The challenges of visually representing poverty for international non-government organisation communication managers in New Zealand

Abstract

This article explores the role played by local communication managers in how poverty is represented by four international non-government organisations (INGOs) operating in New Zealand. A critical-interpretative study, it examines how communication managers make decisions around what and how images should depict poverty in fundraising campaigns. The findings demonstrate how INGO communication managers are implicated in the highly simplistic social construction of ‘ideal victims’ of poverty, a typical Western representation which fails to communicate complex structural understandings of poverty, its causes, possible solutions, and the contexts in which it occurs. Communication managers explain that lack of resources and media logics, as well as the imperative to solicit donations, play a large part in determining how they visually depict poverty. Yet their own tacit and professional beliefs about the type of imagery which motivates donors are also highly complicit in image selection. The study identifies the considerable challenges that INGOs face in recognising their obligation to an ethics of care towards those who they represent in fundraising campaigns to alleviate poverty.