There’s been a lot discussion in the development blogosphere lately about fundraising and the images we use to trigger donations. It’s a serious conversation, and one that interests me. Exactly how much damage do we do when we use condescending portrayals of poor people in NGO ads? Tales from the Hood has an interesting take on it. So does the Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog. Aid Thoughts has a whole series, and Waylaid Dialectic has the iconoclastic view.
But you know that? The whole debate is irrelevant to my life right now. It’s not something I have to think about in my work. Because I work for a company. An employee-owned company that works for the public good, but an actual profit-earning company.
People complain a lot about involving the private sector in development aid, both as donors and as implementers. But I will tell you this: my employer never runs ads featuring scrawny, weeping, big-eyed children. We never have to make sure our logo is in the picture when we take a photograph. Our organizational development department just writes proposals and applies for contracts. No fundraising appeals. No donate link on our website. We don’t send anybody address labels and you sure can’t sponsor a child through us.
International development companies do have to market themselves. But that marketing is a very different game; it’s about looking competent, reliable, and professional in everything they do. They are selling their own skills, not someone else’s pain. (And let’s be fair here. NGOs don’t use heartbreaking pictures because they like to demean people. They use them because they are proven to work. It’s what they have to do to get their funding.)
I’ve worked for NGOs, and the US Government, and universities and the UN and all kinds of places. (I was a consultant; I got around.) No particular tax status makes for a perfect employer: companies can’t do advocacy the way NGOs can, the UN’s got bureaucracy like fast food has French fries, and universities treat minor politics like blood sport.
On the other hand, for-profits don’t need photo ops. Universities access a nearly bottomless human resource pool and access to cutting edge research. UN agencies have moral authority and sector clout no one else can match. NGOs that do a good job of fundraising can start moving money really really fast when they need to.
This is our field. It has a lot of very different players, with different strengths and weaknesses. I like that. NGOs are not inherently virtuous. Companies are not inherently greedy. It’s a all mixed bag of human beings organized in different ways, attempting to do good things. Doing effective work matters a whole lot more than tax status.
(photo credit: #1millionkittensforAfrica)
The usual disclaimer: I am speaking for myself. These are my views and my views alone. I am not in any way speaking on behalf of my company. I believe in what we do, but I do not speak for the company in this or any other instance.
I agree that different types of organisation involved in aid should be judged on what they achieve rather than their legal status. But isn’t part of the problem that different types of organisation are held to different standards? I think NGOs/charities/UN agencies are assumed to be “good” in ways that companies aren’t. Also, funders / clients have different rules, funding mechanisms for different types of implementer. Many contracting/funding programmes are only accessible to non-profits, or to companies.
I’m also wondering about your point on photo-ops and logos. While your company may not need these, don’t your clients sometimes need them? And in a competitive environment, isn’t there the temptation for profit-making companies to also use proven marketing approaches?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ian Thorpe, Alanna Shaikh, Matthew Greenall, Public Health Reader, Alanna Shaikh and others. Alanna Shaikh said: Poverty porn and companies who do development – new Blood and Milk post: http://bloodandmilk.org/?p=1711 […]
Matt – the reason companies don’t need photo ops of starving kittens is because they don’t have to sell donors on the fact that a problem exists. They have to sell donors on using their company as the solution. Insofar as that requires photo ops, it is a different set of them.
And yes, we do have to worry about getting donor logos into pictures, but the kind of big government donors who work with companies have generally moved away from wanting misery type pictures.
I agree about people assuming that non-profits are good. It was one of the reasons I loved the Inepd satire – it forced people to reconsider that basic assumption.
Hi Alanna – OK but this situation can change… non-usage of misery pictures is, I agree, a good thing, but it is not inherent to companies. I think some companies do use them, and so do some NGOs, and some foundations, and some government donors. I’d much sooner there was a code of conduct that all actors subscribed to!
Another aspect of this debate is the extent to which donors do or do not directly fund/contract organisations that are indigenous to the country where the work is happening. Obviously there are issues of capacity, but many governmental donors favour funding organisations from the donor country and don’t pay much more than lip service to developing local organisations – whether for profit or not.
Yep. Lot of resonance in the above for me personally. It’s why I choose to work in securing and managing institutional grants, not on the other side of the house in public fundraising. As technocratic as it can be, at least you know the person at the donor agency assessing the proposals is v. likely to have a genuine grasp of the issues. And while there may be some arcane rules, you’re fundamentally making an appeal based on reason (around your programme design & organisational capacity/competency) rather than emotion.
i appreciated this post as someone who has also been around the un/ngo world and landed in the private sector (with a non profit contract on the side, that i can only do because of the salary from my main job).
i have learned a tonne in the past two years about how the private sector can have a meaningful (and sometimes, just as unintentionally negative) impact on socioeconomic development. community investment at the companies i have come into contact with is done largely anonymously and although there are certainly tax incentives, it is a diverse and dynamic field that i think could prove to come up with some innovative solutions that haven’t (or, due to the challenges mentioned above, can’t) be solved by our traditional view of who ‘does’ development.
and i think that sector can learn a lot from those of us who have worked on both sides of the equation and maybe we can make better donors of companies that have much less stake in the execution and outcome of a project than typical donors and sometimes are too forgiving when giving money to a ‘good cause.’
I fully agree: different institutional frameworks have different strengths, and we need all of them. One point does strike me though: there are good and bad NGOs, private companies and universities. Although it is a slow process, the worst tend to get filtered out and the best prosper – this is as it should be. There is only one UN, though, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to improve at the pace we’d all like.
It’s worth mentioning that if 100% of a company’s budget is coming from US government sources, it leaves those companies dependent on USG priorities and foreign policy interests. Those photos of weepy children provide important sources of $$ for humanitarian support in areas that aren’t foreign policy hotspots.