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Do charity fundraisers follow their own guidelines?
Aid agencies generally want to show respect for those they work with. They also want to maximise their income from fundraising. Sometimes these wishes clash. What happens then?
Here's a simple way of finding out. It's a series of activities focusing on the images used by aid agencies and NGOs.
The idea is that students match the best-practice guidelines against pictures they see actually used by such charities.
First, here is a summary of those guidelines. It is followed by various suggestions for classroom or homework activities.
How to portray people in fundraising appeals
The following are tips for best-practice use of pictures in charity fundraising appeals. They are based on guidelines drawn up by Save the Children and suggestions from aid workers at Imaging Famine, a September 2005 conference in London.
1 Show people with dignity
Don't reduce survivors to passive victims. For example, discouraged people waiting for aid or lying in shelters might only be part of the truth or may only show a brief moment in the development of an emergency. Groups rescuing neighbours might show a more accurate reality. So might women cooking or collecting water.
2 Avoid stereotypes
A matchstick-thin black child's fingers dwarfed by a benevolent white hand. Children – or anyone else – holding out bowls for help. Critics say such images perpetuate a colonial idea of incapable Africans waiting passively for help from their white saviours.
3 Show people in active roles
Try to find images of people helping their own communities, responding to crisis. In an emergency, communities can be remarkably resourceful and resilient. People build rafts, dig for neighbours, fetch water and cook for their families.
4 Not all aid workers are white
Many Western aid agencies recruit local staff in the countries where they work, so an image of a white doctor with a black child many give a distorted picture of reality.
5 Did the person want to be in the picture?
Ask yourself: "Would I want my picture, or my child's picture, to be used in this way?"
6 Don't twist reality
There is usually more than one reality, so this is a difficult one to decide. But don't crop a child's mother out of a picture to make a baby look more helpless. Worse still, don't put a child on the ground to give the impression of its being abandoned and unloved.
7 Give names
The captions of newspaper pictures and charity appeals often fail to give names when their subjects are poor and unknown. On the other hand, sometimes a child's full name shouldn't be printed for safety reasons.
8 Don't change names or places
Don't make up children's names or use a picture from one country to represent another.
9 Think about the consequences
Will the person's reputation or pride be damaged if you use the picture?
10 Put the picture in context
Try to explain where and when the picture was taken and what was going on. For example, a picture of a thriving market stall in a famine region shows the problem isn't necessarily about lack of food but about prices being out of reach of many people.
11 Avoid nudity
Pictures of naked children are rarely appropriate. Pictures of topless women should also be avoided in cultures where breasts are associated with sex and salaciousness.
12 Try to hire photographers from the region
It's hard for NGOs to find resources to pay photographers, and sometimes it's hard to find the right person at short notice, but working with photographers from the developing world can encourage local skills and get better images.
13 There are no set rules!
A picture that's appropriate in one place may not be in another. Agencies may be different from each other and need to represent those differences in images.
Activities
Here are some suggestions for exploring these guidelines in class.
Find a breach. Ask students to work in pairs or small groups. Using a checklist of the above guidelines, invite them to look through aid agency fundraising material and identity as many apparent breaches of the guidelines as they can in a set time. This could be done as an online activity. Or it could be based on printed materials, newspaper adverts and charities' own leaflets, that you or the students have gathered beforehand.
Find a success. As above, except this time look for positive interpretations of the guidelines. What can students find that shows that the positive image guidelines are being followed?
In both cases share the small groups' findings and discuss. What do aid agencies seem to find easy to comply with? What is more difficult? Talk about why. Was there anything that surprised them?
Design an advert. Invite students to design a fundraising advert – perhaps a poster, or a video – that complies fully with the guidelines. Their task is to motivate people to give money for a worthwhile cause, without breaching the guidelines. Do students think it would work? Discuss what emotions move people to donate? How easy is it to evoke those emotions using the guidelines?
Unpack the guidelines. Split the class into smaller groups and allocate one of the guidelines to each. Their task is to understand why the guideline is there, so they can explain it to the rest of the group. It's an exercise in communication.
Rank the guidelines. Working as a class, discussing, then voting, try to get agreement about which are the most important guidelines. Which matter least? Use a scoring system to grade each guideline – where 5 is essential and 0 is not important at all.
Contact an aid agency. Let the agency know your students' observations on their use of images. Pass on praise as well as any suggestions for improvement. If you are critical, invite the organisation to explain – remembering that a diplomatic approach that shows you have considered the issues is likely to get the best kind of response.
For more information contact reducation@redcross.org.uk
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education