Multimodal Persuasion in Humanitarian Communication: A Comparative Analysis of Text-Image Alignments in Online Charity Materials

Summary

INTRODUCTION

To attract sponsors and compete successfully with other charitable causes, humanitarian organizations have promotional and informational materials designed in ways that appeal to broad audiences not only through logical and rational argumentation (central route), but also more subliminally with presentational, aesthetic and emotion-laden means (peripheral route). As the digital medium renders even complex graphic designs easier and more affordable to prepare and disseminate, the persuasive potential of multimodality has increased in humanitarian communication. This study explores the current applications of combinations of visual and verbal affordances in selected examples of online charity documentation and solicitation materials publicized by two prominent humanitarian organizations campaigning for donations to foreign causes: Polish Humanitarian Action (Polska Akcja Humanitarna) and the Polish division of SOS Children's Villages (SOS Wioski Dziecięce).

To be communicatively effective, online charity materials must demonstrate a context-sensitive alignment of textual and visual modes, both of which will utilize iconic, indexical and symbolic signification to various degrees. The modes and signifying orders may be combined strategically in “multimodal ensembles” (Kress 2003) to rationalize, legitimize, or emotionalize charity appeals. For example, if the text describes the suffering and deprivation of hundreds of victims in detail while the accompanying imagery shows a handful of smiling beneficiaries being given blankets by a relief worker, then the viewer may be led to thinking that the organization has been able to control the emergency and substantially reduce the amount of suffering. Following the procedures of critical multimodal analysis (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen 2005; Machin 2007; Bateman 2008), in this study attention is paid to the interplay of semiotic resources in visual representations and verbal descriptions of (1) the vulnerable others positioned vis-à-vis the donors/organization (them vs. us), (2) the narratives of the organization's actions (before and after), and (3) the material and human impacts of the organization on the community. The discussion of identified patterns of multimodal persuasion is enabled by their positioning against the discursive formation of “mediated post-humanitarianism” based on aesthetization, irony and spectatorship (Chouliaraki 2006, 2010, 2013). The study delineates the extent to which either organization applies the visual and verbal devices characteristic of the discourse of post-humanitarianism.