Abstract
This chapter looks at how nongovernmental organization (NGO) professionals think about, plan, select, and produce appeals and campaigns. Drawing on interviews with NGO practitioners, it discusses how professionals account for their communications practices and how their understanding of their organizations’ goals, structures, and values, and the conditions within which they operate, shape their decisions about how to communicate distant suffering and appeal to the public. The discussion is structured by the three types of relationship represented by the ‘humanitarian triangle’: (1) NGO-public; (2) public-beneficiaries; (3) NGO-beneficiaries. It concludes by discussing some of the consequences of NGOs’ employment of ‘intimacy at a distance’ in their communication, NGOs’ emphasis on creating comfortable and non-threatening relations with the public, and the implications of their communication’s over-reliance on the emergency model.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Barnett describes such organizations as the ‘alchemical’ branch of humanitarianism. See Barnett (2011).
- 2.
For an elaboration of this discussion see Orgad (2016).
- 3.
With the exception of Unicef, professionals from all other nine NGOs were interviewed.
- 4.
- 5.
For an elaborate discussion of this point see Orgad and Seu (2014).
- 6.
For an interesting parallel, see Cameron (2007) on the use of the journey metaphor for framing a reconciliation process.
- 7.
Alex De Waal (1997: xvi) argues cynically that the humanitarian field ‘appears to have an extra-ordinary capacity to absorb criticism, not reform itself, and yet emerge strengthened’.
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Orgad, S. (2017). Caring Enterprise in Crisis? Challenges and Opportunities of Humanitarian NGO Communications. In: Caring in Crisis? Humanitarianism, the Public and NGOs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50259-5_6
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