Ethical storytelling can help us fight back against the aid cuts

As the international development sector faces tremendous pressures, many NGOs are in danger of neglecting ethical communications in pursuit of desperately needed fundraising. But as Jess Crombie argues, ethical storytelling isn’t a ‘nice to have’, but rather one of the tactics that will help us to raise money and continue to deliver aid. 

Following the recent cuts in foreign aid, the interest in ‘ethical storytelling’ has appeared to wane. Intense pressure on fundraising, particularly from major and individual donors, has resulted in a renewed questioning of why we need to tell stories in an ‘ethical’ way.

I was in Istanbul with 25 leaders from the UN and large NGOs running a week of advocacy workshops when the dismantlement of USAID was announced. The response – other than the obvious horror at the impending impact of this decision – was one of pausing and taking stock. A sensible response, and a necessary one, but one also rooted in caution.

As a sector, we are fact finders, careful decision makers, and balancers of pros and cons. Cautiousness, therefore, is baked into our modes of operation. This is as it should be, but it also means that when things get really challenging, we can fall back on cautiousness when we should be innovating and advocating for forward momentum. 

At various points over the past months, I’ve wondered whether advocating for a different model of communication and fundraising was an indulgence or a ‘nice to have’. After all, this is a time of hardship for those our sector supports as well as frontline aid workers. I was cautious myself during this period: like many I also lost work, and attempting to map this new reality – implications, possible outcomes, next steps and more – took a lot of energy.

In May, three months after the initial funding shock, I was invited to Zurich to run a two day workshop with the Swiss NGO HEKS/EPER. Prepping and then delivering that workshop reminded me that ethical storytelling isn’t about ‘doing the right thing’; it’s about power, who has it, and the implications of not being able to communicate what you need and want. Innovation requires courage, and while it is hard to be courageous when everything feels so precarious, if we are to stand by the argument that our sector deserves to exist we need to innovate for equitable change.

And so these are my five reasons why ethical (or, as I prefer, equitable) storytelling is an urgent priority and why the incredible momentum we have made over the past years mustn’t slow:

1. Equity in who gets to tell the stories of lived experience is what the people in those stories are and have been demanding for a long time now (The People in the Pictures is now eight years old). And not listening to them and enacting this demand is to fly in the face of the values we believe that we exemplify as a sector.

2. Narratives that cause long-term harm in the form of stereotyping and othering don’t do anyone any good. Africa No Filter has carried out some groundbreaking research to prove this point, it’s worth a read. 

3. Donors are looking and asking for more transparency – and what better way to give it to them than to let them hear directly from an affected person what is and has been going on. Here is proof of the need for transparency – my own research (linked below) backs this up.

4. It works! I’ve trialled and tested this way of working with wonderful partners like Amref Health Africa, UNHCR and UNICEF and the results have been financially positive. If you’re not sure, or need to convince your colleagues, you can check out the Amref report here, and the UNHCR findings here where I detail the cold hard quant financials alongside the qual donor interviews (which are equally positive).  

5. Lastly, the intangible but so important point – we are educators as well as engagers. We don’t often think of ourselves in that way, but that is what we are doing, helping to shape the world as our audiences see it – and like all educators we have a responsibility to impart information in the most respectful way that shapes equitable world views.

I had a lot of positive feedback while in Zurich, but the best one was from a senior fundraiser who told me – “I thought this was going to be pointless for me, and maybe even boring, but it really wasn’t. It was a reframing of what I feel passionate about, and a reinvigoration of what we need to do”.

And that’s what I took away. Not praise (although always nice) but instead a reminder to myself that this type of storytelling is exciting and inspiring and also critical to our ability to deliver the aid that the money raised is there to fund. If we abandon the values that underpin our sector by falling back into the old inequitable models of money raising, then we undermine the trust and reputations that we need more than ever to maintain right now. We have made so much progress, and our donors are with us on this journey, which is a really positive thing to remember in this moment of uncertainty. 

Jess Crombie is a researcher and scholar working as a Senior Lecturer at UAL, and as a consultant for the development and humanitarian sector – find out more at https://www.jesscrombieconsultancy.com/ 

You can find Jess’s upcoming courses here https://www.jesscrombieconsultancy.com/our-courses