Transparency is King
Transparency leads to trust. Trust leads to Goodwill. Goodwill is invaluable. So, how do nonprofits get that goodwill?
Trust is pretty important, but we don’t need to tell anyone twice about that. Anyone who’s ever done a trust fall gets that. But, what makes trust important to nonprofits?
Trust in nonprofits isn’t the same as trusting a friend to get you a ride to the airport. Instead, it’s more about trusting in an organization to live up to its mission and execute it.
How to Go About It
Trust building through transparency is a delicate process for civic organizations. To do it, there are many things to keep in mind:
Who to build trust with?
How to go about building that trust?
What will this group respond positively to? Negatively?
These are important guiding questions, but let’s get into them.
When a nonprofit organization seeks to build trust, the first step is figuring out who to build trust with. Sadly, everyone is not a target audience. Different groups will respond differently to trust building attempts. For example, a digitally savvy audience may want to see digital impact reports, social media posts about how money is spent at a nonprofit, and more. Older audiences may prefer to see in-person events discussing impact and money spent or see it in physical donor communications.
To figure out the best ways to build trust, nonprofits will need part intuition and part data gathering. Surveys and other forms of feedback will help people discuss how a nonprofit should go about building trust. Sometimes, nonprofits may meet people where they’re at – in-person events, community gatherings, and just simply asking people door-to-door.
Building transparent practices that increase trust takes intentionality. There isn’t going to just be one way to go about it. Here are some examples of strategies to take to build trust:
Reports to donors about the ways money is spent
Volunteer monthly meetings where they learn how their impact helps the community
Community presentations about different programs and their impact
After that, it’s time to evaluate.
Figuring out the response to trust-building initiatives is crucial to understanding how effective they were at establishing trust and transparency. To do this, nonprofits need to understand how they’ll benchmark their transparency and the trust they generate from their activities.
On the internal side, transparency can be measured in many ways. External awards, like from organizations like Guidestar for financial reporting, are incredibly beneficial at signaling trust to outside viewers. Nonprofits may choose to self-report as well, through their website and other channels. While these have less integrity compared to an outside party, sourcing the information given and drawing attention to it will be incredibly beneficial.
Externally, trust measuring takes planning. Nonprofits need to figure out where they’ll measure the efforts, and what markers indicate growing trust by the target audience. Maybe brand reputation will indicate trust best, because to like a brand trust is needed. On the other hand, it might be better to look at agree and disagree statements solely about trust. Figuring out these reporting metrics will make surveying and understanding the effectiveness of their efforts easier.
It Isn’t Without Challenges
Trust is hard to build, and so (so so so) easy to lose. Let’s look at some killers of trust and ways to prepare for them.
First is the crisis. A crisis can erode trust in an organization and kill efforts to appear transparent to build trust. Getting around a crisis isn’t easy, but there are ways to do it. We’ve touched on this in a previous article, but here are some quick takeaways:
Prepare and plan: focus on planning for common crises an organization can face.
Find root causes: crises are failures, but aren’t impossible. Focus on how to find out what the issue was and correct it.
Talk about it: don’t go silent. Work on communicating the ways that the issue will be fixed.
Another one is pay. Nonprofits have been caught up in discussions and difficulties surrounding how much employees make. Sometimes, the issue is how much employees make and how little it can be compared to rising costs of living. Other times, it’s about how much executives make compared to program spending. There’s realistically only one way to get around this: be transparent. Set guidelines for compensation, plan for cost of living increases, and manage communications to employees, donors, and community members around compensation with grace and transparency.
Reap The Rewards
For nonprofits, trust buys the most expensive thing in the world: goodwill. When an organization has goodwill, it can explore new programs, make mistakes, take risks, and more. Trust buys the thing that lets an organization thrive and grow. Without that trust, figuring out how to go about expansions, requests for donations, and dealing with crises becomes that much harder.