Humanitarian Relief Editing and Proofreading Services

Six days after the earthquake, an appeal goes out with a photograph of a child alone in rubble and a line about a community that has lost everything. The road to the district hospital had been cleared by that community on the second morning, and the search teams working the collapsed market were local. Donors thousands of miles away see none of that. Appeals are written fast, about people who cannot see what is being written, and the sector is still recovering from a long history of raising money by presenting people as helpless.

The documents we edit for Humanitarian Relief

Emergency appeals and rapid-onset fundraising material arrive with the shortest deadlines. Situation reports and donor updates follow them, together with needs assessments, response plans, and proposals to institutional donors and pooled funds. Cluster and coordination documentation reaches us as well, along with beneficiary communication and accountability material, complaints and feedback mechanism information, and policies on safeguarding and on protection from sexual exploitation and abuse. The rest is staff and volunteer briefing material, security and access documentation, photography and storytelling guidance for field teams, evaluations and after-action reports, and public communication during a protracted crisis. Our editors work to the standards your organization has already signed.

What the editing involves

The tension between the sector's standards and its income is resolved in specific choices, not in a general commitment to dignity. A person described as somebody who acted reads differently from a person described as somebody things happened to, and the difference is usually what they did in the first seventy-two hours. "Amina walked her two youngest to the school shelter and went back for her neighbor's mother" is a sentence about a person. "Amina lost everything" is a sentence about a disaster, and it tells a donor nothing about who is doing the work.

Numbers should be used where they are known and marked as estimates where they are early, because inflated first-week figures get corrected later and remembered longer. An appeal reporting 4,000 homes destroyed when the assessment eventually finds 900 has bought a week of income at the price of a decade of credibility. The appeal should also say what the money does at this stage of the response, since a donation arriving in week two pays for water treatment and staff time rather than for a named child's meal. Implying otherwise is a promise the organization cannot keep.

Consent for images and stories has to be genuine and specific, obtained where refusal was realistically possible and recorded in a form the organization can produce two years later. A caption reading "a community that has lost everything" is contradicted by the response itself, because most of the clearing and the searching is done by people from that community. Appeals written this way raise less in week one and considerably more over a decade, and the decade is the timescale that governs an organization's income.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including security information, unpublished assessments, and material about identifiable people. We are editors, not humanitarian practitioners, and we offer no opinion 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 organization has already made.