Building Trust with Transparent Informed Consent

Securing informed consent is foundational to ethical storytelling. It ensures that individuals featured in content are active participants, fully aware of how their stories or images will be used. However, many non-profits and impact-driven businesses still face significant challenges in making this process seamless, clear, and truly informed.

Traditional consent collection methods, such as paper forms, often fall short, introducing inefficiencies and potential risks. The adoption of digital consent tools offers a transformative solution for organisations committed to ethical practices and compliance, especially with regulations like GDPR. But not all tools are created equal, and careful consideration is needed to ensure transparency and inclusivity in the process. Let’s explore further the present and future of consent tools to help you choose the best fit for your organisation.

The Persistent Challenges of Informed Consent

Many traditional consent processes have inherent limitations, including:

• Time-Consuming Workflows: Managing, storing, and retrieving physical forms slows down operations.
• Language Barriers: Paper forms often lack multilingual support, leading to misunderstandings or incomplete consent.
• Accessibility Gaps: Traditional methods frequently fail to accommodate individuals who are visually impaired, illiterate, or unable to sign.
• Storage Risks: Physical documents are vulnerable to loss, damage, and unauthorised access, increasing the risk of non-compliance.

These obstacles can undermine the very trust that informed consent is meant to establish.

?? Related reading: Informed Consent: Why an App is Better than Paperform

What to Look for in a Digital Consent Tool

When transitioning to digital consent tools, ensure they meet these essential criteria to uphold transparency and accessibility:

1. Regulatory Compliance: The tool must align with legal standards like GDPR, ensuring secure and organised storage of consent records.
2. Multilingual Support: It should offer materials in various languages to cater to diverse participants.
3. Inclusive Communication Options: Look for alternatives like voice or image consent for participants who cannot read, write, or sign forms.
4. Efficient Record Management: The tool should streamline the collection, organisation, and retrieval of consent data, minimising administrative burden.
5. Integration Capabilities: It should connect seamlessly with your existing systems, whether you’re an individual freelancer or part of a large international team.
6. Offline Functionality: The ability to collect consent offline and sync data later is vital for work in remote or low-connectivity areas.

Prioritising Transparency and Trust

True informed consent is about more than compliance — it’s about respecting participants’ rights, ensuring they fully understand their role, and empowering them to make decisions freely. By adopting a digital solution that prioritises transparency, inclusivity, and ethical standards, your organisation can build stronger, trust-based relationships with the communities you serve.

Transparent informed consent isn’t just a procedural step; it’s a commitment to storytelling integrity and mutual respect. As organisations continue to refine their practices, ensuring that consent processes are clear, accessible, and ethical will remain a cornerstone of impactful and trustworthy storytelling.

?? Related reading: Informed Consent - The Right to One's Own Image

How to Transition Into a Digitalised Future

At Fairpicture, after years of experience co-creating visual contents for challenging projects with nonprofits, impact businesses, and visual creators from around the world, we developed the FairConsent App — a powerful tool designed to simplify and streamline the efficient collection and management of informed consent. Rooted in our commitment to fair by design practices, organisations partnering with us can trust our leadership in ethical content creation.

To ensure a seamless onboarding experience, we are hosting a free webinar, to provide a practical walkthrough of the FairConsent app, helping you integrate it into your daily activities with ease.

Sign up here for the Webinar: Ethical & Digital Informed Consent, on 3rd December 2024, lead by Aurel Vogel .