Our purpose was to collect data that would help us better understand the challenges and opportunities facing organizations that depend upon current, compelling images to tell their stories.
Many organizations that advance environmental and social progress are challenged by the demands of acquiring, publishing, and cataloging compelling images to help tell their stories. These burdens place significant costs, both direct and indirect, on the organizations in terms of staff time and on the organizations’ abilities to respond quickly and effectively.
In an effort to help organizations find solutions to these problems, in March of this year Blue Earth Alliance launched an online survey of these organizations. We sent 00survey invitations to a list of 400 staff members at 350 organizations.
The majority of these staff positions were communications directors/managers/coordinators. If a group did not have a communications staff member, the invitation went to the executive director. If there was more than one person involved in communications, the invitation went to the top two positions in the communications department.
Because of Blue Earth’s focus on environmental and social progress issues, the survey responses are heavily weighted by organizations that work in these areas. We received 102 responses to the survey invitation, or slightly more than a 25% return. This is the predicted average return or a cross-sectional survey such as this.
Because of the issue biases in the responses and the relatively small sample size, the survey results should not be viewed as applicable to all nonprofits.
These responses provide a snapshot of some of the issues that affect many organizations with similar interests as Blue Earth, and, as such, they provide useful insights into the challenges and opportunities of the working relationships between certain nonprofits and photographers.