Last week we wrote about informed consent and what it actually requires.
This week: why so much social impact content looks the same, what that does to the people in it, and what a better brief looks like.
In 2009, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk about the danger of the single story. Show a person or community as one thing, over and over, and that becomes the only thing they are. The problem with stereotypes, she said, is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.
Social impact content has a single story problem. It tends to show people defined entirely by their need, their hardship, or their diagnosis, there to illustrate a problem the organisation exists to solve. Their personality, their context, their life outside that issue rarely makes it in, because the brief never asked for it.
This matters for three reasons.
The first is ethical. The Dignified Storytelling Handbook puts it plainly: contributors are not props. Reducing someone to a single circumstance, their illness, their poverty, their mental health history, without any dimension beyond it does not respect their full humanity. When organisations have actually asked contributors what they thought of the content made about them, the finding is consistent: people did not object to honest portrayals of hardship, they objected to being flattened into a stereotype rather than telling their story their own way.
The second is practical. Research by Jess Crombie and David Girling with Amref Health Africa found that audiences respond more strongly to content that breaks from stereotype. Showing contributors as full people, not illustrations of a problem, creates stronger emotional connection and drives more action.
The third matters most for health and government communications. The power of this content lies not in pretending an issue affects everyone equally, but in showing why it affects who it affects. Research on public health campaigns has found that issues framed around underlying circumstances, access to services, housing, environment, broaden public and policy understanding and tend to attract more resources. Issues framed as an inherent trait of a particular group do not. A single story that shows only the hardship, without the structural reasons behind it, risks turning a systemic issue into what looks like an individual or cultural one, undermining the very case for funding or policy change the content was meant to make.
What this means in practice
- Build flexibility into your brief.
A brief that arrives with the story already written, contributor type, setting, emotional tone, narrative arc, leaves no room for what contributors actually want to say. Approach each production ready to discover the story with contributors, not to extract it from them. - Ask what else is true.
If you are filming someone about their experience of homelessness, chronic illness, or disability, find out what else is going on in their life. Their work, their family, their interests, their opinions on things unrelated to your campaign. That material may not all end up in the final cut, but it changes how you film and what you capture. - Brief your production partner on who the contributor is, not just what they represent.
This is where the single story problem actually gets solved or repeated. A briefing document that describes a contributor only in terms of the issue they illustrate is a brief for a stereotype, regardless of how skilled the production team is. - Share the finished content with contributors before it is published.
It is a useful check on whether the content reflects the person as they see themselves, and it occasionally surfaces problems before they become public ones.
