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This spreadsheet is part of ACE’s 2025 evaluation of New Roots Institute and contains our cost-effectiveness analysis of two of their programs. Because this type of analysis has inherent limitations, the results should be interpreted with caution. Where we felt we could make reasonable and defensible assumptions, we included them in our analysis. However, when estimates would have required less justifiable assumptions that could lead to dramatically different results, we chose not to include them.

This approach reflects one of ACE’s guiding principles: to follow a rigorous process grounded in logical reasoning and empirical evidence. While speculative guesses can sometimes be useful as thought experiments, we did not consider them a sound basis for charity evaluations.

We also attempted to independently verify many of the values in this spreadsheet, particularly when estimates were provided by the charity. In cases where we encountered differing credible sources, we adjusted our estimates to fall between the upper and lower bounds.

"SADs averted per dollar"
To facilitate comparisons across interventions, we aimed to express cost-effectiveness estimates in terms of animal suffering averted per dollar. We adapted Ambitious Impact's Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) metric, which roughly represents the number of days of intense pain experienced by an animal, adjusted for:
- Suffering intensity
- Likelihood of sentience of the species
- Welfare range (i.e., relative capacity for suffering and pleasure, following Rethink Priorities’ ‘Welfare Ranges’ report)

Please note that we use our own 2025 SADs values, which are not directly comparable with 2024 SADs values or SADs from other organizations. The spreadsheet containing our calculations are available upon request.

If readers have any questions or comments, please contact ACE's Evaluations Manager, Vincent Mak: vincent.mak@animalcharityevaluators.org
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There are several significant limitations in our CEA of Program 2: Leadership Development
- It is important to note that we are very limited by the data that we have on alumni’s futures. For example, only 4 out of the FY24 and FY25 cohorts have full-time animal advocacy jobs. However, many of them have not started working or graduated yet. At the moment we are using the average between the current number of 4 (an underestimate) and New Roots’ expectations of 18%-36% of alumni finding animal advocacy jobs.
- It is difficult to estimate the impact the alumni of the program will have in the future from just 1-2 years of their career, and we might be underestimating by not counting alumni who have not yet entered the workforce.
- This CEA does not include possible future opportunities that alumni might get in roles outside of the movement, where they might be able to have positive impact in animals.
- Our intention was to estimate suffering adjusted days (SADs) per dollar for as many cost-effectiveness assessments as possible; however, when making this attempt for the Leadership Development program, we found early in the process that the assessments would have to estimate how many animals are directly impacted by the fellows’ future careers, without knowing what their long-term careers look like. For that reason, we chose to estimate the monetary value that is added by a better candidate, following the system that Animal Advocacy Careers use for their own Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning.
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