Good (and bad) practice among advertisement in Charities / International Development

A short time ago I saw an AWESOME advert, which had been deployed as part of a campaign on safe water supply by UNICEF Sweden. As this and the following are all public advertisements I have felt free to reproduce them here:

I really loved the advert for many reasons and I would use it with no doubt as an example of good practice in charity advertising whether I had to give a lesson about the subject (hopefully some day, why not?) or explain to a friend what I believe should be done in such cases. In my opinion it has a perfect sensitization approach, it is indeed shocking as it must be, while being very simple; it is far from taking any advantage or making an unfair use of the beneficiaries; it is also far away from the moral blackmail that still today is regrettably used sometimes -bombing the tired eyes of the audience with unbearable extreme situations-; technically is perfect; and besides it makes you mull over your preconceptions about which actually are the most harmful dangers the children in empoverished countries face, so, it raises the awareness of the people.

Sensible people might think that among the charities should be a strong commitment with these values, that they'd be specially careful when using pictures or messages, for they are not typical companies trying to fight for customers, they are rather social agents engaged to sensitize the population. To be honest, most of them are aware of that and create nice examples like the bad-water one. Some of them do not. There seems to be an increasing competition between them to get the confidence (and the money) of the largest possible part of the goodwill market -instead of spreading this "market" (sorry for the word) and, therefore, they appear to forget the awareness role and have a competitive approach based on the market rules- say almost-no-rules. Thus, they'd fight to take the money to their projects, and make use of any mean. I'll ilustrate my opinion with two samples.

Please, bear in mind that the following examples have been found after barely one hour of internet research and that I don't intend to critisize any individual charity, but only the way they have tried to advert themselves in this specific poster. I'm sure we could have found adverts alike from many other organisations and good adverts from these ones. I must also thank my fellows and friends Dinka Acevedo and César Jiménez for their contribution.

 First sample: it is incredibly easy to find campaigns making a reproachable use of the beneficiaries, even children, to advert the NGO.

This little girl has eventually become the Hussain Bolt of the medical aid, and the sponsors wanted to be sure their logo was clearly readable. The smile of the lifeguard could also have been used in a toothpaste campaign. I am sure they were able to promote themselves without having to use a child in this rough way. For my standards this is an unfair use of her, even though I have found people thinking otherwise. Anyway, we can do it better than that.

Then, we can find the moral-blackmail-strategies. This would generally consist of appealing to your feelings of guilt by bombing your eyes with dreadful pictures of abject poverty, sickness, misery or hunger. We all have seem them, since they were very tipical in the 70s and specially the Ethiopia's famine was widely used to raise funds. I don't argue that the funds were needed and getting them fastly by any means could eventually have a positive effect in the short term, but they used these kind of pictures far too much and this overuse became in a mental block of the donors (no bother they call them partners, it is part of the marketing). We can find more subtle or imaginative samples though, and I have found one that I believe illustrates exactly what I am trying to explain. It's in Spanish and, even though the picture is quite expressive by itself, I can't help translating the text. It reads: "One of them has got house, food, water, education and medical care. Guess who?" and underneath "Help us to change it". I sincerely hope that this poster has meant one or two sacked people either in the NGO or in the publicity agency. I don't know what annoys me more, if the small child or the glowing dog. This sort of adverts try to steadily blackmail the audience and this is ethically unacceptable and should never be done. It is not giving any useful information, nor raising awareness, just guilt-feeling.

I think that the charity advertisement should be conceived to change attitudes more than raising money, or at least change them while raising money. They must be carefully designed to present the utmost respect to the objective population and to the audience at the same time. They should move to actual actions, for small they were, which help change things for good. In this respect there are indeed many actions we can perform from here to change things, such as ethical shopping, political lobbyism, voluntary involvement or reducing our consumption (of goods, energy). We should be showing far more of what we can do and a lot less of what we can't avoid to happen, since this is counterproductive. And, last but not least, they should avoid creating a perverted picture of the truth. To illustrate what I mean and to finish with a thoughtful smile, another awesome brand new campaign, now on video: Africa for Norway, RADI_AID!!!