'All they want is my money' is the most common rejoinder from participants in a nationwide study carried out by Birkbeck and LSE on how the public feel humanitarian and international development organisations communicate with them. Bruna Seu and Shani Orgad explore the issues.
International development communications and fundraising professionals believe that the UK public trust them and view their work as valuable. However, with the exception of humanitarian emergencies, the public is expressing widespread fatigue and resentment to being targeted as monetary donors. They feel manipulated and resist engaging with the communications because they believe that ‘all they want is my money’.
It is true that because of financial pressure and increased competition within the field, NGOs' communications have become increasingly geared towards raising funds from the public via methods derived from advertisers and commercial retailers. As such, NGOs conceive of the UK public primarily as monetary donors and only secondarily as potential ‘supporters’ or ‘followers’ of their cause, and this predominantly fundraising-driven approach is proving detrimental.
This hardening of the public’s response is also having a detrimental knock-on effect on their engagement with humanitarian crises and international developmental problems. Data show that as soon as humanitarian communications are perceived as advertising, the public tends to disconnect from them.
If NGOs want a more sustainable relationship with the public, it is essential that they revisit their view of the public, to form one predicated on understanding of and respect for the psychosocial complexities of the public’s responses - how the public understand and emotionally respond to humanitarian causes, and what moral principles govern their responses.
Responses to NGO communications
Concise and contextualising information enables the public to better understand the suffering and to process and tolerate the difficult emotions evoked in them by humanitarian communications. Many NGO fundraising communications very successfully provoke an emotional response, but without further contextualisation this emotion is difficult to process and can lead to switching off, thus distancing the public from the cause, rather than supporting a sustainable connection.
When deciding how to alleviate distant suffering, the majority of the public apply the same principles as when considering relationships they are familiar with. Fundamentally, they want a meaningful relationship with those that they are helping.
If NGOs are not able to become effective mediators in building meaningful human relationships between their supporters and their beneficiaries then they risk alienating the public both from themselves and from those who most need their ongoing support.
The findings from the project will be discussed at the ‘Caring in crisis?’ colloquium to be held at Birkbeck on 7 June 2014.
Bruna Seu is Reader in Psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of Lodnon and Shani Orgad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at LSE
