Ken Burnett | The truth told well. About telling our stories better

‘These charity ads are dreadful’, wailed Harriet. ‘It’s one misery after another. They depress the living daylights out of daytime television, really they do. I have to listen to the radio to get away from them and even that doesn’t always work, they still pop up.’ I know what she means. It’s a mystery why fundraisers inflict such endless distress on their audiences, particularly when things are going so well in the world.

Many would see that last phrase as a touch controversial. Particularly those, Hans Rosling tells us, whose world view is stuck back somewhere around 1965. Which, according to his book, Factfulness, is most of us. Seriously. It seems our species is predisposed, preconditioned even, to see the world mostly as it was 40 or even 50 years ago, ie, bad and getting worse. The reality, Rosling and Co claim they can simply demonstrate, is dramatically different*.

I’ve long been a fan of Hans Rosling, author, TED talker, statistician, sword-swallower and alleged Pollyannaist, who sadly died last year. See page 48 of my 2014 book Storytelling can change the world. Rosling is widely acknowledged as a presenter par excellence, adept at using statistics, truth and stories to make us think and rethink. How it’s possible that most people today are walking around with a decades-out-of-date worldview is one of the many fascinating insights of Rosling’s latest – and last – book.

I can’t do more than touch the surface here. Suffice to say it’s not surprising that most people living in the world’s affluent areas (who Rosling terms as level 4 people, the ‘rich consumers’) have world views that are way off-balance. It’s because our first-hand experiences are invariably seen from the perspective of consistent privilege and our second-hand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which, Hans says, ‘loves non-representative extraordinary events and shuns normality.’ Because of this, those who live at level 4 (roughly 1 billion of us) struggle to understand the reality of those at levels 1, 2 and 3 (the other 6 billion). And perhaps, for the most part, always will.

Back when I was a raw newcomer to fundraising the commonly accepted philosophy was that people applaud achievement but give to need. There’s truth in this, of course. And maybe by presenting gloomy vistas we’re simply addressing our audience in the way they’ll most easily understand (another mantra drummed into me in those early days was, ‘talk to people where they are, not where you want them to be’). Again, seems sensible and has served us well. But increasingly I feel we need to revise these tablets of stone and to change the perceptions behind them, because the world is changing and the expectations of sophisticated donors are changing too.

The truth is, our donors have accomplished such a lot that’s really worth shouting about. (NB, despite so often giving contrary impressions, we and our organisations are not solely responsible for all that’s been achieved. It’ll pay us to give regular credit to donors, so they get something in return for all they give us.)

According to philosophers and statistics-studiers such as Rosling and Pinker our species suffers from something Rosling calls ‘the Negativity Instinct’, the tendency to imagine that things are much worse than they are and are deteriorating rapidly. I first went to Africa in 1978 and toured some of the world’s poorest, most dire places. What knocked me from my preconceptions was how happy and cheerful most people were, how generous, welcoming too and positive about the good things that were coming to their village (mostly basic necessities we’d not think twice about). I returned to the prevailing paradigm of poverty alleviation promotion that dictated images must be black and white, its ‘victims’ should never be seen smiling and needs must always be emphasised both ahead of and after any mention of achievements. Though gradually these views have changed, they still persist and often dominate.

Continued top of column 2, above.

*Footnote: Some of the good news cited by Rosling and others includes far fewer people now living in poverty, child mortality dramatically reduced, life expectancy, access to clean water, health care and electricity all increasing, as is access to education for both boys and girls, not just in some countries but almost everywhere.