When it comes to ethical storytelling for nonprofits, “consent” has become a buzzword. Nearly every article on the topic of ethical storytelling mentions the need for “informed consent,” yet few go to the trouble of defining what exactly that means, why we need it, or how it can get operationalized. In this article, I’m going
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This is one of those stories we tell ourselves: That fundraising staff and program staff are not aligned in storytelling. There is a perception that the fundraising staff prioritize the needs of donors, wanting to overly focus on the negative aspects of clients’ lives and commodify their stories into “assets” for the annual appeal. And
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The conversation around ethical storytelling has evolved a lot over the years. We used to think of ethical storytelling as a practice of “doing no harm” to our contributors and those featured in the stories. For this, we owe a lot to journalism’s best practices, like getting informed consent, not traumatizing the contributors with insensitive questions, not
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Most people think alumni travel is only one thing: big group trips, the kind we see in glossy catalog photos. But my experience working with universities and colleges large and small has revealed at least three models of alumni travel. One school could find a match with one model, or all three. You just should
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One of our biggest challenges when writing about culture is avoiding stereotyping that culture. Sometimes our stories sound like stereotypes because we have failed to ask one important question of what we have written: “How do I know what I just wrote is true?” Dani Robbins, a nonprofit strategist, provided a great example of this failure in
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I get asked a lot about how to address culture—a group’s shared values and beliefs—through ethical storytelling. Nonprofit staff who are not members of the communities they serve sometimes struggle with authentically describing the role culture plays in their organizations’ work. This apprehension makes sense; there are a lot of good questions around this topic. What
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