Five Nonprofit Photography Best Practices
As a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization (NGO), your most valuable photos will show how you are delivering upon your promise to serve others.
Here are 5 essential characteristics of great photography for nonprofits and NGOs.
Image quality: Viewers are deluged with a flood of good images, thanks to advancements in camera technology, and there is no excuse for using low-quality photos. Use photos that are properly exposed, focussed and composed.
Identity: Your most valuable images will be those the viewer immediately associates with your organization. While you may be accustomed to adding graphics or narratives to accompany your images, remember that you are competing for the viewer’s attention and the more informative images will always win out. Whether it is a logo, a color combination or the presence of key personnel, viewers should be able to recognize that a photo comes from your organization before they read its caption.
© Kevin Suttlehan/American Red Cross, 2020
3. Context: A nonprofit’s photos should illustrate what the organization is doing and for whom, especially when the photo is used for fundraising. If the organization serves children, for instance, it is usually not effective to show just a close-up photo of a child. Instead, consider illustrating what you do and how you do it by providing context.
© Kevin Suttlehan (for Actors Theater Workshop), NYC 2023
4. Authenticity: The most compelling images are candid and unscripted, and they tell true stories. While posed images can play a role in visual storytelling, they must not be used in a way to suggest they are candid photos of real events or genuine interactions between people.
© Kevin Suttlehan/American Red Cross, 2023
5. Capturing genuine human interactions: Behind all great organizations are great people. Ideally, an organization’s photography will capture the interaction between these people and those who are benefitting from the organization’s mission. To make these sort of photos, and to do so in an unscripted way, a photographer needs to let subjects know what he is doing and either gain their consent to be photographed or allow them to decline. Those that consent will ultimately get comfortable with the photographer’s presence and even forget he’s there, allowing him enough time to craft a visual narrative of the organization’s work.
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