Note: all relevant comments from charities (with edits for readability and redactions for anonymity) are included in italics

1. What is the name of your organization?

Feedback related to the evaluation process

2. Approximately how many staff hours did your organization invest in our evaluation process? Please note that your response may help us determine the size of your participation grant.

"We did not write it down, and it involved many different employees, who contributed data from their respective programmes. Our estimate is 100 hours, but it might have been well beyond that up to 150 hours, or perhaps slightly less than 100 hours."

"It seems to us that ACE has limited understanding of how complex, time consuming and challenging it is to describe a summary of work by an international organization. The amount of data country directors have to provide, the selection of it and making it coherent and concise for evaluators in their requested form is extremely laborious"

3. Was this number of staff hours fewer, about equal to, or more than the number you expected to spend on the evaluation process?

4. Please rate your satisfaction with each stage of the evaluation process.

5. How do you feel about the amount of time allotted to respond to the following requests during the evaluation process?

"The problem with not having enough time, was the general review process taking place in the summer period when our main person working on it had 2 weeks off. I suggest that being in the summer and most staff in organizations take periods off, the process should last a couple of weeks more."

"Some of the information was factually incorrect and required many hours on our side to weed through why this was the case and rectify it. The timelines to give documents were far too short at every stage particularly the final approval which I think was one working day. The evaluation itself was not clear or transparent about the rationale for the decision, it took multiple emails to understand it."

6. Please indicate your level of agreement with the following attributes of ACE's communication style during the process.

"All communication was very professional and constructive. We have indicated 'Agree' (and not Strongly Agree) under Timely, as a few responses were received quite close to some deadlines, however it didn't impact our ability to submit the needed material."

"Document submitting, reviewing, revising process can be operated more smoothly through various digital tools. For example, all revising process can be done via Google Docs. Other than these kind of efficiency increasing suggestions, we are very satisfied with the process and thank you for all the crew for continuous help and support. There were some wrong link in our review and one table that should not be publicized got published. However, ACE was quick to respond when we bring this to your attention so thank you. I think these kind of errors is inevitable for this scale of work."

"Made the process very easy and we are appreciative. The staff members making changes before publication were also responsive and helpful. This was my first year participating in the process and I thought it was well-run and straight-forward, and I appreciate how communicative the ACE team was throughout."

7. Please leave any comments you have related to questions 2-6, or suggestions to improve the evaluation process more generally, here.

Feedback related to the written review

8. How would you rate the overall quality of content (writing and graphics) for each of the criteria in your review?

"Perhaps the review could add a bit more on the highlights (and possible challenges) of each organization. E.g. explaining a bit more in-depth, why X organization scores well on X programme. But perhaps this would be opening Pandora's Box and would result in a lot of follow-up questions to you?"

"I thought the reviews this year were more neutral and less judgmental than in previous years. I like the new style."

9. How would you rate the methodology for each of the criteria in your review?

"Some members of our organization have an opinion that ACE reviews' methodology approach is somewhat unfair to welfare commitments. I think this misunderstanding arrives from how this part is phrased in the review."

"RFMF: I think the way ACE worded this question was strange (though maybe this was just more strange to orgs like ours that plan their programming and then try to fundraise for it, instead of first raising the money and then running what programming they can with that)."

"We feel that the RFMF calculation was a miss for us in terms of the message that was being communicated. As we scored lower in this section, that may have reduced our overall funding prospects for 2023, thus not allowing us to invest in the necessary infrastructure that would see us scale up as effectively as possible."

"Regarding leadership and culture we believe that the measurement and methodology use currently by ACE does not reflect the reality of the organizations evaluated. We understand what ACE has stated regarding how it is not possible to dig deeper about the results of the survey or comments they receive but we think this can be damaging and have impact on the evaluation."

"Groups that are smaller or American-adjacent have it easier in the evaluation process… Methodology for assessing leadership is not adequate, which is understandable, because it requires a lot of expertise to assess organizational health properly. ACE should either drop organizational culture assessment or hire external consultants that are well equipped to take such tasks, especially in a culturally diverse environment."

10. How would you rate the accuracy of judgments, calculations, and estimates in each of the criteria in your review?

11. To what extent would you say the written review and other feedback from ACE, no matter the recommendation status, has been useful for your organization?