The images used to be broadcast so often that, after a while, they were hard to distinguish from each other: close-up shots of malnourished and sad children gazing helplessly into the lens of the camera. As the camera pans, a voiceover asks you to reach into your heart and pocket and donate money to save the children.

For many years, such sentimental pitches were used by many UN and aid agencies. Aside from running the risk of being seen to be exploiting the children for their own fund-raising and marketing purposes, the ads rarely seemed to inform us of the impact of the work done by the respective agency. Nor did they provide us with hope that a long term solution to the donor-funded interventions is being mapped out.

But things are changing for the better, with more innovation and creativity being employed by charities in their marketing and advocacy efforts to fund their far-flung global operations. With disasters and conflicts occurring more frequently and lasting longer, charities need a way to distinguish themselves and combat donor fatigue.

There are two videos which I regard as raising the bar on advocacy – one by the Nike Foundation and the other by UNICEF.

I first saw the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect video at the Clinton Global Initiative summit in New York many years ago. The animation tells the stories what girls can do and the effect they have on the world, from point of view of 12 year old girls and barriers they might face. With a super-innovative and engaging form of story-telling it quickly became a video which I incorporated into my workshops on innovative ways to share a narrative. Clocking in at just over three minutes, it tends to hold the viewer’s attention until the very end.

The second prize-winner is UNICEF’s “Every Child” video, which features the organization’s goodwill ambassadors and the children of UNICEF USA staff. Not unlike the Nike video, it ends on an upbeat message – suggesting that ordinary people can actually make a difference. (Of course for UNICEF, it has an enormous edge over other aid organizations due to its wide network of prominent goodwill ambassadors. The “Every Child” video alone includes Ralph Fiennes, Lucy Liu, Sarah Jessica Parker, Whoopi Goldberg, Tea Leoni, Susan Sarandon, and Alyssa Milano).

A significant improvement in pitching for donor money is Save the Children’s snappy video which claims that around 90 cents of every donor dollar goes directly to support its mission – with the remainder going to innovation and communication.

Another is scandal-plagued Oxfam, which nows offers donors the ability to directly impact communities by providing them with chickens, goats and sheep. For just $58, livestock gifts can provide a community with milk, eggs and wool, Oxfam says. Under its “Buy Oxfam Unwrapped” programme, gifts such as water pumps can “help create lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice for people and communities in the 90+ countries where we work.”

Offering individual donors to purchase life-saving supplies is a trend which has become immensely popular with charities. In what I have called ‘shopping catalogue fundraising,’ even UNICEF has jumped on the trend, offering everything from bednets to water pumps for sale.

UNICEF USA even has a shopping page for “inspired gifts” which allows would-be donors the ability to purchase winter clothes, gift baskets, pencils, jump ropes, backpacks – even ‘girl empowerment packs.’

While the shopping aspect probably appeals to the scrutinizing mentality and vanity of millennial donors, I suspect it makes aid agency country office management growl as ‘untied donations’ – where they can spend funds on programmatic interventions and operations – is always preferred. It also makes fundraising for non-tangible interventions – such as psychosocial support – that much more difficult.

Whatever the trends in humanitarian aid advocacy, capturing the attention of sceptical donors – in an environment where attention spans are shorter and completion greater – will a strong dose of imagination and innovation. Agencies pitching for donations will have to experiment with messaging and segment demographically to determine what works best.

To be sure, being able to show a demonstrable and credible impact will always remain a major ingredient of fundraising.

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