Please Send Me to Blog from Bangladesh

In a recent piece for Guardian Development, Rowan Davies discusses the latest NGO trend: sending bloggers to the field. She discusses the example of Heather B. Armstrong who traveled, on her own dollar, to Bangladesh at the invitation of the Every Mother Counts. Davies is not sold that sharing such an experience will lead the audience to act or engage in their own right.

"Where blogger engagement projects often fall down is in closing the deal: having aroused the empathy of an engaged audience, they fail to provide something potent for people to do next. If you've just read a post about children working 14 hours a day scavenging material from towering heaps of putrefied waste, you probably want to do something more effective than signing a petition or sending an email to your elected representative; but frequently, this is all that's on offer. Engagement, information and a powerful completion strategy allow westerners to stand behind those in absolute poverty: not to attempt to save them, but to recognise our outrageous luck and try to change global systems for the better. Deciding what this completion strategy should be is the hard part. But without an answer, blogging trips risk being little more than groovy PowerPoint slides in the campaign department's next quarterly report."

As an aid and development blogger, I would selfishly love to be flown around the world to see various projects. It would be quite the experience and allow me to increase my understanding of how various organizations enact their interventions. However, I am not sure what the value would be to the sponsoring organizations and the people they serve. If anything, my trip would use up valuable time and money that could be better used for project implementation.

Even if I paid for it myself, I would need to have someone from the organization show me around. Any media savvy organization would provide the staff member because they will want to be sure that I can provide a positive image of the work that is being done which can then reach current and potential supporters.

For me, it would be a selfish endeavor. I do not mean to say that anyone who does it is selfish; there might be ways for NGOs to put bloggers to good use through travel experiences. To do so would require a bit more work than taking an individual with an audience. I would suggest by starting with people who have some background in poverty; first-hand experience will be valuable. As Davies points out, there are already enough stories about people experiencing poverty for the first time. Those stories should exist and continue to be told, but are redundant when they become the most used narrative.

World Vision got around this a bit with their vloggers last year by having three go at the same time. All three had somewhat different audiences, but ended up on the same platform for World Vision. This meant that they could not post the same reflections. By forcing the three to look at what they were experiencing differently some interesting videos were produced which helped to show what World Vision was doing in the areas visited and how the work impacted the lives of those benefiting from the programs.

Someone else who is starting to get it right is Shawn Ahmed of the Uncultured Project. Shawn acts as a Kanterian ‘Free Agent’ by partnering with Save the Children. To some extent, Shawn is a mini NGO who encourages people to give to him so that he can use the money to directly fund projects. He and I have had some exchanges over the idea of overhead, but Shawn should be commended for leveraging an audience of supporters for his mission. What is unique is that he has done this entirely through social media. His twitter account has over 250,000 followers and thousands see each of his latest videos.

What attracts people to Shawn is that he is an individual. He champions the work of Save the Children, but places the focus on the people he interacts with and the way that supporters are impacting their lives. This is an excellent way for Save the Children to gain greater notice since he is an advocate for their work with actual experience. Whenever he travels to Bangladesh, he is not only going with a strong understanding of the situation on the ground, but goes with language skills and cultural connections.

Nobody seems to have figured out how to effectively utilize bloggers as partners. A few are getting close. Davies is right to be concerned with what impact these opportunities have on the organizations and the greater conversation. Without much planning, these trips can end up using up resources unnecessarily. I think that an effective partnership can be forged between NGOs and bloggers, but it must be done carefully. Money and time spent on visitors should ultimately be done if they can impact the most important people in all of this; the recipients of the interventions and aid seen by bloggers.