This article articulates key ethical issues that may arise in sponsored digital storytelling initiatives, projects wherein participants’ stories are used to promote the organization that subsidized their training. Analyzing a digital story from a public health project in the US, the article suggests that sponsored digital storytelling initiatives require participants, facilitators, and those within sponsoring organizations to make complicated ethical judgments about recruiting storytellers, the role of storytellers in the production process, and if and how to represent proximate others in stories. Critical concepts from life writing and documentary studies are used to explore these issues.

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Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are reported on the variety and frequency of the modes, featured constituencies, narrative perspectives, and digital interface features in the sample. Overall, the nonprofit DPEN collections sampled showed limited use of new digital production and distribution possibilities. Practice, however, differed notably between two segments of nonprofits: networks and service organizations. To explore these results, the article discusses key examples of DPEN collections from each segment.

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