Posted on 15 September 2025
Interviewed by Tania Sawicki Mead
One of the many highlights of the CID annual conference in August was a discussion on how the NGO sector can get people to care, with some great insights from the panelists and thoughtful questions from the audience. There was a strong theme that came through that conversation on effective narratives and ways to engage with our audiences.
We thought it would be useful to put some of these questions to Dr Jess Berenston Shaw, a public narratives researcher with significant expertise in developing evidence-based approaches to communications on complex issues.
What do you think are some of the key values that are really relevant for the development and humantiaran sector when trying to build a better public understanding of our work, and why it matters?
I'd start off by saying I don't think the problem is that people don't care - people do care. I think probably the biggest challenge is people’s sense of fatalism, what we call ‘economic naturalism’ - the idea that the situation that many developing countries are in is just how it is, and how it’s always been. When that happens, it makes it pretty hard for people to move from care into a sense that something can be done, primarily because they don't know what can be done. They’ve not got a sense of agency, especially because of the added problem of distance, and it seems big and overwhelming.
So, you can continue to activate values of care and shared humanity because those are still important values to remind people of: that no matter where we come from or where we live, everybody should have the opportunity to live a dignified life and for their contributions to count.
I think the next step is actually showing people the types of solutions that do work in quite explicit ways and then also naming who should do what, especially where there are more powerful actors. What are things that the New Zealand government particularly can do? As a citizen of New Zealand, what can you do? What power do you have? Because we still have power as citizens and community members to influence our government's decisions. Although there's obviously a huge amount of aid and development work that comes from money and time that people donate, acting as citizens is a relatively visual, visible thing that people know about and can do as well as donating.
What do you think are some of the narrative or communication approaches that are effective in a wider context of donor fatigue, and multiple and intersecting crises?
Practically, I think it's helpful to remind people how many other people care. When fatigue and fatalism sets in, what happens is people withdraw, and they become disengaged from issues. One of the ways that happens is that we think that nobody else cares, we think “look at all these problems in the world, nobody's doing anything about them, I'll just disengage and take care of me and mine.”
One of the ways that you can overcome that is by showing how many people care, and specifically how many people want action. So, using your data in clever and smart ways to show how many people donate, how many people think that the government should be increasing our aid to our Pacific neighbors, how many people think the government should be doing more to help in places where conflict is happening. That helps to switch off that fatalistic fatigue.
Another thing I'd like to remind people of is something that we call the spillover effect. When we use effective values framing, along with good explanations and solutions, we're telling people that this issue matters because it matters for our communities, it matters for everyone’s sense of freedom and self-direction. This tends to spill over into other issues, and people apply those ways of thinking to other, related issues like, for example, sexual violence. So, you don’t have to fight every battle – if you take this approach, it starts to shift those wider cultural understandings across multiple issues.
You’ve spoken a lot about how the trap of ‘mythbusting’ in communications about complex issues. What are some of the common traps that we can fall into when trying to challenge erroneous or harmful narratives about aid and humanitarian work?
Often the reason we’re drawn to myth-busting is because we really believe in our work. It’s a transgression to the things that motivate us to hear rubbish being said, and we see how offensive and harmful it is. So of course, we have a need and a desire to correct that. That sense of injustice is totally appropriate and drives our response.
The challenge is the more people hear a particular idea or set of ideas - even if it's to prove it wrong - the more familiar we become with it. And that's because of the way our brains process information. Repetition is one of those ways in which things essentially become smoother and the neural connections become stronger.
So even if we're hearing a message with the word ‘no’ in it, those are the types of words that our brains tend to forget, especially if this idea is familiar in our culture. I always say to people, talk about the thing that you want people to remember, don't talk about the thing that you don't want them to remember. That's sucking our resources away from telling our stories about where development makes a difference, when how it's really important.
I think the other thing I would say about myth-busting is that sometimes we feel that these wrong or harmful ideas have reached far further than they actually have because we (as people working in this field) see them all of the time. And you know, stopping and asking yourself, you know, how many people actually believe these things? Do I need to put my resources into challenging that? Or is it a better use of my very limited resources to start to build up and switch on more accurate understandings of development work, and its impact?
People often ask me, there are instances of totally false information that get out there: If we can't repeat it, how do we deal with it? And there are a number of evidence-based tactics that we know that we can use in order to minimize the impact of repeating harmful or untrue information in order to give people correct information.
If you’re curious about Jess’s work you can see more of their publications and research at www.theworkshop.org.nz