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The UK public perceives poverty as a consequence of war, famine and natural disasters, and despite giving, see donation as a flawed response. It’s time to change their minds Over the last 10 years I’ve been looking at the question of how the UK public engages with global poverty. I’ve done this research with a variety of NGOs, including Comic Relief, and have reviewed the evidence on public engagement for DfID on four occasions. Following the most recent of these reviews – probably the bleakest – Martin Kirk at Oxfam got in touch and suggested we attempt to find solutions to the problems I was so familiar with documenting. At the same time, Tom Crompton at WWF was drafting his report, Common Cause (pdf) , identifying a shared set of values on which all third sector organisations should be campaigning in order to deepen and widen their connections with the UK public. The result of our collaboration, a report called Finding Frames , launches on Monday. In terms of perceptions of poverty, the UK public appears to be stuck in 1985. You could conduct your own survey with the public today – on the bus, at the school gates, or in the pub – and I would wager you’d find the same things as I’ve been finding in research for a decade. Poverty in poor countries arises from internal causes: war, famine, natural disasters, over-population, and of course corruption – currently the UK public’s top cause of poverty, when asked in DfID surveys . And all we can do, they would say is to give money, which probably won’t reach the people for whom it is intended. This has been called the “Live Aid Legacy”. One respondent in research for Save the Children in 2009 said: “What’s happened since Live Aid? I was at school then. Now I’m 36 and nothing has really changed.” Development NGOs are deeply implicated in this. While the research evidence on public perceptions shows levels of concern about global poverty to be static at best, and more likely falling, the available data on fundraising show a contradictory pattern: steadily increasing annual growth in public donations to development NGOs, particularly marked since 1995. In Finding Frames, we ask ourselves how this can have been achieved against a backdrop of ebbing public concern. The answer appears to relate directly to the adoption of new fundraising methods by the sector (for instance, the introduction of direct debit arrangements in the mid-1990s), as part of a wider shift in the way NGOs engage with the public. In the academic literature on social movements, this shift is described as the rise of “chequebook participation”, as the quality of the engagement between organisation and member is changed, and the organisations morph into “protest businesses”, with strong management structures and, increasingly, targets for growth. The transaction model of public engagement has worked for fundraising, but we argue it has played into the Live Aid legacy, with its emphasis on the power of giving, and little else. A quick look at the communications strategies adopted by the sector shows that, in order to achieve the same or greater levels of donation, the content of the material has got harder, more heart-rending, and with less context. It is fair to ask where campaigns and fundraising will go next to keep income rising. Make Poverty History provided an opportunity to break out of the transaction frame. By rallying around the call for “justice not charity”, it attempted to disrupt the stubborn perception that “all we can do is give money”. Yet, as it turned out, the transaction frame proved too strong. In focus groups we ran around the event, the public repeatedly stated that it must be raising money, from all those wristbands and text messages. When in the end, Live8 became the finale to the activity around the G8, the public’s certainty about the transactional model was confirmed (“Live8 was the event, ‘Make Poverty History’ was the slogan” said one respondent). Inadvertently, MPH had reinforced the Live Aid legacy. It is our contention that it is time to have another go at breaking that legacy, once and for all. We have marshalled a body of theoretical and empirical evidence around values and frames, which we use as lenses through which to see the problem of public engagement. Through these lenses we also point to solutions, for ways out of this stalemate in public engagement. We do not dictate the solutions though, as it is critical that the development sector comes together to work them out for themselves, in collaboration. Whatever the new frames for global development are, they will need to work for all organisations. Most obviously, the frames we find will need to enable NGOs to keep raising the revenue they need now, but without jeopardising public engagement over the longer term. Happily, we think there are solutions out there: at community level, in faith groups, in academic thought, and in development as it is taking place in the global south (not least through south-south partnerships). All this amounts to a big change in how NGOs pursue their missions to end global poverty – from how they draft their business plans, to how they fundraise, campaign, or work with their volunteers. Most strikingly, it suggests they should frame their messages differently; seen from this perspective, “charity” “aid” and “development” are all problematic terms. The findings in the report are not new. But the quest for positive frames to re-engage the public in global poverty will take us in new directions. If all this strikes a chord with you, we recommend you read the report, and then think about how you can get involved in this new agenda. And let us know what you think below – what do you see as the problems of a transaction model of aid and the Live Aid Legacy? What new strategies of campaigning and communication might motivate people to have a deeper, more meaningful engagement than simply signing a cheque – and what implications might that have for the sector? • Andrew Darnton is an independent researcher, and lead author of Finding Frames Aid Live 8 Live Aid guardian.co.uk