McLeod Group guest blog by John Cameron, June 8, 2020
There are powerful tensions between effective marketing and the ethical representation of global poverty and development. The recent controversy over an online campaign by the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC) and the Canadian Network for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH) to generate support for Canada’s global COVID-19 efforts highlights the urgent need to scale up the debate in Canada about the balance between effective and ethical communications about international development. It also underlines the importance of developing stronger mechanisms to ensure compliance with the principles of ethical communication.
High-level reports make it clear that civil society organizations (CSOs) recognize trade-offs between effective and ethical communications. A report by Dóchas, the consortium of Irish development CSOs, argued that “There is always a tension between the kind of image that brings in the money and one that doesn’t demean the subjects of the photo”. A VSO report similarly asserted, “For too long, development agencies and the media have been complicit in promoting an unbalanced picture of third world doom and disaster. We have taken part in an intricate dance that sacrifices the long-term building of a balanced view for the short-term gain of raising funds for or awareness of our work”.
In 2011, the widely referenced Finding Frames report by BOND argued that the heavy dependence of UK CSOs on transactional fundraising models with simplistic messages about the global South was undermining the long-term sustainability of their public support base. That report actually informed a major CIDA-funded public engagement project by Canadian provincial and territorial councils for international cooperation called The Global Hive. More recent reports by Save the Children and Radi-Aid also highlight the ways that many CSOs grapple with the tensions between effective and ethical communications and marketing.
The CCIC Code of Ethics includes specific operational standards on “Fundraising and Communications to the Public”, as do the codes of ethics and conduct of CSO consortiums in other donor countries (for instance, CONCORD, Dóchas and InterAction). However, there is a growing disconnect between the principles in the codes of ethics and the communications and marketing practices of many development CSOs.
The creation of the CCIC’s and other CSOs’ codes of ethics on communications followed a long debate within the development sector about the need to represent people and communities in the global South with dignity and to avoid misleading Northern donors or seek to motivate them through overly emotional appeals. Sparked by a backlash against the use of graphic images of human suffering – so-called poverty porn – CSOs created ethical guidelines for their public communications.
For instance, the CCIC’s Code of Ethics states that, in fundraising solicitations, member organizations “shall ensure that images and text”:
- respect the dignity and rights of the individuals portrayed…
- are accurate, balanced and truthful…
- portray local communities as active agents in their own development and do not fuel prejudice or foster a sense of Northern superiority.
These principles offer good protection against “poverty porn”. However, non-profit communications and marketing strategies have become much more sophisticated in the 10 to 15 years since the CCIC and other CSO consortiums created their codes of ethics. Research in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics enables communications and marketing professionals to design fundraising and advocacy campaigns based on powerful scientific evidence about what kinds of narratives, images, music and stories are most likely to be effective at motivating public audiences to donate or support a campaign.
CSO communications campaigns are now much more likely to use celebrities, sex appeal, humour, cause-related marketing, storytelling and images of happy, empowered-looking people (mostly women) than images of starving children. Canadian CSOs need to re-engage with the CCIC Code of Ethics in the context of these new approaches to communications and marketing. Images and messaging that use these approaches are much less likely to represent people from the global South as helpless and without dignity. However, they still often overemphasize the agency of development actors and charitable donors from the global North and relegate people from the global South to roles as “props in the West’s fantasy of itself”, as Uzodinma Iweala put it.
BOND’s Finding Frames report also points out that the increasing use of narratives appealing to the self-interests of donors and campaign supporters will eventually undermine the values of benevolence, universalism and solidarity that underpin the principles of international cooperation. CSOs thus need to decide what values they want to promote: self-interest or altruism. Evidence indicates that they cannot co-exist and that promoting self-interest will undermine altruism.
CSO codes of ethics need to be updated or at least reinterpreted in the context of the communications and marketing strategies at use in the 2020s. Debates about the ethics of climate change communications highlight the need to not just persuade public audiences to donate or click in support of a campaign but also to enhance their capacity to understand and deliberate about climate issues.
The development sector needs to follow suit by reflecting more deeply on the objectives of public communications: Should they be short-term, one-off actions like donations? Or should they enhance the capacity of public audiences to understand and deliberate about global justice?
The development sector – including practitioners and academics – also needs to strengthen its capacity to ensure compliance with the principles in the Codes of Ethics, beginning with a much more active debate about the ethical implications of new and emerging strategies of communications and marketing. Just because communications strategies are effective at producing short-term fundraising results or catching the attention of new audiences does not necessarily make them ethical.
John Cameron is Associate Professor of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University.