How Ethical Communications Empower Nonprofit Donors and the People They Serve
As humans, we communicate constantly: to coordinate, to explain, to inspire, and to uplift. But as we all know, when we’re not careful, communications can have unintended consequences. They can manipulate, undermine, hurt, or discourage.
Much of our joy—and a good bit of our unhappiness too—is caused by the way we communicate with others, from our family members to friends and colleagues. Our communications succeed when they’re grounded in understanding and empathy. When they fail, it’s often because we’ve allowed short-term objectives to override our long-term mission and values.
For nonprofits, ethical communications honor both the agency and the potential of their subjects, regardless of intended audience or objective. In practical terms, they ensure that an organization’s clients are never portrayed as victims, nor are donors appealed to as saviors. Subject does not imply subjugation.
As nonprofit fundraisers, it’s crucial that we learn to communicate not just with compassion, but with a deeper, more ethical intention. Nonprofits are often obliged to address and/or refer to two distinct audiences: our supporters and the people we serve. These audiences are very different, and so are the goals we have for communicating with them. Thus, it takes some care and consideration to ensure that our appeal to one does not come at the expense of the other.
Fortunately, there are strategies we can use to appeal to donors while also honoring the humans we serve.
Charity Vs. Service
If you’ve lived long enough, you can probably recall commercials that feature a village in Africa. The village is filled with emaciated children clearly struggling amidst their circumstances, as well as a kindly older gentleman kneeling beside them, assuring you that, for just a nickel a day, you can provide each of them with shelter, food, and clean water.
It’s an important cause, certainly, and if you contributed to it, you can likely rest assured that it was money well-spent. But this older model of charity—that appeals to donors as saviors and clients as victims—no longer works.
When it comes to fundraising, effective storytelling empowers donors to make a difference, but ethical storytelling also upholds our clients’ ability to empower themselves.
As organizations that rely on monetary support to help people, it can be tempting to tailor our communications to the ones cutting the checks. If it helps us raise the $50,000 we need to launch a new program, or provide direct assistance to those in need, the ends seem to justify the means.
Image from the Emmaus House Freedom School's 2022 fundraising campaign.
But when we zoom out, we see that the ends and the means are not distinct at all; they are both contained by our mission to empower those in our community, and we cannot empower people while simultaneously undermining their sense of dignity.
No matter who we’re referring to, our tone should be one of empowerment. If we’re referring to donors, we’re empowering them to support broad social change via their financial resources. If we’re referring to our clients, we’re honoring their struggles as well as their potential to lead happy, fulfilling, and inspired lives.
When you’re focused on a mission, there can be no victims. Our work and our communications need to express that vision constantly. In order to move forward, we have to think forward.
The Humble Art of Storytelling
One important way that we empower donors and clients is through storytelling.
Human beings are built for storytelling. Before the written word, it was the way we passed down legacies and skills from generation to generation. As a result, our minds have evolved to retain stories better than “loose” information.
We respond emotionally to stories, which makes them an ideal vehicle for inspiring action. And while there’s a near infinite variety of storytelling subjects, modes, and styles, there are a few important characteristics that nearly all good stories share.
Dramatic tension requires that there be a problem of some kind, and a hero who struggles to overcome it.
Rule #1 in fundraising communications (and one that many organizations get wrong) is that your organization is not the hero—your audience is. Ultimately, it’s their values, problems, and perceived solutions that motivate them to take action. Therefore, in a fundraising campaign, it’s important that your storytelling gives donors the opportunity to play the role of hero.
Hero does not mean savior, however.
This is where nuance becomes critical in how you frame the problem as well as how you represent your clients.
The Problem
Believe it or not, the problem—at least as far as your fundraising campaign is concerned—is not your clients’ struggles or their suffering. Those are stories that belong to them, and in those stories, they are the heroes.
Booklet showcasing recent graduates from Covenant Community's Men of Hope program.
For your audience of donors and supporters, the problem that they can help solve is actually the broader systemic issues that are responsible for clients’ suffering.
In his article, The White-Savior Industrial Complex (published in The Atlantic), author Teju Cole invites us to practice “constellational thinking” (i.e. considering the broader systems and circumstances that have contributed to people’s struggles). By applying this kind of thinking in our fundraising campaigns, we:
Demonstrate that our clients are not the sole originators of their circumstances, thus undermining the false alignment between their struggles and their identities.
Connect their private circumstances to broader social issues, effectively raising the stakes and providing audiences with a greater sense of investment—and involvement—in the problem at hand.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that you shouldn’t refer to your clients at all. But rather, when you do, think of it as a story within a story: their successes belong to them, but they function as proof that change is possible. Likewise, your donors aren’t rescuing them, they’re ensuring that others have the resources they need to make whatever change is necessary.
Keep Your Mission Close
When it comes to fundraising, the line between helping our clients and exploiting them can be difficult to manage. Ultimately, your greatest asset for avoiding the latter is the idea your organization is built around: your mission.
No matter what operational and/or organizational goals you're focused on, make sure that your mission of empowerment remains top of mind and that you refer to it explicitly when planning your messaging. Your values are what built the organization and they’re also what guides the work you do. Keep them close, and they will not fail to propel you forward.
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