Every nonprofit communicator eventually meets the same temptation. You have a mission to fund, an audience to move, and a person in front of you whose story would do both. The shortest path is also the oldest one: amplify the suffering, sharpen the pity, and let the donations roll in. The sector even has a name for the result—poverty porn—and a growing body of research showing that audiences increasingly distrust it. A 2024 study found that what readers find most ethically alarming about charity appeals isn't that the story is emotional, but that it may have been "twisted for effect."

During my time with Servant Partners, an organization that plants churches and partners with leaders in urban poor communities across the U.S., Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, I helped develop our internal ethical storytelling principles. While the document was practical and organizationally tailored, the underlying logic applies to anyone whose work depends on telling someone else's story. Here were the most basic commitments.

1. Stories are partnerships, not extractions

While there’s a reliable instinct to write about the people we serve, the discipline was to write with and for them. That meant treating interviews as relationship-building, not data collection. It meant inviting subjects to review, edit, and shape the final piece. And it meant resisting the urge to position our staff as saviors. Practitioners across the sector now call this a strengths-based or asset-focused approach—keeping the person at the center of their own story rather than reducing them to the problem the organization solves.

2. Language is a quiet form of authorship

Word choices carry assumptions most readers never see. At Servant Partners, we used "urban poor" sparingly—and shifted to "urban marginalized" in everyday communications. We replaced "slums" with "informal settlements." We described communities with structural language, but never reduced individuals to it. None of these edits made our stories less true; they made them less likely to flatten a person into a category. Style guides like AP, A Progressive Style Guide, and the DC Fiscal Policy Institute's inclusive-language guide are good starting points, but the deeper work is interrogating your own defaults.

3. Consent is ongoing, not a signature

We didn't publish anything—story, photo, name—without express or implied consent from the subject or a responsible contact, and we treated consent as something that could be withdrawn at any stage, including after publication. We avoided forward-facing photos of children without explicit permission, and we chose images that reflected dignity rather than misery, even when the story itself was hard. Leading practitioners now build this in formally: GiveDirectly uses plain-language consent forms in local languages and emphasizes that aid is never contingent on sharing one's story.

The communications lesson

Ethical storytelling is often framed as a moral constraint—something that limits what communicators can do. In practice, it's the opposite. It is a craft discipline that produces stories audiences trust, donors stay with, and subjects can live with after the campaign ends. Pity is a short-term fundraising tactic. Dignity is a long-term communications strategy.

The question every communicator should hold close isn't "Will this story move people?" It's “Would the person in this story feel honored by how I told it?" If the answer is yes, the first result tends to follow.