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For the first time, an alliance of aid charities, including WaterAid, Care, Save the Children and ActionAid, is addressing the public as one, to try and reignite a belief in the power of helping. 

"It's taken a long time for us to get here,” Saul Parker, founder of The Good Side, admitted. His agency has been working with an alliance of major international charities for the past couple of years, helping them piece together why UK audiences are becoming less engaged with international development. 

For 40 years, WaterAid has been at the vanguard of the water crisis, battling against climate change and rapid urbanisation, to help provide clean water sanitation. But perhaps its biggest challenge has been a significant decline in support for international aid over the past decade.  

Simon Capper, head of performance and insight at the charity, said the number of people giving to international development organisations has fallen year on year, and public trust has waned. 

Without international aid work, the world would be a worse place, so why has this trend emerged? Are people becoming more frugal with their money and uninterested in the world beyond their own four walls? 

"British aid supporters have lost their faith in a sense of progress," Parker said, detailing the findings of The Good Side's research into the UK's donating habits.

The UK public is not getting meaner with charity donations, he added. Rather, the decline is down to decades of charity communications that focus on a problem narrative. "There's a tendency in broadcast news to major on bad news stories, an addiction to social media doom-scrolling, and our brain’s tendency to remember negative experiences over positive ones." 

Thus, Parker explained, the net outcome is people think the world is getting worse, when in reality, on many really important issues – such as life expectancy, infant mortality, access to water and basic education – the world is way better than it ever has been, and continues to get better all the time.

The international aid sector understands it needs to inspire a cultural shift in how aid is understood, appreciated and supported by the public, to overcome the problem. "To effect the sort of sea change in public opinion that is required to turn around this decline, it is critical that the sector rallies around the challenge," WaterAid's Capper said. 

Historically, the international aid sector has regularly united around key issues, such as to engage MPs in debates on the future of aid but seldom do charities come together to address the public. "While the partner organisations have much in common, they all have their own personalities, priorities and ways of expressing themselves. This can sometimes make it hard to see the bigger picture," Capper added.

Desperate times call for unusual measures. Care, Save the Children, WaterAid and ActionAid have worked together on "We the helpers" with The Good Side and The & Partnership. It's a campaign that not only announces the alliance but showcases the positive impact international aid has within countries most in need.

"With strong, persuasive leaders from across the sector seeing this campaign as a priority," Capper said. "It’s been great to see many of those historic impediments set aside." 

According to Parker, "the helpers works brilliantly to reframe aid work as hard work rather than a handout, to centre the narrative on workers on the group making a difference every day, and to feel inclusive".

"Typically, when people think about international development charities, they think about 'chuggers' on the street, chief exec in the headlines and malnourished children on the telly with flies in their eyes."

As a pilot campaign, Capper said WaterAid's core objective is to learn whether the framing it identified through its research has had the desired impact on the target audience’s perceptions of international development. 

"Our pre- and post-campaign research activity will enable us to monitor changes in opinion, while activity level measures will enable us to evaluate the efficacy of the individual components, like assets, channels and targeting approaches," he said.