Ethical storytelling at Christmas

Sightsavers is always striving for authenticity and ethical storytelling – amplifying the voices of the people it supports and works with around the world. For a number of years now, we’ve been interviewing in-country staff to use as signatories for their warm mail appeals – asking them to share their unique personal experiences, and tell supporters directly about the situation in their regions.

For Christmas 2024 we took this a step further. Our story focused on a family in Tanzania, where cataract is the main cause of blindness. Several members of this family were struggling with cataracts, and one aunt, Rudia, was advocating for all of them. She’d made sure that her nephews Ezekiel and Joseph got the sight-saving treatment they needed, so they’d be able to continue with the education that would open up a world of greater opportunity and potential.

It was an incredible story of determination and love, but it was this beautiful quote from Rudia’s transcript that sparked the idea that we could do something really different with our main appeal. 

"I would like to express my sincere gratitude to you. I would like to plead that your kindness should not start and end with us, because every environment, every society has children with these eye problems. I urge that when and if you meet such children, please hold their hands and walk with them like you did with us."

No-one could say it better than the woman who had seen her nephews’ lives transformed, so we put Rudia’s words at the heart of our pack and created the entire letter from her transcript. And where we needed to make small edits to accommodate translation issues, the local Sightsavers team got back in touch with her for approval.

So that her letter was a truly authentic account of her story, we put the fundraising asks elsewhere in the pack – including a comp slip and a hard-working leaflet to explore the wider programmatic work in Tanzania.And we followed the main appeal with a more traditional reminder, sharing the boys’ story using interviews with them and the local team.