Organizational storytelling presents new ethical concerns:

• the power dynamic between a nonprofit and a person who benefits from the nonprofit create the potential for exploitation — intentional or not

• when a person’s life story is narrated by an organization they may lose narrative agency (the ability to make independent decisions about how they see the world and their place in it)

• telling certain types of stories can translate to financial gain (e.g. donations), which can put an organization in opposition to ethical storytelling practices

Organizational storytelling sits at the intersection of communications: creating narrative text, but using it to benefit an organization. The best practices communicators borrowed from journalism and media don’t extend to the ethical issues that are raised by this specific practice, including narrative agency, identity and exploitation.

Ethical storytelling requires investment in internal systems and processes to establish ethical practices — and protect them when there is pressure to produce stories.