With this article I invite you to think about the fundraising campaigns you see online, on TV, in newspapers, on the streets, that continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. I present a reflection on how campaigns can communicate in a more nuanced, creative and engaging way, without falling into old narratives of poverty porn.
In late 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I joined an international humanitarian children’s organization as a face-to-face fundraiser. I would stroll around the streets of central Copenhagen, appealing to the passers-by to give their money for the children most in need around the world. I was taught to trigger emotions, feelings and persuade individuals into donating to the organization to “save children’s lives” – a narrative I was highly uncomfortable with. A few months into my position, I organized a session for our team to reflect on how we could change our fundraising communication to avoid harmful stereotypes, oversimplification, and promote dignity of the children we were aiming to help. Almost two years have passed by since my job as a fundraiser and I find myself wondering: have humanitarian campaigns and fundraising improved? Have we moved away from portraying harmful stereotypes and objectifying people’s suffering?
Donate to save an African child
We have all seen this kind of fundraising campaign: helpless, starving African children with thin arms and swollen stomachs, with flies swarming around their faces, a close-up image of their sad eyes with a slogan inciting you to donate only $5 so you can save their lives. Perhaps with a popular singer, actor or celebrity, telling you their sad story: Children are dying. They need your help and they need it now. It’s simple: they are hungry, we are not. They have no food, we do. It is time to share. Help save a life. A simple step from here can save lives there. Or, for the holiday season, as a classic Christmas song meant to tug at our heartstrings to donate to charities, like the Band Aid 30 “Do they know it’s Christmas?”, where the shocking image of the death of a woman suffering from Ebola is followed by the clip of white celebrities recording a song about poor Africans in desperate need of help, in a gruesome sequence of images wrong in so many ways.
Since the golden age of charity campaigns in the 1980s, humanitarian organizations have used these kinds of shocking and graphic images of starving children and poverty porn to increase charitable donations. And here’s the problem: they have been successful in doing so. With the intention of raising awareness and funds for vulnerable communities, humanitarian organizations have exploited people’s suffering to elicit acts of kindness and trigger feelings of pity to support a given cause.
So, one might wonder, if this way of fundraising is effective to raise donations, why should we stop using these kinds of images and narratives?
Is it justifiable to portray stereotypes and use sensationalism to generate empathy and raise donations?
During the reflection session I organized at the children’s organization, one of my fellow fundraising colleagues argued that, although using poverty porn and exploiting people’s suffering to fundraise could be considered ethically bad, it is worth doing, as the end result is to generate donations that will benefit those people. Whether or not we agree that “the end justifies the means”, beyond doubt, poverty porn is harmful and, in the long run, it does more bad than good. Here’s why.
First of all, poverty porn is objectifying and dehumanizing. In the images and other forms of media often used by humanitarian organizations, poverty is fetishized, the vulnerable are objectified, stripped of agency, autonomy and unlimited potential. Poverty porn shows helpless individuals, who are devoid of dignity, powerless to alter their faith, and waiting to be saved. By disregarding its complex causes and multi-dimensionality, poverty porn also misrepresents poverty and the poor, reinforcing stereotypes of what poverty looks like and misconceptions – for example, that Africa is a country filled with misery and diseases. Stereotypes are problematic; not because they are untrue, but because they are incomplete and “they make one story become the only story”. Often, fundraising campaigns ignore the context the vulnerable people are living in and focus entirely on the single story. But context is important: when we take it away, every story – even the one of freezing kids in Norway – can become a heartbreaking story, you just need to add some sympathy-inducing rhetoric and melancholic tunes.
Stereotypes and the oversimplification of complex issues, such as poverty, are more damaging than helpful, and lead to simplistic debates around development. Most importantly, poverty porn generates the wrong kind of awareness and triggers short-term aid. By failing to produce a deeper understanding of the multi-dimensionality of poverty and the necessary structural changes needed to address it, poverty porn leads to short-term donations, instead of promoting activism, advocacy and sustained donations. What poverty porn says to someone watching or reading an advertisement, is that poverty and people’s suffering can be simply fixed with an easy phone call or monthly donation.
It also tells the donor that they have the ability to save the vulnerable group. This way, it actually empowers the wrong person and perpetuates paternalism, white saviorism, and the dangerous ideologies that promote poor people as helpless beneficiaries waiting for the ‘Westerners’ to save them, and the financially secure donors as the – white – saviors. The use of Western celebrities as “white spokesperson trope”, for example in the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Yemen with Tom Hardy, in the Africa Famine Appeal with Eddie Redmayne, and in Comic Relief campaign with Ed Sheeran, is an exploitation of privilege that plays on the colonialist image of the civilized ‘white man’ saving ‘Africans’. These kinds of appeals further emphasize the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and reinforce the narrative of ‘othering’ by focusing on the representation of single mothers, infants, girls and representing few men and families.
Towards a new era of fundraising campaigns
Is it possible to raise money for campaigns without using harmful stereotypes and exploiting people’s suffering? Yes. In 2013, the former awareness campaign Radi Aid, created by the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ Assistance Fund, released Africa for Norway, a spoof of the typical charity campaign videos. The video, where a group of musicians urge their fellow Africans to donate much-needed radiators to the Norwegians suffering from the perils of a cold, really cold, climate, sparked a movement and bigger public debate on decolonizing the aid media and fundraising. In the following years, Radi Aid used humor and satirical awareness videos to break down stereotypes in aid communication and celebrated the best – and the worst – of development and humanitarian fundraising videos, demonstrating that there are indeed better ways to fundraise.
The best fundraising videos, according to Radi Aid, manage to communicate in a nuanced, creative and engaging way, avoiding exploiting the suffering of people and the one-sided representation. They provide context and explain the underlying causes of poverty, rather than obscuring them. Most importantly, these campaigns promote agency and respect and portray people with dignity, potential, talents, strengths and resilience, and ownership. Powerful fundraising films, like Batman by War Child about refugees in Yemen, give us strength and hope. They humanize the suffering of children and people in war-torn countries, showing the kids as kids and humans as they are, while still communicating complicated issues in an effective way. In these appeals, those suffering are given an active role in providing solutions, rather than being passive recipients of help, and they speak for themselves, without white ‘heroes’ speaking on their behalf.
Instead of trying to evoke feelings like pity, feeling sorry for, and focusing on people’s guilt, positive fundraising appeals create a feeling of solidarity and connection, often using humor and positivity. Effective fundraising adverts do not present easy and cheap solutions to global issues, nor do they exaggerate the stories or suggest that with a small donation you can “save a life”, but rather they inspire donors to take actions beyond donating.
A new step in the right direction
Going back to my question of whether humanitarian fundraising has moved away from harmful stereotypes, it is safe to say that since the last Radi Aid awards in 2018, there has been an increase in nuanced, positive advertisements and campaigns. The conversation around the dangers of poverty porn has also slowly moved from an academic to a mainstream audience.
Recently, a major humanitarian organization, Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), has spoken about the harmful legacy of white saviorism and the use of the “distant in suffering” trope in their fundraising campaigns. “Today we recognize that these images propagate a single story and perpetuate racist stereotypes of so-called white saviors and powerless victims” explain Dr. Chinonso Emmanuel Okorie and MSF Norway General Director Lindis Hurum. “Our humanitarian history is unavoidably rooted in the history of colonialism, neocolonialism and its stubborn stereotypes of the white European “expert” and the distant “other” in need”. MSF say they are committed to showing a more representative picture of their diverse global workforce, of which 4 out of 5 staff are locally hired, and give the whole picture in their communications and fundraising.
The path to address issues in humanitarian fundraising is a long one and there is still lots of work to be done. This video is a one step towards changing the culture and ways we communicate and advocate in humanitarian organizations. More awareness must be generated within humanitarian organizations and the media. The days of graphic images of starving children might be behind us, but we need to keep challenging our perceptions to change the dominant dialogue on development, which continues to be fueled by the stereotypical depictions of the poor and the white savior complex.
Eye on Global Health 