by Alanna Shaikh. Alanna is a global health professional who blogs at UN Dispatch and Blood and Milk.
Over the last couple of years, we have seen a lot of criticism of how international NGOs advertise and fundraise. There’s a new term – “poverty porn” – and a new emphasis on thinking seriously about the true impact of advertising.
I’ve heard three main arguments against oversimplified NGO advertising:
- These ads make donors stupid by convincing them that development problems have quick and easy answers. They also portray development itself as a rapid, simple process. This encourages donors to choose dumb projects that offer speedy, photogenic, solutions that are unlikely to have any real impact. A classic example is the over-funding of orphanages and fishing boats after the 2004 tsunami.
- NGO marketing demeans the individuals who benefit from aid efforts. It makes them look like passive victims instead of humans who are partners in making things better. In this social media world, these individuals will actually see the advertising that features them. They’ll know exactly how they are being portrayed, and that portrayal will affect their sense of their own capacities.
- Oversimplified stories about aid and its impact distort government policy on international development, leading to a focus on aid, and a neglect of other policy choices that support development, like fairer trade policy or allowing more immigration. It also leads politicians to expect unreasonably rapid results and again, to favor photogenic, easy-to-explain projects.
Here’s what NGOs have to say about NGO marketing: It works. Complicated narratives and long explanations don’t attract attention, and they don’t get donations. Heartbreaking pictures and tidy stories do. We need these kinds of ads to raise the money to actually do the complicated and difficult work.
But here is my question: Have we reached the point that it’s not worth it anymore?
I think we can safely say that the fundraising for the earthquake in Japan has led to actual outrage among some aid insiders. And last Tuesday, in response to both a demeaning marketing campaign and a simplistic project with doubtful impact, we saw a Day Without Dignity. Are these signs?
How exactly will we know when the money raised is no longer worth the damage done in raising it?
22 Comments
One of those irreconcilable tensions. Advertising has to be stupid and frivolous; that’s what advertising is. And yet this is serious work. Will any NGO let its actual work take a funding hit, on the principle that its public face must be nuanced and reflect the complexities of the situation? Should it?
Seems to me like your argument is not at all about advertising and entirely about fundraising. the sort of emotions you try to elicit is secondary to what you try and get them to do.
and ‘poverty porn’ is not a new buzword, the ‘NGO insider fatigue’ is not new either – surely this has been around since at least 1983?
so i don’t think the debate is about the content of advertising or whether it has gone too far. and it has gone no further than any other component of the media landscape, print commentators, tv news, whatever, who appeal to biblical-proportion narratives to get you to relate to massive disasters.
if you had better accountability for the way NGOs channel funds and delivered money in disaster areas, and if you created an environment that was conducive to NGOs eliciting different kinds of actions from supporters, you’d see their advertising arms and other PR consultants relaying different messages.
i’d suggest the question, then, is how much leeway NGOs have for leading such a change, or how might it be addressed by things like regulation of disaster fundraising, or whether the onus is on big-money foundations to incentivise NGOs to communicate in a way that educates supporters (idea: big foundation matches donations received for fundraising campaign deemed innovative or educational) .
ETC!
I’ve seen a LOT of phishing/spam saying “donate $$ to help Japan” from Nigerian scammers. We appear to have reached the tipping point where click-and-give turns into click-and-rob.
I think this is a good development, since most aid agencies are bad at getting results and worst at linking donations to impacts. They need a new reporting structure and a much smaller set of goals.
Big beltway bandit NGOs also do their share of info-marketing as they don’t need to advertise to the public. Look at the newly designed PSI Health Lives blog that has hired hacks to churn out promotional material on PSI ‘successes’: http://www.psihealthylives.com/
Effectively performing “complicated and difficult” aid efforts is simply incompatible with “demean[ing] the individuals who benefit from aid efforts” (no. 2 above).
Alanna’s question is excellent, and I find it very difficult to conceive how aid can sustainably improve people’s lives while simultaneously stripping them of their character and agency. Sure, an NGO needs money to carry out projects and won’t consciously, actively undermine the poor. But it seems unlikely an NGO, its board, its staff, and its projects can remain uninfluenced by — immune to — the battering of negative imagery that the NGO itself projects.
Mustn’t an NGO’s demeaning and disempowering messages pervade — to some extent — an NGO’s ethos, operations, and projects?
@Matt: a tweak of your last question is to ask: do aid recipients give a damn whether they are being demeaned on twitter, to distant audiences, provided they find the aid beneficial? I’m not asking this rhetorically! i can see arguments on both sides.
and by the way, does anyone seriously think ‘ Advertising has to be stupid and frivolous; that’s what advertising is’??!! ads are usually clever and impactful. except radio ads. radio ads are terrible.
Advertising doesn’t have to be stupid and frivolous, but it does have to be simple. This simplicity both raises money to make lives better and makes individuals infuriating to talk to when you try to explain the complexities of aid and development to them. It also makes it harder for the public to learn how to recognize “good” aid rather than “bad” aid, independent of the advertising because there is little differentiation on the surface.
Personally, I wish that an organization like the Gates Foundation would fund advertising focused primarily on educating donors (through tv, magazine, etc ads). By teaching people to recognize what they should be looking for we’d fundamentally shift the way advertising is done, in my opinion.
Alanna et al seem to be having a “not seeing the forest for the trees moment.” None of this fund raising is about aid or aid projects, it is all about funding the NGO. Qui Bono, follow the money. INGO’s all depend on a constant stream of new money to stay in business. They dont sell a product and cannot finance themselves from sales. They depend on income from taxpayers, USAID, WB, DIFD, ADB etc and individuals who can be persuaded to part with their money to ostensibly make the world a better place. There is no reason to think aid professionals have any business in NGO fund raising. Aid professionals are not a profit center, they are the necessary evil. No project, no pictures, no pictures, no money. The size and number of NGOs have grown enormously in the past twenty years and the search for funding has gotten more competitive. Remember the early Save the Children fund raising ads of twenty years ago? (that would only be directed at persons older that 30). Heart wrenching and effective. So effective that STC is still in business, bigger than ever and see no reason to change a successful formula. The formula works, look at all the copy cats. The management of STC and all the other NGOs mean well but that doesnt mean they aren’t going to live well and that means new money!!
Look around you students. 20 years ago your majors did not even exist, now you are more populous than fleas on dogs. Aid and development are a growth industry. You need jobs and the NGO community needs cannon fodder. You are made for each other.
Quit yer bitchin’ its your salary they’re raisin.
The aid industry is not regulated by the Professions Act or any similar legislation. If it were, then there would be enforceable regulations concerning the conduct of its practitioners and controls over marketing and advertising, especially regarding misleading or over stated claims, concomitant with a process through which the public can bring the unprofessional and unethical to account.
With the rise of the internet and social media, marketing and advertising costs have dropped significantly. Therefore there has been an explosion in the number of NGOs competing for a share of the aid market. Intuitively, the public understands generally that not all the NGOs can be effective or even honest, yet have a limited capacity to separate the bad from the good unless the aid industry takes the lead in this regard.
With the lack of regulation we have a free-for-all and a race to the bottom as NGOs compete to use the most effective forms of advertising. Any NGO, that uses a socially responsible form of marketing and product as defined by Alanna or anyone else is subject to the free-rider problem: the benefits of any such socially responsible behaviour will accrue to the socially irresponsible.
I agree with Alanna about the importance and complexity of the issue, but even as a geeky anthropologist I wonder whether we can specify ‘damage’ better? Is there a ‘figure’ for too many orphanages? How can we measure potential economic distortions of too many fishing boats? The price of fish fell, but the local boat industry was doing well? Most non-development experts would find it hard to believe that more money can actually cause damage. Another point I’m not sure I really agree is the ‘gone too far’ idea…compared to historic advertisement that was better? I’m less concerned about the ‘too far’ and more about the absence of evolution in advertising/fundraising. Maybe technology has changed, but the billboards for child sponsorship organisations still look similar to those years ago. And why change if it actually works? Even with so much more critical information the world outside those of ‘aid insiders’ still seems very difficult to adapt to the complexities of development, so media, NGOs and campaigners stick to their old tools, creating a vicious circle of non-learning
Alanna Shaikh’s comments are on the money regarding INGO advertising. Peel back the onion even more and you will see how INGOs hope for, and even assist in precipitating human disasters in order to further the inflow of grant money.
Agreed! Advertisers should stop pulling at our emotions but they’re not going to stop. They’ve found ways to raise money and spark our interests. If our texting for $10 can be sent to an international developing agency, instead of needy children, then things may begin to improve. My idea is to cross program planners, searchers, and see success in numbers. I realize that this is a naive and oversimplified thought but this bickering back and forth between each other is becoming redundant and hindering development.
@slw – If they are successful at raising money like this, what incentive do they have to do it any other way? That’s like saying, “Steve Jobs and Apple have figured out that we will pay $500 for new iPads every year! They should stop pulling at our emotions and not release new iPads with better features!”
No, like most things in life, a little personal responsibility would be nice. Just don’t donate money to NGOs when you don’t like their advertising practices. Unless we believe Americans are “too dumb” to notice these plays on emotion.
I think an important distinction has to be drawn here between fundraising for disaster relief and fundraising for development initiatives.
When disaster hits, you have limited amounts of time to mobilize resources (funds) and respond. I would argue that it is not time to be innovative in your messaging but to do the best with what you’ve got: proven marketing tools and information from the ground that changes by the minute. Though as the situation evolves, so should the messaging.
Seeking financial support for long-term development programs however, is a different ball game that requires us to become better and more responsible story tellers. Connecting the dots in a compelling way between research, policy recommendations and creating space for change is hard work which requires both communication and development professionals to roll up their sleeves. “Poverty porn” may be irresponsible, but feeding academia to the general public is illogical. Communications and development experts must work together and gain contextualized and nuanced understandings of each other’s work. I think the solution lies in having communications become everybody’s responsibility.
Can I quote Bill and Laura when they say “A blog post makes one illustrative post, it’s not a Ph.D. dissertation.” Similarly, perhaps an ad is not a Ph.D. dissertation? Just saying…
I worked at the US Fund for UNICEF and the policy was that no promotional materials could show any children in distress or in obvious suffering. We focused on happy children because photos of children are exploitative enough, no need to amp it up with a kid with flies buzzing around his eyes and a distended belly poking out over a rag loin cloth. Those cliches had no place. And I liked that.
Interesting – even Alanna thinks poverty porn is a new term…which just goes to show that we have here the eternal recurrence of the same at work…just like the every-15-year-global goals…therefore no need to think that anything will change. The next generations will be having the same debates…thinking they are fresh and new. Reminds me of Zion in the Matrix – created and destroyed in endless cycles…
FTS is the perfect saltpeter to slap on the Japan poverty port. Massive corporate aid donations from all over; as much if not more cash than GIK.
http://fts.unocha.org/reports/daily/ocha_R10c_C105_Y2011_asof___1104130204.pdf
Contrast with Pakistan Flood donations…
http://fts.unocha.org/reports/daily/ocha_R10_E15913_asof___1104130204.pdf
higher aid amounts to Japan
…. and less need?
I personally think that is it’s don’t broke, don’t fix it. I do also believe and agree with what was said in that these are human beings and we should help them in their development, not just treat them like helpless victims. That last point works if it’s for a development project, but in truth, if it’s some sort of natural disaster where the rebuilding of the infrastrucutre is needed, then by definition those people are victims of a natural disaster outside of their control. This “poverty porn” is what helps in keeping a lot of developers funded. Granted, the majority of these developers are of the planner type and they really only help in what they see they need to help. Scientifically speaking, as humans we are proned to take sympathy and help those who we see as in need. That’s why these pictures and advertisements work, because they get the message across in a manner in which most Americans can understand. Let’s be honest, the only people who want to hear the long, drawn out narratives are the people who are criticizing or developing the projects. I also add, since when has the media been honest?? How long has it been since non-partisan, unbiased media has come out?? Look at MSNBC, CNN, FOX, The New York Times, etc.. They all have opinions to insert and the last time I checked all advertisement is is a biased media wanting people to take notice. If I were personally heading a development agency or project I would much rather be over-funded than under-funded or not funded at all. Maybe it isn’t the advertisement that needs to be looked into, but maybe the NGO’s and their spending themselves.
I noticed a couple of grammatical errors in my previous post. Just making it known lol.
The NGO’s have a point, without their persuasive ads they wouldn’t receive any money. I’m assuming the donors mostly come from the West, and are planners even if they know it or not. They feel obliged to donate to disasters like Japan and Haiti. I’m not saying that the NGO’s are evil money hungry corporations, but rather in order to continue their work they need funding. Sure, the ads may make donors “dumb” when it comes to development but so does any other ad on television these days. The same “misleading ads” could be liked to McDonald’s. McDonald’s always shows fit “healthy-looking” people, when majority of truly healthy people wouldn’t go near that place. It is McDonald’s fault that its advertising makes people eat their food? No, it’s the consumer that should have done their research on the food content. So again, is it really right to blame the “evil” NGO’s for their marketing scheme? No, the donors should hold some accountability and do their research before donating money.
I recently finished my M.A. in Communications and I studied this area of communications in-depth. The biggest barrier INGOs have in raising funds is actually donor fatigue and poverty porn is one of the causes of that fatigue (amongst other things).
Research suggests that in an industry which has boomed in the last 20 years, poverty porn has become ineffective. We have been over-exposed to poverty porn and it no longer holds the same resonance that it did before mass media. Donors are a lot more savvy, too, which means emphasis should continue to be placed on education. They’re also more likely to donate if they see action-oriented images with happy people (which suggests a level of agency), rather than being confronted with images of human misery. The reason for this is that images of the latter, apart from being dehumanising, seem like a problem the individual donor — while sympathetic towards it — can’t help with. As the area of development work evolves as have the triggers of donors.
The compulsion of people to give isn’t what’s in question here (disaster relief is another area), but rather how much the donor feels their contribution will have an impact on the situation. Communicating the direct impact of where donations are going (school uniforms, the salary of a local engineer, etc.) will probably solicit more donations and this is probably why Kiva is so successful (the — for lack of a better term — ‘business model’ is their strongest advertising tool); not to mention, using this tactic may also weed out less transparent INGOs. Having a smiling child in a school uniform with arrows to his/her uniform, books, school shoes, etc. and quantifying it in the donor’s local currency with a tagline and a link to the INGO’s website for more information, will probably be more effective than an image of a young child with a bloated stomach standing in a swarm of flies.
Point is: poverty porn, ultimately, doesn’t work anymore; INGOs that hold onto this exploitative piece of advertising are probably limiting their capacity to raise funds.
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