recommend?
I think the initiative that will be the most impactful is mass data collection as this is the one intervention that enables all other interventions in the AI space for animal advocacy and by focusing our first 6 months on extensive data collection and curation, we will lay the groundwork for all 3 of our planned interventions (training and deploying open-source AI systems free from speciesist bias, empowering animal-friendly organisations to integrate AI into their operations and helping AI labs and developers align their models with the interests of animals).
Because all 3 interventions require this as a first step, we save considerable time and resources by choosing to start here.
Furthermore, by open-sourcing this dataset, we further mitigate against potential risks by allowing any individual or organisation to develop their own interventions using this data. This significantly increases the potential for impact, as this first step is not only laying the groundwork for our own interventions, but potentially for all future interventions at the intersection of AI and animal advocacy.
But in terms of ranking each of those three interventions that come after data collection, it primarily depends on the timeframe in which you evaluate impact, whether you prefer interventions that are lower risk to lower reward or higher risk to higher reward and whether these interventions happen together or in isolation.
For example, helping animal organisations implement AI in their workflows is much more likely to be successful if we're helping them implement AI without speciesism and helping AI labs to reduce speciesism in their models will be much easier if we have already successfully done so with our own models.
Helping animal organisations with implementation is likely to have the greatest short term impact, whilst working with other AI labs may have the largest long term impact, but also a higher degree of risk.
As for the question about specific use case, I'm personally most excited about automated agents, chatbots and the intersection of generative and predictive AI. For example, we could have AI agents that monitor social media for misinformation from the animal industry and automatically respond to it with factual information, we could have LLMs that use real world social media analytics from animal organisations as their reward function (in other words, they would learn which kind of posts get the most reach, likes and comments and they would write more posts like that) and we could have AI-powered chatbots that personalise their responses to each individual based on what is most likely to resonate with them.
Regarding the technical questions about expected increase in performance and the difference between prompt engineering vs. fine-tuning, I'm currently in the middle of writing a literature review that addresses this question in more detail and I'd be more than happy to share it with you once I'm done to provide a more comprehensive answer, but in the meantime, I'm happy to share a few general thoughts on this question that explain why I believe the 10% increase in productivity estimate is highly conservative.
Prompt engineering techniques can work well to align LLMs for narrow use cases like creating vegan recipes (for example), but in agent-like systems (specifically externally facing ones that deal with the general public) the risk of the system becoming unaligned rises, as does that potential impact of that risk. I believe particularly as the year progresses this is going to be an increasingly important problem to solve as the AI industry as a whole is moving towards automated agents quite rapidly. There are also data and privacy concerns with the closed source models for animal organisations, many of which see this as an obstacle to implementing AI. Open source locally hosted models could potentially solve this issue.
Also, optimising for the correct reward function is something that will be very difficult to do with closed source models. For example, with enough data, we can train models that predict how different advocates rank different responses based on the type of advocacy they do, we can train models to predict how social media or blog posts will perform for different organisations etc. and we can use these as reward models to fine-tune models that are goal focused towards the needs of animal advocates. I believe as a result of this we will be able to create much more persuasive LLMs than we would through prompt engineering alone.
There's also a lot of interesting use cases for using smaller fine-tuned LLMs as tools, for example, we could create very hyper-specialised small models for something like grant-writing tailored to vegan grant-makers (using data from what grants do and don't get approved as the reward) and then have a larger LLM decide when to call that tool. The impact of something like a vegan-specific GPT would be much greater if it had access to a wide range of small fine-tuned models, prediction models and retrieval augmented generation, even if we don't succeed in creating a superior general vegan LLM (although I am very confident that we will be able to create that as well).
Regarding the question around influencing AI labs, the animal advocacy movement has a long history of successful corporate and legislative campaigns that we can learn from and apply within this space. One thing that stands out to me is that the most successful corporate advocacy campaigns tend to have a clear alternative provided by campaigners and often support in helping corporates implement that alternative. I believe for us to be successful in influencing AI labs, we will likely also require a clear alternative, in this case by building animal-aligned AI models, evaluations and benchmarks that we can use to help AI labs in aligning their models.
Hi Sam! I want to apologize for taking so long to respond. I'll try to be quicker in the future if there is more to discuss after my response here. I also really appreciate you taking the time to respond in such detail. Here are some poorly organized thoughts:
I appreciate you outlining the specific use cases you have for AI in this space. I certainly like the idea of bots that automatically provide factual information. I'm not sure 100% automation will be possible without a good deal of regrettable or borderline false positives or hallucinations, but it could at least automate surfacing misleading information with high visibility. I think the social media use case makes a ton of sense, but it's less clear to me that this won't be solved by a private company.
Thanks for clarifying the limitations of fine-tuning! I hadn't realized that. I'm still a little unsure about the feasibility of training your own models to be capable AI chatbots, though. How big of a non-speciesist corpus do you expect to be able to assemble, and how does it compare to the size and quality of the training data from foundation models? You might have found a way of amassing a ton of data, in which case, kudos. If not, however, I wonder if it would make more sense to focus on developing techniques to clean speciesist data out of corpuses, which could be used by the bigger AI labs. Overall, I'm still not entirely sold on the theory of change with AI powered chatbots, but I'm also not sure exactly what kind of world we're heading into. My sense is that people mostly change their habits/views out of self-interest or under influence from their close peers. I do think personalized messaging/ads could improve the quality of outreach efforts, but where do you get the prerequisite data on the individuals?
I also like your point that advocacy is most impactful when you can point to specific solutions. My sense is that suggesting techniques for pruning their corpuses of speciesist data is more tractable than showing them presumably less capable models trained on a different dataset. This paper might also be inspirational.
I just saw a video on instagram of someone basically sabotaging megatrawlers by dropping gigantic pieces of marble into the ocean to mess up their nets. People who know about fishing: does this seem like it could be effective or scalable? If so it seems like it could be massively cost-effective.
Link to video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3QSQTdvDQh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
You probably have heard of this argument, but I just want to point out that it's very unclear whether trawling decreases or increases animal suffering in the short term. It could decrease suffering by reducing wild animal numbers because wild animals suffer a lot. This consideration doesn't make me want to go and eat shrimp or support trawling, but I do think it's good to ask who would be the beneficiaries of such an intervention before pursuing it.
Wow, this sounds like a great acheivement! Can I ask how you calculated the 25M estimate? I tried looking in the campaign report and didn't see additional info. I maybe found a couple of the Yougov surveys (UK and Germany)?
In 2020, a farmer in Ohio found a colonial-era cannonball while metal detecting on his land. The cannonball was believed to be from the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which was fought in 1794. The discovery of the cannonball shed light on a significant historical event and helped to fill in gaps in our understanding of the past.
Using metal detectors in agriculture, as promoted by GoldXtra, ensures that the agriculture industry can yield safer, purer, and better-quality products. These tools are not just the treasures of history enthusiasts but have proven to be genuine assets in modern farming.
Question: I received a Movement Grant last year, am I eligible to apply again?
Response: Yes! Provided the work you are applying for remains in scope (see the Movement Grants eligibility criteria here) previous grantees are welcome to apply for funding again this round.
Question: I am curious whether you accept grant applications from organizations preferring to remain anonymous or not publicly acknowledged as grantees?
Response: You can apply and request to remain anonymous. If successfully awarded a grant, we would only publicly list the amount and that it was to an anonymous organization.
There is no question in the application form asking if you would like to remain anonymous, but you can note “anonymous” in the preferred name field so we are aware of your preference. If awarded a grant, we ask for feedback on our announcement post providing another opportunity to request that your grant remain anonymous if you haven’t already made us aware.
Question: I have previously applied for funding on Granti, is there any connection between this application and applications I have submitted for other funders?
Response: Granti is the grant management platform ACE is using for Round 8 of the Movement Grants program. A number of other funders in the animal advocacy space use Granti, so applicants may already be familiar with the platform. Although we are using the same platform, our grantmaking programs are separate, we cannot see any applications you have submitted to other funders, and likewise they cannot see the application you have submitted to ACE.
This is our first time using Granti and we appreciate any feedback you have on how you have on your user experience.
Question: We will be applying for funding to cover our general operational costs, how do you determine an end date for the grant period?
Response: If you apply for general support funding, we will award the grant for 12 months from the point at which the grant agreement is signed - this means your grant period is likely to be from June/July 2024 to June/July 2025. If you spend the grant before that period concludes, you are welcome to report on your grant earlier (there is a question in the application that invites you to provide a date to report earlier), but this is not required.
You can find more information on the Process and Timeline here.
Comments on 2024-11-21
Comments on 2024-11-19
Kevin Xia @ 2024-11-19T18:41 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Hey there! Thank you so much for your work! A couple of questions:
- Do you have an explicit method on how you arrive at whether a charity is being recommended based on the "scores"/evaluations they receive on your different criteria? I.e., do they need to clear a certain bar in every criteria, are some criteria (say, Impact) weighted more than others (say Organizational Health), is there a "total sum" that needs to be exceeded, etc.?
- Are there/do you intend to publish more detailed reviews of the charities that were not recommended?
- After having revised the methodology quite a bit, what are some areas in your new methodology that you are uncertain about and why?
Alene @ 2024-09-13T20:24 (+1) in response to Civil Litigation for Farmed Animals - Notes From EAGxBerkeley Talk
Thank you for posting this, Noa!!!!! <3 <3 <3
Alexander Togbah Wornie @ 2024-11-19T18:17 (+1)
Thank you very much for the opportunity and I will participate in the Fast Forums.
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T18:03 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Thank you for the great questions! It looks like we've answered all of them so we'll be signing off for now. Feel free to submit more questions if you have them—we'll keep an eye on this thread and try to respond later in the week. As always, if you have any questions about our work, you can also reach out to us on email via our website.
If you’re looking for impactful giving opportunities for animals this giving season, for a limited time, all donations to our Recommended Charity Fund will be matched! Your support will help all 11 of our Recommended Charities that we estimate will have an exceptional impact for animals with additional donations.
Thank you!
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:28 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
How many counterfactual donations have the recommended charities received in the last year? Do you know how much change the recommendation makes to their budgets, and therefore how significant it is to be placed or dropped out from the list?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T17:58 (+4)
Hey Ula, great question! This year we conducted an influenced-giving analysis to assess ACE’s counterfactual impact on funding via our Charity Evaluations and Movement Grants programs. We aim to publish the full reports on November 29th.
During our last fiscal year (April 2023-March 2024) the total reported ACE-influenced donations to the charities recommended during that time was $8.5 million, and we estimate that $3.7 million of this would not have been donated if not for ACE’s influence. The upcoming report will thoroughly explain how this was calculated.
Our charity recommendations last for two years. We don’t guarantee that any charity is re-evaluated or re-recommended, so charities know to prepare for that when their two-year recommendation cycle ends. For some charities, being recommended by ACE might be their first introduction to certain donors. Anecdotally we’ve also found that some donors choose to continue donating to formerly recommended charities.
We expect that being recommended for the first time, leads to a greater increase in funding than retaining a recommendation. The same seems likely for a recommendation for a newer intervention or animal group, or for a younger charity compared to the budget impact of a recommendation for a well-known charity. According to a recent survey, ACE’s annual influence per charity has varied anywhere from about $150,000 to $1,000,000+. Some of those gifts might not be fully counterfactual (this will also be further explained in the report coming out next week). Assessing budget impact and change in recommendation status is something we need to examine further though, so we’ll be expanding our impact assessment work this year to include more than just our quantitative counterfactual impact on funding.
Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund because these gifts are currently being matched. Donations will help all 11 of our Recommended Charities that we estimate will have an exceptional impact for animals with additional donations.
— Elisabeth
stevenhuyn🔸 @ 2024-11-19T16:48 (+3) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Do you ever wish there was a benchmark charity with a near infinite funding gap like Give Directly on the global health side to always be able to compare to? Is there anything akin to GD in the animal space?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T17:45 (+3)
Thanks Steven, great question! In short: yes we do, and no there isn’t :-) We think GiveWell’s approach of using GiveDirectly as a benchmark makes sense for GiveWell, and we’ve had several team discussions about whether we could take a similar approach. One step in this direction is to seek to get to the same unit of animals helped/suffering averted for each charity to make it easier to compare across charities, and we’ve sought to do that this year through our use of AIM’s Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) model. (You can read more about our 2024 cost-effectiveness assessments here.) However, while we found this helpful for this year’s Evaluations, it’s not always possible to reach a meaningful SADs estimate given limitations such as the long-term or speculative nature of some charities’ programs, a lack of reliable data around charities’ achievements, a lack of evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of different animal advocacy interventions, and the diverse range of programs conducted by the charities we evaluate. We’re also not aware of any charities in the animal advocacy space that share GiveDirectly’s room for additional funding and potential for scaleability.
Instead, we currently base our recommendation decisions on a set of decision guidelines that align with our evaluation criteria (see here for the guidelines and additional context), and use these to score charities against one another. It’s possible that in future a sufficiently scalable charity will emerge, and the animal advocacy movement will have sufficient evidence and data for us to produce reliable cost-effectiveness assessments for all the charities we evaluate, but at the moment this doesn’t seem realistic.
Currently, our Recommended Charities are those we’ve identified as the most impactful giving opportunities for animals based on the information we have available. Considering each of our Recommended Charities have significant room for more funding, for those looking for impactful donation opportunities, we suggest donating to our Recommended Charity Fund that supports all 11 of our Recommended Charities and where gifts are currently being matched.
— Max
Sean Rice @ 2024-11-19T16:37 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Great, thank you! One follow-up question to Number 2 and the SADs: How do you calculate cost-effectiveness for orgs who indirectly impact animal suffering? For example, I looked at the Good Food Fund's overview and there was no CE posted, but they have a detailed Theory of Change analysis. Is there a different calculation to recommend charities whose goal is to create systems change that will indirectly reduce suffering, but for which SADs are not as appropriate to calculate?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T17:35 (+2)
That’s a great question and one that we spent a lot of time considering in this year’s round of evaluations. We aimed to use SADs in all cost-effectiveness analyses and attempted to find a way to quantify each charity’s impact using the SADs unit. We have found that for more indirect work, such as GFF’s programs, quantifying the number of animals affected is largely speculative and requires a number of assumptions. For these cases, we decided to not make the assumptions needed to estimate the SADs averted but to stop at an intermediate unit in the analysis. For GFF, this was the number of people reached through their programs per dollar. Our reasoning for avoiding highly speculative assumptions is based on one of our guiding principles, which is to follow a rigorous process and use logical reasoning and evidence to make decisions. For cases like GFF, we focused more on their Theory of Change analysis to guide our decision-making. We are excited about their work because China farms around 50% of the world’s farmed animals, and GFF has made inroads with getting animal welfare on the government’s agenda, which could have significant expected value in the long term (although we didn’t model this explicitly).
Overall, we believe that interventions with a long theory of change (such as some policy interventions) and meta-interventions are often too speculative to estimate the number of animals affected and therefore the SADs averted. This appears to be consistent with the existing research in the animal advocacy movement, where the existing cost-effectiveness estimates focus on direct interventions (corporate campaigns, institutional outreach) and avoid quantifying indirect interventions (research, movement building). We will review our methods in the coming months and will reconsider how we compare charities that do more indirect work.
— Zuzana
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:18 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
On your recommendation list, there are charities that are clearly cost-effective charities, that you tested with your new methodology, and that stand the test and came across to you as highly impactful opportunities.
On the other hand, there are somewhat more speculative charities, that have a less clear Theory of Change and at the moment could have less impact for animals (which e.g. was not tested with your new methodology, because some of them are recommended a second year in a row).
Are you not concerned that having those double standards this year (some charities evaluated with new, more rigorous methodology, and some not) might lead to directing money to these speculative, and possibly less impactful opportunities, rather than directing them to organizations that create tangible impact for animals?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T17:19 (+3)
Thank you for your question. We refine our methods each year and we don’t think that recent changes mean that we can no longer rely on the decisions we made in 2023.
Specifically about cost-effectiveness, in the past ACE has identified limitations of direct cost-effectiveness analyses and found it less helpful to directly estimate the number of animals helped per dollar. Instead, we began exploring ways to model cost-effectiveness, such as achievement scores and the Impact Potential criterion. Since then, the animal advocacy movement (namely Welfare Footprint Project, Ambitious Impact, and Rethink Priorities) has invested in research that enables quantifying animal suffering averted per dollar and in turn, we’ve evolved our methods. However, we think it is still remarkably challenging to do these calculations and draw conclusions from them, and that using proxies is still a reasonable approach.
Additionally, while we’ve introduced a theory of change criterion to formalize our assessment of charities’ assumptions, limitations, and risks, we have already been taking these factors into account during our decision-making in the past. Our other two criteria, room for more funding and organizational health, were included in our methods in both years.
In summary, while we see recent improvements as a step forward, we wouldn’t claim that 2023 charities were evaluated with a less rigorous methodology.
— Zuzana
Colin Roy-Ehri @ 2024-11-19T16:34 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Do you use any generative AI currently? Do you imagine any potential for it to assist your work?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T17:01 (+3)
Hi, great (and topical) question! Yes, some ACE staff use generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude to help generate ideas or to help draft lower-priority internal documents. However, we don’t use such models for external or high-priority documents given the various limitations of AI models (such as the risk of factual errors, biases, and plagiarism), and we also don’t input information that could be potentially sensitive.
We apply a similar principle to image generation models. Given the risk of AI-generated images being seen as misleading in certain contexts, potentially casting doubt on, e.g.. photographic evidence of farm investigations, we instead use images from public-domain sources, prioritizing ethically aligned sources such as We Animals Media.
Personally, the most useful AI tool in my day-to-day work is Perplexity, which cites its responses and can be really helpful for locating research papers. I also find ChatGPT and Claude helpful for summarizing research, cleaning up documents, and advising on spreadsheet formulas. A newer tool is Google’s NotebookLM, which seems very useful for distilling information from a wide range of sources.
For more information you can check out ACE’s Responsible AI Usage policy. We also have an internal document where staff share AI use cases with one another, so you could consider introducing something similar at your own organization if that sounds helpful!
— Max
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:21 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
What difference have SADs made in your methodology? Will you try to use this methodology across various types of organizations next year?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T16:55 (+5)
Thanks for your questions! This year we decided to use Ambitious Impact’s new unit SADs (Suffering Adjusted Days) in our cost-effectiveness analysis. This allowed us to provide the estimate in a unit that could directly compare the suffering across different interventions and animal species. For example, we could compare in the same unit the welfare improvement of cage-free campaigns, crate-free campaigns, and institutional meat replacement campaigns (see Sinergia’s review). We found SADs especially useful for more direct interventions, where the welfare improvement and the number of animals affected can be quantified with some certainty. Note that because SADs are a recent methodology that hasn’t been finalized yet, we expect that some of the estimates we used might change. Although we found SADs very useful in our cost-effectiveness analysis, we plan to discuss in our coming strategic sessions whether we will keep using this methodology in our evaluations, and for which interventions it might be more or less suitable. Depending on our strategic priorities and capacity, we will consider refining and updating the current estimates, as well as producing estimates for more interventions and species.
— Maria
stevenhuyn🔸 @ 2024-11-19T16:48 (+3) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Do you ever wish there was a benchmark charity with a near infinite funding gap like Give Directly on the global health side to always be able to compare to? Is there anything akin to GD in the animal space?
SungHwang @ 2024-11-19T16:12 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Is there an active effort to promote lab-grown protein sources?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T16:41 (+3)
Thanks for the question! None of our current Recommended Charities work on cultivated protein sources, though we have previously recommended charities working on this (such as Good Food Institute and New Harvest) and awarded Movement Grants to projects in this area (such as Cellular Agriculture Australia). We’d certainly be open to considering charities and Movement Grant applicants working on this in the future.
— Max
SungHwang @ 2024-11-19T16:14 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Which organization is engaged in reducing pharmaceutical or medical animal testing?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T16:40 (+4)
At ACE we currently prioritize farmed and wild animals, so none of our Recommended Charities work to reduce the use of animals for scientific purposes (i.e. research, testing, and science education).
If you’re interested in organizations and institutions that are focused on this area, here are few great options to explore:
There are also government-funded alternatives centres around the world like the European Centre for Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM).
— Elisabeth
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T16:13 (+4) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Hi Sean - thanks for your great questions!
— Elisabeth
Sean Rice @ 2024-11-19T16:37 (+1)
Great, thank you! One follow-up question to Number 2 and the SADs: How do you calculate cost-effectiveness for orgs who indirectly impact animal suffering? For example, I looked at the Good Food Fund's overview and there was no CE posted, but they have a detailed Theory of Change analysis. Is there a different calculation to recommend charities whose goal is to create systems change that will indirectly reduce suffering, but for which SADs are not as appropriate to calculate?
Colin Roy-Ehri @ 2024-11-19T16:34 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Do you use any generative AI currently? Do you imagine any potential for it to assist your work?
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:28 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
How many counterfactual donations have the recommended charities received in the last year? Do you know how much change the recommendation makes to their budgets, and therefore how significant it is to be placed or dropped out from the list?
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:21 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
What difference have SADs made in your methodology? Will you try to use this methodology across various types of organizations next year?
ulazarosa @ 2024-11-19T16:18 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
On your recommendation list, there are charities that are clearly cost-effective charities, that you tested with your new methodology, and that stand the test and came across to you as highly impactful opportunities.
On the other hand, there are somewhat more speculative charities, that have a less clear Theory of Change and at the moment could have less impact for animals (which e.g. was not tested with your new methodology, because some of them are recommended a second year in a row).
Are you not concerned that having those double standards this year (some charities evaluated with new, more rigorous methodology, and some not) might lead to directing money to these speculative, and possibly less impactful opportunities, rather than directing them to organizations that create tangible impact for animals?
SungHwang @ 2024-11-19T16:14 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Which organization is engaged in reducing pharmaceutical or medical animal testing?
Sean Rice @ 2024-11-18T17:45 (+4) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T16:13 (+4)
Hi Sean - thanks for your great questions!
— Elisabeth
SungHwang @ 2024-11-19T16:12 (+1) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Is there an active effort to promote lab-grown protein sources?
Kay @ 2024-11-18T20:19 (+3) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Does your evaluation process shift at all each year in regards to any regions or interventions that are prioritized?
Could you give us a brief overview of how ACE's evaluation process has evolved over time? What are some major differences between the evaluation process in your founding year versus 2024?
Animal Charity Evaluators @ 2024-11-19T15:58 (+3)
Thanks for your questions!
1. We refine the methods of our evaluation process every year based on internal and external feedback in order to improve on the previous year and be more accurate in our assessments. We also update our position on the likely effectiveness of interventions based on new research and consider the particular situation of each country in our assessments. However, this year we didn’t explicitly score or prioritize certain interventions and countries. Instead, we analyzed the impact of the specific work of each charity using our new evaluation criteria (see below). In general (with some exceptions), we continue to prioritize work on farmed animals and wild animals, interventions that are more institutional in scope, and countries that are more neglected or have higher levels of animal suffering.
2. ACE’s methods to evaluate charities have changed a lot over the years. We used to have more criteria to evaluate charities and we have reduced that number of criteria over the years, focusing on the most important factors for making recommendation decisions. The biggest changes we made this year were introducing a process allowing interested charities to apply for evaluation (rather than ACE inviting charities to be evaluated), and updating our evaluation criteria. Specifically, we:
You can read more about our latest charity evaluation process here.
— Maria
Comments on 2024-11-18
Kay @ 2024-11-18T20:19 (+3) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Does your evaluation process shift at all each year in regards to any regions or interventions that are prioritized?
Could you give us a brief overview of how ACE's evaluation process has evolved over time? What are some major differences between the evaluation process in your founding year versus 2024?
Sean Rice @ 2024-11-18T17:45 (+4) in response to Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on November 19 at 8-10am PT
Comments on 2024-09-13
Alene @ 2024-09-13T20:24 (+1) in response to Civil Litigation for Farmed Animals - Notes From EAGxBerkeley Talk
Thank you for posting this, Noa!!!!! <3 <3 <3
Comments on 2024-07-05
LaurenKohler @ 2024-06-04T16:53 (+1) in response to Cutting Through the Controversy on Alt Proteins as Ultra-Processed Foods
Thank you, Amie and Caryn, for this great summary of the discussion! Stray Dog Institute is so grateful to have had the privilege of bringing this topic to the AVA mainstage with such incredible panelists!
Amie Albright @ 2024-07-05T23:19 (+1)
You are so welcome! Thank you very much for being there with us during AVA DC 2024.
Comments on 2024-06-21
Animal Advocacy Careers @ 2024-06-20T07:04 (+1) in response to Animal Advocacy Careers is hiring!
Hi, we are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We hope to have the new candidate starting in September though and thus would keep the application open until August. :)
allisona @ 2024-06-21T03:11 (+1)
Thank you!
allisona @ 2024-06-21T03:10 (+1) in response to undefined
This looks like spam?
Comments on 2024-06-20
allisona @ 2024-06-19T17:51 (+1) in response to Animal Advocacy Careers is hiring!
Is there an application deadline for this position? I quickly scrolled through the webpage and didn't see one listed.
Animal Advocacy Careers @ 2024-06-20T07:04 (+1)
Hi, we are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We hope to have the new candidate starting in September though and thus would keep the application open until August. :)
Comments on 2024-06-19
allisona @ 2024-06-19T17:51 (+1) in response to Animal Advocacy Careers is hiring!
Is there an application deadline for this position? I quickly scrolled through the webpage and didn't see one listed.
Comments on 2024-06-07
Alene @ 2024-05-09T18:14 (+2) in response to Using shareholder activism to help animals
Super cool! Thank you for writing this, Max!
If anyone reading this gets involved in shareholder activism, please let me know.
There's another little extra way you can help animals if you own shares in a company, in addition to doing shareholder activism. Learn a little more here: legalimpactforchickens.org/investors, or reach out to me!
Max Carpendale @ 2024-06-07T10:16 (+1)
Thanks so much, Alene! And thanks for making others aware of this opportunity
Comments on 2024-06-04
LaurenKohler @ 2024-06-04T16:53 (+1) in response to Cutting Through the Controversy on Alt Proteins as Ultra-Processed Foods
Thank you, Amie and Caryn, for this great summary of the discussion! Stray Dog Institute is so grateful to have had the privilege of bringing this topic to the AVA mainstage with such incredible panelists!
Comments on 2024-05-21
Iselda Livoni - Arba Peru @ 2024-05-21T18:58 (+1) in response to Iselda Livoni - Arba Peru's Quick takes
Hello everyone!
!!
We have three new commitments for Peru
1-. Sweet Freeze Bakery announces its 100% commitment for December 2024.
Engagement link: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4GcIyVO371/?igsh=NW0zeWFvMWVic3By
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in February 2024, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: There were none from the beginning, communication was very good.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners, linking them directly with cage-free producers in the area. Phone calls and WhatsApp messages.
Scalability: Sweet Freeze Bakery is a company in the pastry business with excellent acceptance in the districts with the most inhabitants in Lima.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
2- Red Coffee Shop, announces its cage free commitment to be 100% complete by 2025
Commitment link
https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE4MDIxNjUzMDI3MTU3MjIz?story_media_id=3358582698278345950&igsh=a2Q1dGVmZjdsZzh5
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in December 2023, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: There were none, from the beginning communication was very good.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners to directly contact cage-free producers in the area. In-person visit, phone calls and WhatsApp messages.
Scalability: Company in the pastry - cafeteria sector with excellent acceptance in a district that still has no commitment.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
3- Mascookie Pet Snack, a pet cookie brand, announces its commitment to be 100% complete by the end of 2024.
Engagement link https://sites.google.com/view/mascookiegalletas/noticias
Scale: National (Peru)
Schedule: First contact in February February 2024, follow-up every 10 days.
Who: ARBA
Failed tactics: They liked the idea of making the change after a week of conversations.
Successful tactics: Direct conversations with the owners, linking them directly with cage-free producers in the area. The commitment is aligned with your objective and vision as a company.
Scalability: This important brand has massive distribution in veterinaries, pet shops and soon in supermarkets, it is the first pet food brand to make a cage-free commitment in Peru.
Follow-up: We will keep in touch to request reports and bring producers closer.
Thank you
Comments on 2024-05-15
Nithin Ravi @ 2024-05-15T14:25 (+2) in response to The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations
Interesting, thanks for sharing Michael!
Comments on 2024-05-09
Alene @ 2024-05-09T18:14 (+2) in response to Using shareholder activism to help animals
Super cool! Thank you for writing this, Max!
If anyone reading this gets involved in shareholder activism, please let me know.
There's another little extra way you can help animals if you own shares in a company, in addition to doing shareholder activism. Learn a little more here: legalimpactforchickens.org/investors, or reach out to me!
Comments on 2024-05-07
thedogsmeal @ 2024-05-07T18:10 (+1) in response to You're Invited: Stray Dog Institute's Newest Report on Alt Proteins
Exciting news! Stray Dog Institute is releasing a groundbreaking report on plant-based alternative proteins in the US. Join their webinar on February 29th for insights and recommendations. Register now! 🌱📊
Comments on 2024-05-06
Iselda Livoni - Arba Peru @ 2024-05-06T21:28 (+1) in response to Iselda Livoni - Arba Peru's Quick takes
Hello !
We conducted a new research on the poultry industry in Peru, millions of hens and chickens are used annually to meet the demand for eggs and meat.
ARBA website: https://arba.pe/boletin-arba/como-se-manifiesta-la-crueldad-y-la-falta-de-piedad-en-la-industria-avicola/
YouTube: https://youtu.be/tk_FjJxV0Z0
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C6eW65VOSKm/
Peru is one of the countries with the highest consumption of eggs and chicken in Latin America, with a high percentage of informal industry that is not visible or transparent through the Peruvian state and its ministry of agriculture.
Have a good week,
Iselda
Comments on 2024-05-04
lostinsauces @ 2024-03-28T13:34 (+1) in response to The Potential Impact of AI in Animal Advocacy & The Need For More Funding In This Space
Hi Sam! I want to apologize for taking so long to respond. I'll try to be quicker in the future if there is more to discuss after my response here. I also really appreciate you taking the time to respond in such detail. Here are some poorly organized thoughts:
Sam Tucker @ 2024-05-04T04:45 (+2)
No problem, I likewise apologise for taking so long to get this response back to you as well!
I certainly agree that hallucinations are a huge limitation for using current LLMs in chatbots or automated actions of any kind. Hallucinations are far more likely to occur on questions outside of an LLMs training data, so training an LLM specifically on data relevant to animal advocacy should reduce the frequency of hallucinations.
In addition, the database we build will be used for retrieval augmented generation to ground the responses in fact and provide citations for sources in addition to using it as training data.
These two approaches combined with training techniques designed to reduce hallucinations (such as converting graphs showing relationships between objects to text for training data and using data augmentation to increase diversity in the dataset) will make the LLM we train far more reliable and less likely to hallucinate on animal rights issues.
I should clarify that when I say we are training an LLM, we won't be doing this entirely from scratch. We will begin with a pre-trained state of the art open source model, then continue pre-training, before fine-tuning and finally building it into specific tools for specific use cases. This requires far less data and compute power compared to training an LLM from the ground up.
As for how much data we can collect, we've surveyed more than 100 leaders and employees of animal charities and the willingness to share data is very high, more than 70% are willing to share data for training.
Your point about developing techniques to clean speciesist data out of corpuses is an excellent one and we absolutely are planning to do this as well. After we collect data from animal advocacy organisations, the next step is having volunteers provide human feedback on how different responses affect animals. We will use this data to create speciesism detection and ranking models (as well as a diverse range of models predicting other relevant information, such as how logically impactful, culturally sensitive or generally persuasive a message is), which we will open source to allow anyone to use them to clean any dataset of content that is harmful to animals.
This is quite a complex topic and it's often hard to detail our plan accurately in a succinct way as a result, so I've written a blog post on our website that explains our approach in more detail here: https://www.openpaws.ai/blog/why-animal-advocates-need-our-own-large-language-model
This approach is guided by our comprehensive literature review, which can be found here: https://www.openpaws.ai/blog/literature-review-on-developing-artificial-intelligence-to-advocate-for-animal-rights
Thank you for sharing that paper about the WMDP benchmark, there are certainly a lot of benchmarks that could be adapted to measuring the impact of content on animals. There's also recently been work on developing benchmarks specifically for detecting speciesism, like the AnimaLLM proof-of-concept evaluation from the paper "The Case for Animal-Friendly AI": https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01199
I definitely agree that benchmarks and evaluations in general will play a huge role in aligning AI with the interests of animals and this is something we aim to contribute to through our work as well wherever we can.
Comments on 2024-04-30
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-04-30T16:40 (+3) in response to Eleanor McAree's Quick takes
Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes
I just wanted to share this excellent research from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the article by the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/30/tyson-foods-toxic-pollutants-lakes-rivers
Comments on 2024-04-29
Animal Ask @ 2024-04-29T14:35 (+1) in response to Volunteer Opportunity: Ask your parents about their stock.
Hi @Alene! Thank you for working on this! We at Animal Ask just published an extensive report on shareholder activism. If interested, you can access it here, in case you missed it. :)
Comments on 2024-04-12
Sophika Kostyniuk @ 2024-04-12T18:38 (+2) in response to California OCTO Act Passes First Committee
And a huge congratulations to Giulia Malerbi, Aquatic Life Institute's Global Policy Lead, for driving this opportunity forward with our key partners, and coordinating numerous activities in the background.
Comments on 2024-04-03
David van Beveren @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Thanks! :)
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:49 (+2)
Hi David! Thanks for the questions.
Talking about features of the Whova app, one may wonder, when and how can Whova be accessed?
We are publishing Whova for event communications in mid-April. Everyone will receive an email notification to the same email address that they used to register when it has been published, which is the same email everyone will need to use in order to login and access the AVA DC event.
For any further questions, I invite all who are interested to join our AVA International Slack channel -- we are always there to chat and answer questions!
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:40 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi Dan, Amie here. Thank you so much for this question. I was hoping someone would ask it!
We are publishing the official program TODAY between 12-2 pm PT. We are just finishing up adding it to our website and will announce it across social media as soon as it is complete!
Feel free to check that link above any time after 2 pm PT today and it will be there!
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:46 (+1)
How exciting!
Dan Cooper @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
This will be my first time to D.C. are there any off-program activities happening before or after the Summit?
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:44 (+1)
Hi Dan, I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. We added a ton of new features this year!
And more! See all the details here!
We look forward to meeting you in May!
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:14 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi Franka!
As Taylor mentioned you can find those details and more on our AVA Policies Page.
For ease, you can see all the details below: Exhibitor registration and load-in will begin at 2pm on Thursday, May 16th. Please make every effort to finish setting up by 6pm.
Exhibitor tear-down will begin at 2PM on the 19th.
While we encourage you to table any time from 8 - 5 PM on the 17-18th, and 8 - 2 PM on the 18th. peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Please follow the exact details below to ship your exhibit supplies. If you are sending swag, please make sure it is shipped and labeled separately per the instructions.
While we encourage you to table any time from 7 - 1:00 PM on the 17-19th, peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Registered exhibitors have access to all AVA Summit provided meals.
Please note nothing can be affixed to the hotel walls. If you have signage, please come prepared with pipes or easels.
Preferred Printer
Save time, shipping costs, and carbon emissions by using our preferred printer! The AVA Summit has teamed up with a local print shop, Digi Quick Print, to offer you a 10% discount on printing services, free delivery to the hotel, and a go-to plan for any last minute needs.
To qualify for this deal please contact both brian@digiqp.com and matt@digiqp.com and mention the AVA Summit.
Note: For simple jobs please give 2-5 business days notice. For larger and more complicated jobs please allow 7-10 business days. *If your project is for the Swag Bags please take special note of the instructions listed below.
Shipping to the hotel
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
Guest Name - AVA Summit Hilton Alexandria Mark Center 5000 Seminary Rd Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Due to the limited storage space, packages may be delivered to the Hotel three working days prior to the date of the function. Please note the below charges will reflect on your guest room or invoice. Please follow the below instructions to ensure your packages arrive in the correct place!
Incoming Packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and are held at the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each.
Outgoing packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and can be sent from the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each. Handling charges cannot be collected by the shipper’s account number, therefore please pay handling charges with one of the following methods: cash, check, or credit card.
There is a printer if you need to print off labels, but there is no shipping office at the hotel. We recommend bringing pre-paid labels if possible and scheduling a pick-up with your shipping provider.
Swag Shipping - The first 500 attendees will receive a swag bag at registration. If you are a Silver Sponsor or above or have otherwise arranged to include an item in our attendee Swag Bag, please make sure your swag items arrive by Tuesday, May 14th. We will build the bags on the 15th. Items received after the 14th are not guaranteed to be included in the bags.
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
AVA SWAG - Your Org
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
5000 Seminary Rd
Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Exhibit Needs
If you purchased a WiFi/Power Upgrade, or are a Sponsor at any level, your A/V needs should be taken care of already! Additional requests may result in charges from the hotel.
→ Please contact Amanda@AVASummit.com for further hotel related questions
Franka Schoening @ 2024-04-03T17:44 (+1)
Thanks so much, Amanda, for sharing this. I will read through it in detail and follow up with any questions via email if needed. See you next month!!
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:39 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
People will LOVE your table;)
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:43 (+1)
I will definitely stop by to try some of these snacks I've heard so much about!
Vikram Singh @ 2024-04-03T17:23 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Thank you!
James Morgan @ 2024-04-03T17:42 (+1)
There is an absolutely amazing Ethiopian restaurant within walking distance! Although I definitely recommend following Amanda's advice, Planted Society have some fantastic collaborations.
Dan Cooper @ 2024-04-03T17:30 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
When will the program be published?
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:40 (+1)
Hi Dan, Amie here. Thank you so much for this question. I was hoping someone would ask it!
We are publishing the official program TODAY between 12-2 pm PT. We are just finishing up adding it to our website and will announce it across social media as soon as it is complete!
Feel free to check that link above any time after 2 pm PT today and it will be there!
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:18 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi David, I’m sorry I got you addicted to Cheddalicious Plant Based Snacks. I’m glad to know you’ll be giving them away at the VH Exhibit Table at AVA D.C.
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:39 (+1)
People will LOVE your table;)
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Thanks, Taylor! Hi Alexia!
You will still want to arrive on time on Thursday morning to participate in the many Meet Up and Networking Sessions on Thursday. You can learn more about them here.
Alexia Dean @ 2024-04-03T17:39 (+1)
Thank you Taylor and Amanda!
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:32 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi Alexia, Julia here. This post might be helpful for you: https://forum.fastcommunity.org/posts/zJ6PkchvLyGvowkd4/how-do-you-benefit-most-from-attending-the-ava-summit?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link
We're looking forward to seeing you there!
Alexia Dean @ 2024-04-03T17:39 (+1)
Thank you Julia!
Dan Cooper @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
This will be my first time to D.C. are there any off-program activities happening before or after the Summit?
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:38 (+1)
Hi Dan, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. This post might be helpful for you: https://forum.fastcommunity.org/posts/zJ6PkchvLyGvowkd4/how-do-you-benefit-most-from-attending-the-ava-summit?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link
Joaquín Triñanes @ 2024-04-03T17:05 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Could you tell us about a speaker or session from this conference that you're particularly excited about and why?
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+2)
Hi Joaquín, My name is Amie, great to e-meet you!
I’m truly excited about all of our speakers, but particularly excited about Ed Winters’ (Earthling Ed) presence this year during our Closing Ceremony. I’ve been following, reading, and have been generally greatly inspired by Ed’s advocacy and excellent ability to debate and navigate challenging topics while keeping calm and centered.
I’m also very excited for the session with Leah Garces and Brialle Ringer, Personal Transformation for Collective Liberation, where we will explore avenues of increased empowerment and strategies to elevate leadership from a place of wellness.
Why? Because it is all essential for movement progress! And I am particularly interested in navigating challenging conversations, collective liberation, and personal transformation.
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:31 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi Alexia! Taylor here, Grantee Day runs from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m on Thursday, May 16th. However, the appointments will depend on a variety of factors! Selected organizations will receive their appointment(s) in a few weeks. If selected, you'll know your appointment well in advance.
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1)
Thanks, Taylor! Hi Alexia!
You will still want to arrive on time on Thursday morning to participate in the many Meet Up and Networking Sessions on Thursday. You can learn more about them here.
Joaquín Triñanes @ 2024-04-03T17:05 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Could you tell us about a speaker or session from this conference that you're particularly excited about and why?
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1)
Hi, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. I'm very excited about the fact that we are (mostly) setting up discussion panels instead of standalone keynotes this year. We also had great creative workshop submissions!
Dan Cooper @ 2024-04-03T17:35 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
This will be my first time to D.C. are there any off-program activities happening before or after the Summit?
Alexia Dean @ 2024-04-03T17:27 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant?
Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:32 (+1)
Hi Alexia, Julia here. This post might be helpful for you: https://forum.fastcommunity.org/posts/zJ6PkchvLyGvowkd4/how-do-you-benefit-most-from-attending-the-ava-summit?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link
We're looking forward to seeing you there!
Alexia Dean @ 2024-04-03T17:27 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant?
Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:31 (+1)
Hi Alexia! Taylor here, Grantee Day runs from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m on Thursday, May 16th. However, the appointments will depend on a variety of factors! Selected organizations will receive their appointment(s) in a few weeks. If selected, you'll know your appointment well in advance.
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T16:45 (+3) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1712095613513&key=GRP&app=resvlink
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:30 (+1)
Hi Che,
Amie here! In addition to this information, inevitably, this block will also sell out. Rooms tend to go super fast! When in doubt, you can always head to our DC event page to find the latest updates and news about the hotel (and everything else event-related!)
Also, please join us on our AVA International Slack channel for any/all upcoming wonders you may have! We are always there to provide information and help.
Dan Cooper @ 2024-04-03T17:30 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
When will the program be published?
Alexia Dean @ 2024-04-03T17:27 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hello everyone! This will be my first time attending. What recommendations do you have for a first-time assistant?
Also, could someone please confirm the starting time for Grantee Day? We'll be staying at a different hotel that day and want to ensure we arrive on time. Thank you! :)
Franka Schoening @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi everyone. I was wondering when info will be shared for exhibitors regarding booth set up times, exhibit times, shipments to the hotel etc.
Thanks so much for all your hard work. So excited for May already!
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:23 (+1)
Hi Franka, Amie here. In addition to the policy page and Amanda's provided information below, we also have this information (and so much more!) on our DC event FAQ page. Also, I invite you to connect with us on our Slack channel at any time for any/all questions you may have.
Join us on our AVA International Slack here: https://impactfulanimal.slack.com/archives/C059QEFMWUF
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:06 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi Vikram! Hi! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our event is technically in Alexandria Virginia, just over the bridge from the Capital. We have partnered with Planted Society to bring their Plant Based Initiative to Alexandria! Keep your eyes out for news about our exciting restaurant offers!
As far as where to stay, our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
See you in May!
Vikram Singh @ 2024-04-03T17:23 (+1)
Thank you!
David van Beveren @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Thanks! :)
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:22 (+1)
Hi David, we’ve actually gotten pretty good feedback on Whova in general from our attendees – most of them are using it to see who is coming and arrange 1:1 meetings with other attendees.
The defining difference between AVA Events and other conferences is that our audience consists of dedicated individuals working or looking to work in the animal and vegan advocacy movement professionally. Our audience consists of >80% full-time advocates working for organizations (using all kinds of strategies) towards our shared goals. We are an “internal facing” event, not targeting the mainstream. The beauty of this — and that’s what most of our speakers tell us — is that we can truly speak as animal advocates, use the term vegan, and don’t "need to" wrap up our content for a more mainstream audience.
Another thing that makes us unique is the amount of international attendees and speakers. We’ve had 48 nations represented at our last US Summit!
Gabriele Bernotaite @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA! I'm so excited to join everyone in D.C., thanks for doing this AMA!
When it comes to the conferences in Brazil and Vietnam, if you had to pick just one to attend, do you lean towards a favorite? Why?
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:18 (+1)
Hi Gabriele, this is Amie—what a great question! It is too hard, if not impossible, for me to choose just one to attend. Each event is unique to the respective culture and region, which is what makes our events so relevant and special. So, each event is equally my favorite for its own unique reasons and regional movement elevation potential.
David van Beveren @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Thanks! :)
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:18 (+1)
Hi David, I’m sorry I got you addicted to Cheddalicious Plant Based Snacks. I’m glad to know you’ll be giving them away at the VH Exhibit Table at AVA D.C.
James Morgan @ 2024-04-03T16:32 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
What are some little known facts, or behind the scenes info you can share about AVA that might surprise an average attendee?
Also, what are you as organisers most looking forward about the upcoming summit?
I can't wait to be there!
Amie Albright @ 2024-04-03T17:16 (+2)
Hi James, Amie here! One interesting piece of information that might surprise an average attendee is that our attendees come from all over the world; in our last US event alone (Los Angeles 2023), we had attendees from 48 countries!
One of the things I am looking forward to most this year in AVA DC is coming together in community from around the world, and feeling rejuvenated and inspired from all of the incredible advocates working together in this space. It is sincerely one of my favorite aspects of our events!
Can’t wait to see you in May!
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
If you booked with our link it is 48 hours before check in time!
Che Green @ 2024-04-03T17:15 (+1)
Thank you again! Super helpful.
Franka Schoening @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi everyone. I was wondering when info will be shared for exhibitors regarding booth set up times, exhibit times, shipments to the hotel etc.
Thanks so much for all your hard work. So excited for May already!
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:14 (+1)
Hi Franka!
As Taylor mentioned you can find those details and more on our AVA Policies Page.
For ease, you can see all the details below: Exhibitor registration and load-in will begin at 2pm on Thursday, May 16th. Please make every effort to finish setting up by 6pm.
Exhibitor tear-down will begin at 2PM on the 19th.
While we encourage you to table any time from 8 - 5 PM on the 17-18th, and 8 - 2 PM on the 18th. peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Please follow the exact details below to ship your exhibit supplies. If you are sending swag, please make sure it is shipped and labeled separately per the instructions.
While we encourage you to table any time from 7 - 1:00 PM on the 17-19th, peak exhibit hours will be during breaks and lunches. We ask that a staffer be at your table for those peak exhibit hours, with the others being optional.
Registered exhibitors have access to all AVA Summit provided meals.
Please note nothing can be affixed to the hotel walls. If you have signage, please come prepared with pipes or easels.
Preferred Printer
Save time, shipping costs, and carbon emissions by using our preferred printer! The AVA Summit has teamed up with a local print shop, Digi Quick Print, to offer you a 10% discount on printing services, free delivery to the hotel, and a go-to plan for any last minute needs.
To qualify for this deal please contact both brian@digiqp.com and matt@digiqp.com and mention the AVA Summit.
Note: For simple jobs please give 2-5 business days notice. For larger and more complicated jobs please allow 7-10 business days. *If your project is for the Swag Bags please take special note of the instructions listed below.
Shipping to the hotel
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
Guest Name - AVA Summit Hilton Alexandria Mark Center 5000 Seminary Rd Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Due to the limited storage space, packages may be delivered to the Hotel three working days prior to the date of the function. Please note the below charges will reflect on your guest room or invoice. Please follow the below instructions to ensure your packages arrive in the correct place!
Incoming Packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and are held at the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each.
Outgoing packages are handled as follows: Express Envelopes are complementary and can be sent from the front desk. Packages/Boxes are charged at $6.00 each. Pallets are charged at $150.00 each. Cases/Crates are charged at $75.00 each. Handling charges cannot be collected by the shipper’s account number, therefore please pay handling charges with one of the following methods: cash, check, or credit card.
There is a printer if you need to print off labels, but there is no shipping office at the hotel. We recommend bringing pre-paid labels if possible and scheduling a pick-up with your shipping provider.
Swag Shipping - The first 500 attendees will receive a swag bag at registration. If you are a Silver Sponsor or above or have otherwise arranged to include an item in our attendee Swag Bag, please make sure your swag items arrive by Tuesday, May 14th. We will build the bags on the 15th. Items received after the 14th are not guaranteed to be included in the bags.
Please keep note of your tracking number - if the hotel is looking for your package that is how they will find it
Attn: Sales/Convention Services
AVA SWAG - Your Org
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
5000 Seminary Rd
Alexandria, VA 22311, United States
Exhibit Needs
If you purchased a WiFi/Power Upgrade, or are a Sponsor at any level, your A/V needs should be taken care of already! Additional requests may result in charges from the hotel.
→ Please contact Amanda@AVASummit.com for further hotel related questions
Franka Schoening @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi everyone. I was wondering when info will be shared for exhibitors regarding booth set up times, exhibit times, shipments to the hotel etc.
Thanks so much for all your hard work. So excited for May already!
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:10 (+1)
Hi Franka, Taylor here! You can see all the exhibitor information and shipping information in our Policies page, and the Exhibitor Instruction emails being sent on April 5th and May 3rd!
https://www.avasummit.com/policies
Annika Quist @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Thanks so much for organizing! Might be getting ahead of myself, but - do you have tentative ideas for the 2025 conference location?
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:09 (+1)
Hi Annika, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. We do but we don’t want to give away too much just now :) Let’s say – if funding permits – we will be returning to the US West Coast, we’re looking at India for our next event in Asia, we’re considering a Spanish speaking country for Latin America, and… potentially adding a smaller conference with some partners on the African continent which we are really excited about!
Joaquín Triñanes @ 2024-04-03T17:05 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Could you tell us about a speaker or session from this conference that you're particularly excited about and why?
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:08 (+2)
Hi Joaquín! Taylor here. I am so excited about all the new speakers coming this year who haven’t had a chance to speak yet! I am most excited about pattrice jones and our Uniting Voices series!
Franka Schoening @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi everyone. I was wondering when info will be shared for exhibitors regarding booth set up times, exhibit times, shipments to the hotel etc.
Thanks so much for all your hard work. So excited for May already!
David van Beveren @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA team, fantastic to have you here with us today!
Thanks! :)
Che Green @ 2024-04-03T17:00 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Thanks! Booked, but Marriott is very unclear about the cancellation policy.
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:07 (+2)
If you booked with our link it is 48 hours before check in time!
Vikram Singh @ 2024-04-03T16:35 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Any recommendations on where to stay in DC that has nice vegan food nearby? :)
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T17:06 (+1)
Hi Vikram! Hi! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our event is technically in Alexandria Virginia, just over the bridge from the Capital. We have partnered with Planted Society to bring their Plant Based Initiative to Alexandria! Keep your eyes out for news about our exciting restaurant offers!
As far as where to stay, our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
See you in May!
Joaquín Triñanes @ 2024-04-03T17:05 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Could you tell us about a speaker or session from this conference that you're particularly excited about and why?
Gabriele Bernotaite @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA! I'm so excited to join everyone in D.C., thanks for doing this AMA!
When it comes to the conferences in Brazil and Vietnam, if you had to pick just one to attend, do you lean towards a favorite? Why?
Julia Reinelt @ 2024-04-03T17:04 (+1)
Hi, I’m Julia, AVA International’s Executive Director. If you don’t have any specific travel preferences or if your role is not directly related to any of the regions, I would recommend checking out AVA Latin America because we are trying out a new concept: A collaboration with the huge Sao Paulo VegFest this year! They had over 8,000 attendees in 2023 and tons of interesting exhibitors. (Shoutout to our partners at SVB!)
James Morgan @ 2024-04-03T16:32 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
What are some little known facts, or behind the scenes info you can share about AVA that might surprise an average attendee?
Also, what are you as organisers most looking forward about the upcoming summit?
I can't wait to be there!
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:04 (+1)
Hi James, Taylor here! I am most excited about getting to see everyone again and watching all of our hard work go out into the world!
Gabriele Bernotaite @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA! I'm so excited to join everyone in D.C., thanks for doing this AMA!
When it comes to the conferences in Brazil and Vietnam, if you had to pick just one to attend, do you lean towards a favorite? Why?
Taylor Waters @ 2024-04-03T17:04 (+1)
Hi Gabriele, Taylor here! That’s too hard to choose! I would lean towards the one which would add the most to my projects and roles. Both Brazil and Viet Nam offer incredible networking and learnings for folx working on projects in those regions.
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T16:45 (+3) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1712095613513&key=GRP&app=resvlink
Che Green @ 2024-04-03T17:00 (+1)
Thanks! Booked, but Marriott is very unclear about the cancellation policy.
Gabriele Bernotaite @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Hi AVA! I'm so excited to join everyone in D.C., thanks for doing this AMA!
When it comes to the conferences in Brazil and Vietnam, if you had to pick just one to attend, do you lean towards a favorite? Why?
Annika Quist @ 2024-04-03T16:58 (+1) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Thanks so much for organizing! Might be getting ahead of myself, but - do you have tentative ideas for the 2025 conference location?
Che Green @ 2024-04-03T16:36 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
The AVA hotel is fully booked for all dates, it seems. Will you be opening another block of rooms and/or do you have a list of nearby hotels you would recommend?
AmandaCramerEvents @ 2024-04-03T16:45 (+3)
Hi, Che! I’m Amanda Cramer, the Event Manager. Our hotel block is SOLD OUT.....but fear not! We've secured 35 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott Pentagon South, just 1 KM/.6 Miles away from the AVA Hotel.
Hurry—these rooms will go fast! Book now to secure this rate ($199 + tax) before it's too late! The last day to book is April 29th, or until rooms sell out.
https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1712095613513&key=GRP&app=resvlink
Che Green @ 2024-04-03T16:36 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
The AVA hotel is fully booked for all dates, it seems. Will you be opening another block of rooms and/or do you have a list of nearby hotels you would recommend?
Vikram Singh @ 2024-04-03T16:35 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
Any recommendations on where to stay in DC that has nice vegan food nearby? :)
James Morgan @ 2024-04-03T16:32 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the Summit in DC this May 16-19, 2024. Ask us anything!
What are some little known facts, or behind the scenes info you can share about AVA that might surprise an average attendee?
Also, what are you as organisers most looking forward about the upcoming summit?
I can't wait to be there!
Comments on 2024-03-28
Sam Tucker @ 2024-02-12T10:08 (+2) in response to The Potential Impact of AI in Animal Advocacy & The Need For More Funding In This Space
Thank you for these great questions!
I think the initiative that will be the most impactful is mass data collection as this is the one intervention that enables all other interventions in the AI space for animal advocacy and by focusing our first 6 months on extensive data collection and curation, we will lay the groundwork for all 3 of our planned interventions (training and deploying open-source AI systems free from speciesist bias, empowering animal-friendly organisations to integrate AI into their operations and helping AI labs and developers align their models with the interests of animals).
Because all 3 interventions require this as a first step, we save considerable time and resources by choosing to start here.
Furthermore, by open-sourcing this dataset, we further mitigate against potential risks by allowing any individual or organisation to develop their own interventions using this data. This significantly increases the potential for impact, as this first step is not only laying the groundwork for our own interventions, but potentially for all future interventions at the intersection of AI and animal advocacy.
But in terms of ranking each of those three interventions that come after data collection, it primarily depends on the timeframe in which you evaluate impact, whether you prefer interventions that are lower risk to lower reward or higher risk to higher reward and whether these interventions happen together or in isolation.
For example, helping animal organisations implement AI in their workflows is much more likely to be successful if we're helping them implement AI without speciesism and helping AI labs to reduce speciesism in their models will be much easier if we have already successfully done so with our own models.
Helping animal organisations with implementation is likely to have the greatest short term impact, whilst working with other AI labs may have the largest long term impact, but also a higher degree of risk.
As for the question about specific use case, I'm personally most excited about automated agents, chatbots and the intersection of generative and predictive AI. For example, we could have AI agents that monitor social media for misinformation from the animal industry and automatically respond to it with factual information, we could have LLMs that use real world social media analytics from animal organisations as their reward function (in other words, they would learn which kind of posts get the most reach, likes and comments and they would write more posts like that) and we could have AI-powered chatbots that personalise their responses to each individual based on what is most likely to resonate with them.
Regarding the technical questions about expected increase in performance and the difference between prompt engineering vs. fine-tuning, I'm currently in the middle of writing a literature review that addresses this question in more detail and I'd be more than happy to share it with you once I'm done to provide a more comprehensive answer, but in the meantime, I'm happy to share a few general thoughts on this question that explain why I believe the 10% increase in productivity estimate is highly conservative.
Prompt engineering techniques can work well to align LLMs for narrow use cases like creating vegan recipes (for example), but in agent-like systems (specifically externally facing ones that deal with the general public) the risk of the system becoming unaligned rises, as does that potential impact of that risk. I believe particularly as the year progresses this is going to be an increasingly important problem to solve as the AI industry as a whole is moving towards automated agents quite rapidly. There are also data and privacy concerns with the closed source models for animal organisations, many of which see this as an obstacle to implementing AI. Open source locally hosted models could potentially solve this issue.
Also, optimising for the correct reward function is something that will be very difficult to do with closed source models. For example, with enough data, we can train models that predict how different advocates rank different responses based on the type of advocacy they do, we can train models to predict how social media or blog posts will perform for different organisations etc. and we can use these as reward models to fine-tune models that are goal focused towards the needs of animal advocates. I believe as a result of this we will be able to create much more persuasive LLMs than we would through prompt engineering alone.
There's also a lot of interesting use cases for using smaller fine-tuned LLMs as tools, for example, we could create very hyper-specialised small models for something like grant-writing tailored to vegan grant-makers (using data from what grants do and don't get approved as the reward) and then have a larger LLM decide when to call that tool. The impact of something like a vegan-specific GPT would be much greater if it had access to a wide range of small fine-tuned models, prediction models and retrieval augmented generation, even if we don't succeed in creating a superior general vegan LLM (although I am very confident that we will be able to create that as well).
Regarding the question around influencing AI labs, the animal advocacy movement has a long history of successful corporate and legislative campaigns that we can learn from and apply within this space. One thing that stands out to me is that the most successful corporate advocacy campaigns tend to have a clear alternative provided by campaigners and often support in helping corporates implement that alternative. I believe for us to be successful in influencing AI labs, we will likely also require a clear alternative, in this case by building animal-aligned AI models, evaluations and benchmarks that we can use to help AI labs in aligning their models.
lostinsauces @ 2024-03-28T13:34 (+1)
Hi Sam! I want to apologize for taking so long to respond. I'll try to be quicker in the future if there is more to discuss after my response here. I also really appreciate you taking the time to respond in such detail. Here are some poorly organized thoughts:
Comments on 2024-03-27
Yasmin Ben Tzvi @ 2024-03-27T13:28 (+1) in response to Want to speak up for the animals? Become a NARD Organizer!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd3k7AJH6jLKc8WtLqrbtUeubvLt3-YX_TVNxqUnQVivs3zRQ/viewform
Comments on 2024-03-26
Max Broad @ 2024-03-26T21:50 (+1) in response to Washington State Prohibits Octopus Farming: A Major Victory for Animals
YAYYYYYYYYYYYY! This makes me so happy! I wonder what the legislators main motivators were for voting for this.
Comments on 2024-03-22
Aidan Kankyoku @ 2024-03-05T20:27 (+5) in response to Aidan Kankyoku's Quick takes
I just saw a video on instagram of someone basically sabotaging megatrawlers by dropping gigantic pieces of marble into the ocean to mess up their nets. People who know about fishing: does this seem like it could be effective or scalable? If so it seems like it could be massively cost-effective.
Link to video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3QSQTdvDQh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
saulius @ 2024-03-22T17:27 (+1)
You probably have heard of this argument, but I just want to point out that it's very unclear whether trawling decreases or increases animal suffering in the short term. It could decrease suffering by reducing wild animal numbers because wild animals suffer a lot. This consideration doesn't make me want to go and eat shrimp or support trawling, but I do think it's good to ask who would be the beneficiaries of such an intervention before pursuing it.
Comments on 2024-03-21
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-21T17:08 (+4) in response to Animal Welfare League 2023 Review
This is an excellent write-up of your work! Thank you for sharing it. And especially, thank you for all you do for animals in Ghana!
Comments on 2024-03-20
allisona @ 2024-03-20T20:58 (+1) in response to 25 million try vegan in Veganuary's 2024 campaign
Wow, this sounds like a great acheivement! Can I ask how you calculated the 25M estimate? I tried looking in the campaign report and didn't see additional info. I maybe found a couple of the Yougov surveys (UK and Germany)?
Comments on 2024-03-15
Husnain Khan @ 2024-03-15T05:54 (+1) in response to Nearly 400 Sodexo-Run Dining Halls Have Implemented Meaningful Plant-Based Nudges
Using metal detectors in agriculture, as promoted by GoldXtra, ensures that the agriculture industry can yield safer, purer, and better-quality products. These tools are not just the treasures of history enthusiasts but have proven to be genuine assets in modern farming.
Comments on 2024-03-08
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-07T18:02 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) and we recently opened applications for our 2024 Movement Grants! Ask us Anything!
We also received some questions via email, which I thought would be helpful to share with you all. I will post them in this thread 👇🧵
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-08T16:37 (+1)
Question: I received a Movement Grant last year, am I eligible to apply again?
Response: Yes! Provided the work you are applying for remains in scope (see the Movement Grants eligibility criteria here) previous grantees are welcome to apply for funding again this round.
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-07T18:02 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) and we recently opened applications for our 2024 Movement Grants! Ask us Anything!
We also received some questions via email, which I thought would be helpful to share with you all. I will post them in this thread 👇🧵
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-08T16:37 (+1)
Question: I am curious whether you accept grant applications from organizations preferring to remain anonymous or not publicly acknowledged as grantees?
Response: You can apply and request to remain anonymous. If successfully awarded a grant, we would only publicly list the amount and that it was to an anonymous organization.
There is no question in the application form asking if you would like to remain anonymous, but you can note “anonymous” in the preferred name field so we are aware of your preference. If awarded a grant, we ask for feedback on our announcement post providing another opportunity to request that your grant remain anonymous if you haven’t already made us aware.
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-07T18:02 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) and we recently opened applications for our 2024 Movement Grants! Ask us Anything!
We also received some questions via email, which I thought would be helpful to share with you all. I will post them in this thread 👇🧵
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-08T16:36 (+1)
Question: I have previously applied for funding on Granti, is there any connection between this application and applications I have submitted for other funders?
Response: Granti is the grant management platform ACE is using for Round 8 of the Movement Grants program. A number of other funders in the animal advocacy space use Granti, so applicants may already be familiar with the platform. Although we are using the same platform, our grantmaking programs are separate, we cannot see any applications you have submitted to other funders, and likewise they cannot see the application you have submitted to ACE.
This is our first time using Granti and we appreciate any feedback you have on how you have on your user experience.
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-07T18:02 (+2) in response to Hi FAST! We're from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) and we recently opened applications for our 2024 Movement Grants! Ask us Anything!
We also received some questions via email, which I thought would be helpful to share with you all. I will post them in this thread 👇🧵
Eleanor McAree @ 2024-03-08T15:15 (+1)
Question: We will be applying for funding to cover our general operational costs, how do you determine an end date for the grant period?
Response: If you apply for general support funding, we will award the grant for 12 months from the point at which the grant agreement is signed - this means your grant period is likely to be from June/July 2024 to June/July 2025. If you spend the grant before that period concludes, you are welcome to report on your grant earlier (there is a question in the application that invites you to provide a date to report earlier), but this is not required.
You can find more information on the Process and Timeline here.