Missionary, citizen, and consumer: Evangelical American child sponsorship and humanitarian marketing in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Child sponsorship has been a wildly successful fundraising strategy for humanitarian and development organizations since the Cold War. This article examines the formative period of child sponsorship's growth and early humanitarian marketing strategies using the case of the now evangelical humanitarian giant World Vision in the 1950s and 1960s. Using archival sources from this period, I identify three channels that appear in World Vision child sponsorship ads and branding: Christian missionary sentimentalism, Cold War citizenship, and American consumerism. World Vision operated in all three channels as it transposed familiar cultural meaning to images, gifts, stories, performances, and experiences circulating in the humanitarian moral economy. World Vision experimented in this period with messaging using emerging marketing strategies in addition to established missionary, military, and political networks and rhetoric. This article considers the various historical threads of child sponsorship as a successful humanitarian fundraising strategy that has endured yet been reworked over time.