Sinergia Animal review by Vetted Causes / Animal Charity Evaluators - looking for opinions

It's eag weekend. I would give at least a week before rushing to a judgement.

My primary advice is to avoid rushing to any judgements. The criticism came out yesterday and neither organization was aware of it in advance. I assume Sinergia and/or ACE will respond, but it makes sense that that might take at least several days.

I think it's pretty safe to assume that the reality of most charities' cost-effectiveness is less than they claim. 

I'd also advise skepticism of a critic who doesn't attempt to engage with the charity to make sure they're fully informed before releasing a scathing review. [I also saw signs of naive "cost-effectiveness analysis goes brrr" style thinking about charity evaluation from their ACE review, which makes me more doubtful of their work].

It's also worth noting that quantifying charity impact is messy work, especially in the animal cause area. We should expect people to come to quite different conclusions and be comfortable with that. FarmKind estimated the cost-effectiveness of Sinergia's pig work using the same data as ACE and came to a number of animals helped per dollar that was ~6x lower (but still a crazy number of pigs per dollar). Granted, the difference between ACE and Vetted Causes assessments are beyond the acceptable margin of error

They posted about their review of Sinergia on the forum already: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YYrC2ZR5pnrYCdSLt/sinergia-ace-top-charity-makes-false-claims-about-helping

I suggest we concentrate discussion there and not here.

Hi everyone,

I’m Carolina, International Executive Director of Sinergia Animal.

I want to acknowledge that members of this community have shared this post with us, and we truly appreciate your engagement and interest in our work. A deep commitment to create real change, transparency and honesty have always been central to our approach, and we will address all concerns accordingly.

To clarify in advance, we have never taken credit for pre-existing or non-existent policies, and we will explain this in our response. We always strive to estimate our impact in good faith and will carefully review our methodology based on this feedback to address any concerns, if valid.

This discussion comes at a particularly busy time for us, as we have been attending EA Global while continuing our critical work across eight countries. We appreciate your patience as we prepare a thorough response.

As a best practice, we believe organizations mentioned by others in posts should have the chance to respond before content is published. We take the principle of the right to reply so seriously that we even extend it to companies targeted in our campaigns or enforcement programs. In that spirit, we will share our response with Vetted Causes via the email provided on their website 24 hours (or as much time as Vetted Causes prefers) before publishing it on the Forum.

The EA community has been a vital supporter of our work, and we hope this serves as an constructive opportunity to provide further insight into our efforts and approach.

Best,
Carolina