Ethical Storytelling for Nonprofits: Why and How?
By: Chandana Bhimarao and Chelsia Low
For many nonprofits, marketing towards donors, sponsors, and foundations is a necessary way to stay afloat and thrive in a competitive industry. Within The Berkeley Group, many of the projects we have worked on have included creating branding and marketing materials for nonprofits in order to strengthen their ability to attract and maintain funding. We often package the nonprofit’s work into a compelling story, one that will hopefully tug the heartstrings of a donor enough so that they can contribute to the cause.
However, storytelling purely in the eyes of the potential funder is not the only lens that needs to be looked at. We must also make sure that the stories we tell are accurate, empowering, and consensual of the people that we are describing. Ethical storytelling refers to this active practice of ensuring that NPO marketing and storytelling is inclusive of both the viewpoints of the constituents and the donors, so they can achieve both goals of serving their constituents through receiving funding, while respecting the human dignity of their constituents. This has also become a social movement among NPOs, effectively represented by the website ethicalstorytelling.com, which describes their mission:
“….we believe people’s stories are more than emotion-generating machines. That story consumers are more than guzzlers of emotion. And that stories should always be constituent first, donor second. We aspire to tell stories that are truthful, nuanced, educational and empowering. Not just for donors or for branding, but because stories shape our humanity and our world.”
In this sense, ethical storytelling is something that nonprofits must take into consideration while creating their marketing materials or spreading their cause. Stories open up hearts, appeal to ethos, and evoke empathy. For these non-profits, stories allow them to raise awareness and funds, letting the general public and potential donors connect with their clients on a personal level and better understand the issues the organization hopes to tackle.
Stories in the non-profit sector can be sectioned into a number of categories.
Nonprofits must take additional care in framing their stories and communicating them to the public. Ethical story-telling comes into play in Focus- and Impact-type stories, where organizations portray the current circumstances of their target group and plight of their clients. In publishing the stories, they must take care to be sensitive. As these stories are widely distributed, they might have a huge impact on the character’s life, and how they (or their group) are understood and remembered.
The phrase “poverty porn” came into use in the 1980s to describe how non-profits used graphic images of starving, ill or poor people (often children) to elicit donations, in the process stripping these subjects of their dignity and exploiting their dire circumstances. Stories should be used as a tool of empowerment rather than bring shame to the characters within the story. It requires a balance for organizations to find a balance between pulling on heartstrings and undermining the subjects in their stories.
Ethical Storytelling was founded after the founder’s experience where her team from The Freedom Story created a documentary film on child trafficking in Thailand. A featured girl in the film revealed how she did not want to be remembered by the way the widely-released film had portrayed her. The founder, Rachel Gable, realized the importance of making sure the stories told benefitted not only the donors but also the constituents.No one would like to feel or be perceived as helpless, desperate, inept or weak. By sharing their vulnerability openly with the organization and allowing for their personal history to be shared, these constituents place a huge amount of trust into the organization to do their stories justice and treat them with dignity. Cat’s podcast from Ethical Storytelling shares her story on how she hopes to be remembered, and how she opted not to put the documentary film about her online.
Aside from undermining the feelings of the subject in the stories, nonprofits must also be aware of unethical storytelling in Impact stories. They should be wary of framing the organization as a savior that single handedly “rescues” a beneficiary from their challenges. By concentrating instead on depicting themselves as a partner to the individual and supporting their individual’s journey, they empower their subject matter instead.
Knowing this, The Berkeley Group has a compiled guided steps on how nonprofits can go about telling an ethical story:
Beyond taking these steps, a further critical way to ensure ethical story-telling is asset framing and strengths-based messaging, where conversations are framed to focus on the community instead of the donor, and to define people beyond their situations. For instance, an organization could communicate that they help “a person experiencing homelessness” instead of a “homeless person”. This connotes that homelessness is a temporary issue faced by an individual like ourselves, instead of emphasizing that it is a characteristic that defines that person.
For non-profits that work with more sensitive issues such as mental health services, a different approach might be needed to protect their clients. We interviewed Conard House, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that has been providing permanent shelter, mental health services, and financial help to the houseless population since 1960. Conard House works with vulnerable populations, so they are ethically obligated to protect the dignity and identity of their constituents while marketing their cause. We spoke with them to find out the ways in which they created effective and ethical marketing materials.
In order to respect their clients and abide by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, client identities are never revealed. Conard House uses stock images in public domain or from Getty images in their marketing instead of genuine profile photographs, while client stories published in their materials to donors use pseudonyms or are composite accounts from multiple clients. According to Richard Heasley, the Executive Director of Conard House, “There are stories to be told, but we’re going to be very cautious” as Conard House makes sure no positive identifications can be made. The interview is transcribed below:
Interview with Richard Heasley, Executive Director of Conard House
Q: What kind of marketing tools does Conard House use with regard to its constituents, how does Conard House protect their identity?
We have created solicitation letters and marketing pamphlets, with photographs and statements of stories from our constituents. We haven’t done any videos, or blogs. We actually don’t put up photos of our residents or clients. We use stock photographs, that usually come from Getty Images. None of the people that we use photographs of are our actual residents or clients. If we have identified someone in a story, we have used pseudonyms. We will do as many keyword searches as possible in Getty Images to find the most accurate picture for the story we’re telling. We also combine multiple constituents’ stories into one get our point across, but this makes it extremely difficult to place a positive ID on a certain person.
Q2: Are you legally bound by any structure that controls your storytelling?
Yes. A large portion of the people we serve are through our Department of Public Health contract. So we are liable to protect their personal information under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which includes a privacy agreement between patient and healthcare provider). If anyone in the public can identify the person through what we have published, we would get into a whole bucket of trouble, even with releases. So, we are held under the restriction that the Department of Public Health places on us, since they think that organizations may manipulate constituents into being a part of our storytelling.
Q3: What is the consent process like if you use someone’s story?
We would inform the person of what we’re doing, and make sure they know that we will take editorial liberties to conceal their identities. We also have used consent forms, and there’s actually a distinction between the type of releases people can sign. There’s a shallow release, where we can do very little with the information we gather, and there’s a broad release, where we can pretty much do whatever we want with the interview or footage we use. We typically operate on a shallow release, so the constituent knows exactly what the footage or interview is going to be used for. The idea would be to do these things in a way so that the story gets out. There are stories to be told, but if its our clients, in our building, we’re going to be very cautious about how we tell them.
Conclusion
Following the guidelines we mentioned would enable nonprofits to tell a story that not only resonates with their donors, but also aligns with their mission and does justice to the people in the centre of these narratives. When done right, these stories can provide a megaphone to disenfranchised individuals, letting them find catharsis as their voices are heard. Finally, creating a culture where people are portrayed with dignity and strength might also inspire more to open up, bringing awareness and change to more in the world. If you or your organization is interested in taking the ethical storytelling pledge, check it out here: http://ethicalstorytelling.com/pledge/
