Did the aid sector really screw up its communications strategy?

Last month, Mark Green, the former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, took to the stage at a Devex Impact House event on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly and argued that development organizations had not done enough to make the case for aid. “We screwed up,” Green told an audience of development professionals. “We were wrong. We were badly wrong, and we failed to engage and make the case over and over again, and now we have to make a new case and make it over and over again.” Nor was he a lone voice. Other speakers at Devex Impact House advanced similar positions. Michelle Nunn, the chief executive of CARE, quoted a representative of the current Trump administration, who told her, ‘If you can’t explain what you’re doing to my mother and her Sunday school class, then, you know, you have a problem.’ “And I think we have to take that seriously,” she said, “and I think we have an obligation to invite the American public in and to broaden the constituency of people who care about global development,” she said. Nor is it just UNGA. Earlier this year, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had very similar things to say. In recent weeks, Devex has been bombarded with reports, research, and opinion articles analyzing why the aid sector has lost support. Communication strategy is one of the key themes in that discussion. Several broad themes emerge — that the aid sector made communications mistakes and has not focused enough on public support; that this is not the only or even the primary reason for a reduction in funding; and that it is now time to think very differently about how and how much to speak with the public about aid in the future. Have perceptions of aid shifted? It seems clear that in the United States, at least, government perceptions of aid have radically shifted. The rapid dismantling of USAID bears witness to that, albeit a multibylined article in The New York Times advances that the administration did not come into power with a plan to do any such thing. “A New York Times examination found that Trump administration officials came to U.S.A.I.D. with no plan to dismantle the agency, at least not so quickly,” the piece said. “Instead, that decision emerged day by day, marked by rash demands, shock and confusion.” That being said, aid now finds itself in a defensive crouch, having to make the case for its existence again after decades of bipartisan consensus. Nor is an emerging political targeting of aid funding a purely U.S. phenomenon. In Europe, too, aid has been cut heavily. The leaders of the United Kingdom and the EU have found themselves in straitened economic circumstances, driven by a slower recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, rising energy and food costs due to the war in Ukraine, an influx of refugees, and a need to increase defense spending. These leaders are looking for convenient ways to trim the budget — and aid has been in the crosshairs. But political convenience follows public will. If there was strong and widespread public support for aid, leaders would have cut elsewhere — the keyword, perhaps, being “strong.” Recent research by a U.K. consultancy called Focaldata, published in July this year, found that the majority of the public still supports aid but that, like many other subjects — climate change, race, culture, gender — views around aid have become increasingly polarized. Focaldata divided the community into six segments — ranging from what it termed “progressive internationalists” to “authoritarian populists” — and found that while support for aid had increased at one end of the spectrum, it had cratered at the other. The same research also found that the same members of the public hadn’t just changed their opinion about whether aid was good or bad, but also about how much it mattered. In general, aid is just much lower down the public agenda than in the past. The report did not look at the root causes behind these changes in behavior and approach, but other narratives offer some explanation, not least rising levels of inequality, which have made the public in global north countries more fearful for their own futures. “‘Low salience, high polarisation’ is the death zone for policy areas, where governments will avoid large scale investment and may even withdraw funding,” the report said. “Overseas aid has already fallen victim to this pattern.” How much of this is down to communications? Two decades ago, aid was in the headlines. The Make Poverty History campaign was plastered across the news, and rock stars, from Bob Geldof to Bono, fronted star-studded gigs in 10 of the world’s largest cities. When world leaders sat down for the G7 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005, aid was at the top of the agenda. But since then, aid’s profile has steadily dropped. And some think the focus has been too much on raising money, and not enough on demonstrating value. At UNGA, Michelle Nunn of CARE said the sector had forgotten to “communicate effectively the efficacy and agency of humanitarian assistance and development assistance.” That’s a challenge often leveled at nonprofit fundraising — that it paints a picture of people in need because that’s what brings in the dollars. But it never shows that development interventions actually address that need, so it looks as if nothing has changed. It’s led to campaigns lampooning the sector’s stereotyped portrayal of Africa, such as the Rusty Radiator Awards. Similarly, there has also been criticism of aid for increasingly using elitist language, which is designed to appeal to funders, but alienates ordinary people. In an article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, consultant Matt Watkins argued that this is a flaw not just in the development sector, but in the whole nonprofit field. “The nonprofit sector’s language has become increasingly coded, more abstract, and — ironically — less meaningful,” he went on. “Phrases such as ‘inclusive infrastructure,’ ‘equity in multisectoral collaboration,’ and ‘systemic resilience’ are so common, they often pass without notice. But to the people the field claims to serve, they sound like what they are: carefully calibrated, institutionally safe, and completely disconnected from everyday life.” His broad point is simple: You cannot convince people to support you if you use language that they do not like and do not understand. “This language was never designed to persuade the public,” he writes. “It was meant to reassure grant reviewers, institutional partners, and compliance staff. Over time, though, it infiltrated nonprofits’ public-facing communication — and that’s precisely the problem.” At a recent Devex Impact House event on the sidelines of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings, the director-general of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Gunn Jorid Roset, noted that even though her country is the world’s most generous donor, the majority of the Norwegian public supports its aid spending. “We inform about results, we inform about dilemmas, maybe also about the international discussions surrounding us when it comes to this landscape,” she said. There is an argument that USAID, in particular, did not promote itself because it couldn’t. It’s prevented by law from promoting itself domestically. However, while USAID may be excused, the rest of the sector in the U.S. and across the world cannot be. So what should an effective communications strategy look like? For many, like Mark Green, the first step is recognizing the problem — that aid has lost ground with the public and politicians, and needs to make it up. And the second step is making aid communications a high priority — building an apparatus capable of making the case again and again and again. Perhaps the third step is to find the right words. The Focaldata research identified that there remains a “bedrock of goodwill” toward aid, but that public support grew much stronger when aid was couched in plain and easy-to-understand terms. The report found that the choice of language was extremely important. It found the public was put off both by the language of social justice and by the academic, policy-focused language that has given rise to terms such as official development assistance. The aid sector also faces a difficult decision: How much to bend to the current political rhetoric of those in power? For example, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has said he will not support aid unless it makes the United States “safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” How much should aid communicators adopt that framing? To what extent should aid organizations be principled, and to what extent pragmatic? There are plenty in the sector who believe that the pragmatic argument is easy to make — that aid does provide valuable benefits to the donor country, because it builds soft power, prevents conflicts, makes it easier for nationals of the donor country to do business abroad, and reduces the impetus on citizens of other countries to migrate. But there is also evidence that the public, at least, also believes in humanitarian principles: that helping feed hungry people, and providing education and health care to all, are simply the right things to do, and that they do not need a strategic imperative, just a moral one. A recent Ipsos poll of Norwegians, for example, found that just 9% said they support aid because “It is in Norway’s own interest,” while more than 50% said either “It is our duty to contribute” or “We have an opportunity to help people in need and poverty.” “I think a lot of the advice you’ll get this week will be something like frame your moral and strategic arguments in terms of national interest,” Josh Rogin of The Washington Post said at an event on aid communications earlier this year. “I'm not saying don’t do that. I think that can have a benefit. I’ve seen it work. But don’t abandon that moral and strategic argument at the same time. … Don’t buy into the frame that this is just about us or just about money or just about making Trump look good. Because it’s a moral and strategic imperative that will last long beyond the Trump administration.” How much difference can communications make? It certainly appears clear that it would have taken more than a good communications strategy to save USAID. In an in-depth analysis, Tim Hirschel-Burns, a policy liaison at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, argued that the sector was primarily a victim of culture war propaganda and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, wanted to lay down a marker and show they were serious, and USAID was in the way. But it is also far from clear that the Trump administration and the Republican Party have a clear plan for aid. In Congress, Republicans continue to propose aid budgets in the tens of billions, whilst simultaneously their executive peers dismantle the infrastructure that they would need to spend the money. Many aid leaders are coalescing around a new set of asks — not a return to the USAID grants-based model, but a focus on a different thing: debt relief, tax reform, a restructuring of the international decision-making architecture. More power in the hands of the nations of the global south. More focus of grant money on the least developed countries, where poverty levels remain extremely high. It’s these principles that lie behind the much-discussed Accra Reset — an initiative to seize back control of health programming for the global south. If the aid sector wants to see the world operate differently, its leaders will have to make the case for the world they wish to see. It is clear that there are factors far beyond the development sector that will ultimately determine the future of development strategy and development funding. But it is also clear that aid must be more proactive about its role in the conversation. Hirschel-Burns has a simple message for what needs to happen next. Develop simple, easy-to-understand messaging to persuade people about the value of aid. Build a communications apparatus to push it out to ordinary people. And fund it properly. “It’s a communications war,” he wrote. “We need to be in it.”