How ought charity beneficiaries be portrayed – or ‘framed’ – in charity advertising and fundraising?

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There’s often a difference of opinion within charities.

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Fundraisers tend to favour those images and stories that they believe will maximise income (that will be used to alleviate the plight of the beneficiaries). Those images tend to show in quite stark context the plight and suffering of beneficiaries, often quite graphically. This is because professional received wisdom says it’s these types of images that raise the most money. We call this the ‘fundraising frame’.

 

But the fundraising frame is often criticised as ‘poverty porn’, which stereotypes beneficiaries or does not accord them an appropriate level of dignity.

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So, many service delivery staff, and others at charities (not to mention academics working the development field) tend to favour images that reflect more ‘positive’ values about beneficiaries, maintain their dignity, and focus on the solution to the problem.  We call this the ‘values frame’. But fundraisers would argue that using the values frame raises less money.

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For the past for years at least (it was a key consideration immediately following Live Aid in 1985) the fundraising and values frames have been pitted against each other in the charity sector – very often within charities. The result is that this issue has become polarised, with little progress towards common ground.

 

This Rogare project – under the banner of ‘You’ve been reframed’ –  aims to end the polarisation between the two frames by reframing the entire issue.

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First, we have jettisoned the idea that the ethics of the situation is contingent on whether ‘dignity’ of beneficiaries has been protected (values frame), or whether an appropriate amount of money has been raised (fundraising frame).

 

Our solution grounds framing ethics in whether beneficiaries and service users have genuinely been involved in the co-creation and telling of their own stories. Adapting Rights-Balancing Fundraising Ethics, we have come up with this formulation:

 

Framing in fundraising is ethical when it provides a way for service users/contributors to use their voice and agency to contribute to their own framing and the telling of their own stories, and unethical when it does not.

 

Second, we argue that any position on the ethical framing of people helped by nonprofits is not something that can be offloaded on to fundraisers but is a matter of organisational strategy that must be agreed and supported by senior leadership.

 

The situation is often very unfair to fundraisers. They are castigated for their ‘unethical’ use of stories and images (caricatured as poverty porn). Yet they are still required to hit short-term targets using images and stories that are far from guaranteed to get them there (and thus fail to deliver the money needed to help a nonprofit’s beneficiaries); and often get very little support from their organisations in coming up with values-based fundraising, which almost inevitably requires a medium- to long-term timeframe to be tested and become successful.