“The sweetest songs”—Ethical framing in fundraising through the agency of service users/contributors to tell their own stories

Abstract

Much of the discussion on the ethics of the framing of service users in fundraising and marketing materials focuses on the ethical dilemma of whether the means of using negative framing and negatively-framed images-which it is argued are more effective at raising money-justify that end if they cause harm by stereotyping and "othering" the people so framed, rob them of their dignity, and fail to engage people in long-term solutions. Attempts to find the right balance between these two ethical poles have proved elusive. This paper posits a new ethical solution by removing these two poles from the equation and making the ethicality of fundraising frames contingent on the voice and agency of service users/contributors to tell their own stories and contribute to their own framing: as the Niger proverb says, "a song sounds

“Age as a determinant of new donor acquisition and year‐on‐year retention in the university healthcare fundraising context”

“…H2b. These findings extend the logic in the literature that identifying and targeting on the basis of donor interest is of upmost importance (Breeze, 2013;MacQuillin et al, 2022), and that younger donor prospects generally have different giving motivations than older donor prospects do (Chapman et al, 2018;Graça & Zwick, 2021).…”

“…Successfully connecting the prospective donor to the cause at hand is crucial in driving donor interest and behavior (Wade et al, 2022). Donors are much more invested when they connect personally and deeply with the cause supported (MacQuillin et al, 2022). Understanding the specific motivations and interests of younger donor populations can be helpful in engaging this group successfully (Graça & Zwick, 2021), and it is reasonable to expect that younger and older donor prospects will have different sets of motivations and their fundraising relationships will need to be managed differently as a result.…”