Visual storytelling holds the unique power to transcend borders and language barriers to build movements, empathy, brands, and beliefs. From cave drawings to comic books, we’re wired to gravitate toward visual stories—our brains even process images 60,000 times faster than text. And for a nonprofit brand, ethical visual storytelling can be one of your best tools for sharing your mission and promoting action.
Visual storytelling is more than a tool, though. Whether you’re looking at an eye-popping logo or website, visual stories are a vehicle for communicating values, evoking emotions, and communicating cultures.
With so much to gain, it’s important to remember that visual storytelling isn’t passive. It shapes perspectives and cultural conversations. That’s why we have to take time to think critically about how we tell visual stories with the organizations and brands we oversee. There’s no one single right way to tell a story. There are, however, ethical and unethical ways to tell a visual story.
When you practice ethical visual storytelling with your nonprofit brand, you make the space for your organization to be authentic to your mission, audience, values. If your nonprofit brand produces ethical visual stories instead of perpetuating stereotypes or biases, you get to set the tone for how you show up in the world. Consequently, you set yourself up for greater impact because people trust authentic organizations. And your cause—whether its climate, clinical, or child welfare—depends on that trust.
The ethics of visual storytelling, like all storytelling, change over time. And as storytellers, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we root our stories in our community’s values. We can start by taking what’s called a “values-based approach,” and define our brand’s values. Respect, empathy, collaboration, transparency, equity, and inclusion are all great values to help ground into your brand’s story.
From there, you can consider your nonprofit brand’s visual storytelling—which is the best vehicle a brand has for showcasing its values in a clear, direct, forward-looking way. If you tell an ethical visual story with your brand, platform, or organization, you’re well on your way to building a brand that’s engaging, respected, accessible, and authentic. And that journey starts when you ask yourself seven questions.
Seven Questions to Start Your Nonprofit Brand’s Ethical Visual Storytelling Journey
1. Is my brand story authentic?
An authentic brand doesn’t conflict with its established identity. Take Dove for example. Dove is a brand that built its modern reputation on celebrating every woman’s body. With campaigns like Real Beauty, which celebrates the diversity of people’s body types, the brand carved out an important role for itself in the budding self-love and acceptance movements of the 2010s.
Then, in 2017, Dove released an ad that suggested a black woman, after using Dove soap, transformed into a white woman. Sure, it was not the intention of the ad, but through ill-planned visual storytelling, the ad received near-instant backlash. Dove unintentionally contradicted their brand values by releasing an ad that undermined its role as a champion of diversity.
If you instead stay true to your brand’s values, you can build an authentic brand. That starts with considering the values and design principles that define your nonprofit brand. Brands need clear, unambiguous values that express what they stand for and why—and those have to be consistent with your visual storytelling. Don’t be scared to evolve and grow, but make sure that your brand’s evolution is rooted in your established values. That way, your brand’s evolution will feel authentic.
2. Is my brand story respectful?
When you’re building up a respected, trustworthy brand—especially a nonprofit brand—you need to make sure that the visual story you’re telling remains respectful, even if the content is humorous. That means you need to consider the dignity and worth of all stakeholders involved, from your audience to your directors.
Ethical visual storytelling should avoid portraying any group or individual in a way that is demeaning, disrespectful, or dehumanizing. Vulnerability Framing—defining people by their vulnerabilities—perpetuates stereotypes or weaknesses. To practice ethical visual storytelling, we have to consider whether our imagery will be divisive, demoralizing, or offensive to any individual or community. In practice, that looks like showing people at their most tenacious and resilient—not at rock bottom.
And to make sure you’re building a respectful brand, you should also consider different lived experiences. Take the time to incorporate diverse perspectives and voices to ensure that your visuals are respectful and pay people the dignity they’re owed rather than perpetuate division or biases.
In branding, you often get what you give: Respected brands are founded on respectful practices. Our visual storytelling in the nonprofit space should bring people together—rally people around a common goal of advancing social change. When you tell a respectful visual story, you can do just that. We’ve seen the power of respectful visual stories improve lives all around us, with effective, respectful visual stories helping to switch the script on serious illness messaging or even change the way we frame stories for greater impact. Just by taking the time to read this article, you’re already on your way to building a thoughtful, respectful brand.
3. Is my brand story true?
There’s no room for fake news when you’re building a brand’s visual story. A brand built on falsehoods is a house of cards. An ethical visual brand story maintains storytelling integrity.
Take a brand built on addressing food insecurity. Imagine they use imagery that emphasizes thinness or shows empty plates and fridges. These images would narrowly depict food insecurity, plus they would be untrue to the different ways food insecurity can manifest. Food insecurity means more than having little access to food. Food insecurity also means that people may only have access to low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods. Now, someone facing that kind of food insecurity might not be underweight or have empty plates. Where an emotionally-charged visual might reap incredible engagement for a nonprofit brand, it can be untrue to your most important stakeholders.
Brand visual storytelling should be truthful and accurate. That means you have to ensure that your visuals don’t misrepresent or distort facts, context, or situations. Avoid using visual effects or manipulations that could mislead or deceive your audience. A strong brand can stand alone on truthful, accurate, respectful imagery.
4. Is my brand story relevant?
This key question ties into a brand’s authenticity. Your nonprofit brand’s visual story needs to play a role in the current cultural conversation—that means taking an active, not passive, role in producing ethical, meaningful stories that build empathy. And in the nonprofit space, where so much brand power relies on public perception, you can’t be the brand you were 30 years ago. Think about how much has changed since 1993—now imagine still following all the brands and using all the products you used then. Now, imagine following them if they hadn’t evolved at all in the past 30 years!
You don’t necessarily have to subscribe to the most cutting-edge or disruptive parts of our culture. But nonprofit brands should carve out the time to consider whether or not the stories they tell reflect their contemporary role in society. Take American Forests, for example. While many organizations in the environmental space have garnered a reputation for lacking diversity or equity commitments, American Forests had different plans. That’s why we worked with the 150-year-old organization to make sure that their website met the moment. Centering their new, bold DEI and environmental equity goals on their new website demonstrated the nonprofit’s commitment to a new era of environmental equity—and cultural relevance.
Relevant visual storytelling can mean a lot of things—a rebrand, a website rebuild, a new campaign. But if you’re telling an ethical visual nonprofit story, that means you should always take the audience’s background, values, and beliefs, as well as the cultural and social context of the story you are telling into consideration. You should also make sure your visuals are appropriate and not triggering or traumatizing to some individuals.
5. Am I perpetuating harmful archetypes or stereotypes?
Archetypes provide guidelines for characterization—you might be familiar with archetypes like the rebel, the villain, or the hero in stories. And archetypes exist for a reason. They can help us understand our nonprofit brands in the context of our audience.
Stereotypes, on the other hand, are oversimplified, often derogatory classifications of people or groups. Although archetypes can sometimes be helpful, you need to be careful with both archetypes and stereotypes in your nonprofit brand visual storytelling. Visual storytelling can—often unconsciously—perpetuate harmful stereotypes or biases. It’s important to critically examine your visuals to ensure that you are not perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Make sure you’re not perpetuating overused archetypes or harmful stereotypes in terms of age, race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or religion.
When I think about my own role in avoiding visual tropes or clichés that reinforce negative stereotypes, I think about my work with the Serious Illness Messaging Toolkit. Here, where we had the ability to go with the tried-and-true hospice imagery—cupped hands, doves, bed-ridden patients—we took a different route. End-of-life or serious illness care doesn’t have one face. So we visually demonstrated the diversity of ability and utilized fictional, fantastical people with purple skin to increase relatability, reduce isolation, and break the trend of visual stereotypes for people with serious illnesses.
6. Is my story culturally aware?
Visual storytelling should be culturally sensitive and respectful of diverse lived experiences. In the nonprofit space, this is an especially critical question to consider. Are you avoiding cultural appropriation or stereotyping? And are you taking care to represent cultural practices, beliefs, and traditions accurately and respectfully?
Let’s take poverty as an example topic. Around 2016, nonprofits got a lot of backlash for a practice called “poverty porn.” The practice involves using exploitative images of people living in poverty in order to meet the goals (fundraising or other) of the organization sharing the images. It’s also a master class in what not to do. Poverty porn misrepresents poverty, it rarely features consenting subjects, it often perpetuates stereotypes, and it fuels a cycle of unjust emotional manipulation. It really all boils down to one thing: Poverty porn violates basic human dignity—and dignity is an ethical visual storytelling essential.
Yet, many nonprofits still work with underprivileged or under-resourced communities. So how do we tell those visual stories ethically? For starters, we need to take into consideration the multidimensional nature of the subject at hand. Poverty looks different across cultures. That means that the perceptions of poverty differ, too.
When you’re telling a nonprofit visual brand story, you need to consider the ways your story will play out across audiences. Avoid visual storytelling that could be perceived as insensitive or offensive to certain cultures or communities.
7. Is my story optimistic?
Ethical storytelling should be real, but it should also be optimistic. Fatalistic or cynical storytelling doesn’t inspire action. Our partners at the Frameworks Institute recommend a practice called “solutions-oriented framing.” A story should weave in solutions early and often. Visually, that could mean a brand centers desired outcomes rather than current crises. What would inspire you more: an environmental nonprofit with a logo of the Earth on fire, or one with a brand that communicates the beauty of restoring nature.
Visual storytelling is one of our best tools for getting people to relate to something—to consciously or unconsciously see their perception of themselves reflected in an image. That’s why it’s so important to never lose sight of hope in your nonprofit brand’s visual storytelling.
Otherwise, can you imagine how bad it would feel to see an image that reminds you of yourself, and that image instills hopelessness? You don’t have to be fake. In the nonprofit space, we often depict hard truths. But we can’t lose sight of dignity. Our goal is to change the world for the better, so we can’t lose sight of inspiring that change.
Take Spark the Journey, for example. The nonprofit prides itself on giving young adults the tools, mentorship, and community they need to achieve economic mobility. It centers these young adults and their potential—and the brand imagery captures that potential and optimism through hero imagery. Spark the Journey’s optimistic imagery is a great reminder to consider how your brand’s visuals can inspire hope, motivate action, or promote positive change.
Closing Thoughts on Ethical Visual Storytelling and Your Nonprofit Brand
The future of nonprofit brand visual storytelling is bright—and with powerful, ethical visual storytelling, we have the opportunity to change behaviors, hearts, and minds in hopes of making a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
We hope these considerations help you build a brand based on ethical visual storytelling practices. And here at Constructive, building brands that incorporate diverse perspectives and experiences to drive change is kind of our mission. If you’re interested in learning more about building an ethical visual nonprofit brand, get in touch anytime.
