Reporting in Times of Crisis: Rhetoric Strategies for Gaining Legitimacy and Accountability in Health Charities

This study examines how health charities employed rhetorical strategies in their reporting to gain legitimacy and accountability during a crisis. Drawing on rhetorical theory and analyzing both voluntary and mandatory reports from 52 New Zealand health charities between 2020 and 2022 during COVID‐19, we find that while all charities primarily used logos (logic) to justify crisis responses and secure pragmatic legitimacy and calculative accountability, they combined ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion) with logos to construct narrative accountability and moral legitimacy. Narrative accountability was grounded in reporting of mission‐ and value‐driven, culturally embedded, and equity‐focused commitments, and further strengthened through shared responsibility among diverse stakeholders to promote collaborative crisis response. This study advances understanding of how charities gain accountability and legitimacy through crisis communication, extends the accountability in crisis and rhetoric reporting discussion to the nonprofit setting, and demonstrates how charity size and characteristics shape rhetorical strategies and reporting practices.