Humanitarian Relief Editing and Proofreading Services

Humanitarian appeals are written fast, about people who cannot see what is being written, for donors thousands of miles away. That combination has produced a long history the sector is still recovering from: images and language that raised money by presenting people as helpless, and that shaped how a generation understood entire regions. The organisations doing this well now are constrained by standards they helped write, and the constraint costs them income in the short term and their licence to operate in the long term if they abandon it.

We edit what humanitarian and emergency relief organisations produce — emergency appeals and rapid-onset fundraising material, situation reports and updates to donors, needs assessments and response plans, proposals to institutional donors and pooled funds, cluster and coordination documentation, beneficiary communication and accountability material, complaints and feedback mechanism information, safeguarding and protection from sexual exploitation and abuse policies, staff and volunteer briefing material, security and access documentation, photography and storytelling guidance for field teams, evaluation and after-action reports, and public communications during a protracted crisis. Our editors work to the standards your organisation has signed up to.

The emergency appeal is where the sector's standards and its income are in direct tension, and the tension is resolved in specific choices rather than in a general commitment to dignity. We work on these so the person described is an agent rather than a recipient — what they did in the first seventy-two hours, not only what happened to them; so numbers are used where they are known and honestly caveated where they are early estimates, since inflated first-week figures are corrected later and remembered; so the appeal explains what the money does at this stage of the response rather than implying that a donation reaches a named individual; so consent for images and stories is genuine and specific, obtained in circumstances where refusal was realistically possible; and so nothing in the appeal describes a community as helpless when the response is being delivered largely by people from it. Appeals written this way raise less in week one and considerably more over a decade, which is the timescale that actually matters to an organisation's income.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including security information, unpublished assessments and material about identifiable people. We are editors rather than humanitarian practitioners, and we offer no view on assessment, response decisions, security or compliance with any humanitarian standard. What we can do is make the writing clear, urgent and consistent with the commitments your organisation has made.