The ethics of using someone's crisis story to build your personal brand as a communicator

There is a particular kind of development sector communication I want to name. The practitioner who posts about a community visit on LinkedIn. Who uses a photograph from the field — a child, a woman, a difficult scene — to illustrate their professional thinking. Who positions their proximity to suffering as evidence of their credibility.

I have done this. I am not speaking from outside it.

The question I now ask, and that I think everyone in this space should ask: does the person in this story know they are being used to build my professional profile? And would they have consented to that specific use if they had been asked?

The specific consent question

Someone can consent to their story being published by an organisation. They have not thereby consented to being the illustrative example in a development practitioner's thought leadership content. Those are two different uses. And the second one,  which happens constantly in development sector social media, is almost never specifically consented to.

I notice that the language in these personal posts has become more careful. Many now post with captions about dignity, about learning, about their discomfort with the power they hold. This is better than posting without those captions. But the underlying structure,  difficult experience as professional credential — has not changed. And the more careful language can sometimes obscure rather than address that structure.

Consistency, not silence

This is not an argument for silence. It is an argument for the same consistency that good ethical storytelling always demands: examine who benefits from this content. Apply the same questions you apply to institutional work to your own. And where those questions cannot be answered satisfactorily, sit with that, rather than posting anyway.

The question of whose experience is being used for whose advancement does not stop at the institution's door. If the ethical standard applies to organisations — it applies to us.