The Art and Science of Trust Building

This article is a summary of Episode 32 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

Today we're going to talk about the art and science of trust building specifically for social impact organizations. This is something that leaders think a lot about, but often what we actually hear leaders talk about is wanting to build support, support from their community. And sometimes people think about trust, but oftentimes people assume that they're just going to be trusted. And that is not a safe assumption to make today. 

There's actually been a massive decline in trust in institutions, especially as of late. Here's kind of a scary stat — as of 2024: only 22% of Americans report trusting the federal government to do what is right almost all the time or most of the time.

But beyond that, general trust in institutions is down across the board. If you look at trust in mainstream media, trust in higher education, trust in science, in health, in medical institutions across the board, we just don't trust these institutions in the same way that we used to. And we can argue about whether that's good or bad. We think it's not good. And there are reasons that we should be critical of some of these institutions, but the answer is not to just throw them away and instead trust random podcasters like us. 

But there is some silver lining here in some of these studies. Trust in nonprofits was actually still down, but not down to the same degree that some trust in some of these other institutions has resulted in. But we still think this is a huge issue that we need to be aware of in the social impact space, and we're going to unpack that a little bit.

The Art of Trust Building

The art of trust building, if you're a social impact organization, really comes down to a few key things. A lot of this comes down to gut level instincts that people have about your organization. We under-index how important the surface level or the nonverbal communication is from social impact organizations. 

For example, when someone lands on your website, what's that first impression that they get? 

• Is the website clunky? 
• Does it look well designed? 
• Is the messaging clear? 
• Is there social proof on the site in your social channels or your emails? 
• Are they constructed in a way that feels consistent and trustworthy?

These kinds of nonverbal, subconscious communications have a huge impact on how we assess whether or not to even pay attention to an organization, let alone assess how trustworthy they are.

Trust Through Human Connection

A lot of trust — especially for nonprofits or social impact organizations who are small-scale within their community — is being gained or lost between people. Now, that might not apply to national social impact organizations. But for community regional oriented organizations, trust is gained and lost through human to human interactions, at least in the public spaces. 

Think about parks and zoos and libraries and aquariums. There's some research out by Colleen Dill Schneider, who's an awesome thought leader in our space, and she just put out an article that reinforces that face-to-face interaction with people is the single biggest determinant of whether or not somebody has a good experience at your institution. 

The conversations that staff members at nonprofits are having when they go home and talk with their friends is about if they enjoy working at their social impact organization. So the question is, why is that trust being lost, where it's being lost and does it have something to do with the nature of your organization or the size of your organization?

Trust happens in more than one place and from the study we mentioned earlier, it was shown that larger institutions in the nonprofit space specifically had higher levels of trust. Trust happens on a micro level and it also happens at a macro level. So what we're describing is from the perspective of a smaller local organization. A lot of trust is built through partnerships and individual conversations and interpersonal relationships — but your brand has to back up those conversations. 

Previously, we talked about how to live your brand values. All of this is either working towards building or not building or even degrading trust. If you come out with a brand message, or a campaign that positions your organization in a certain way or makes a certain set of claims or talks about your impact in a certain way and it's not real or authentic or credible, of course that is going to hurt your brand reputation and your trust and your credibility.

Brand Integrity and Trust

If you say one thing — if you make a promise as a brand that you stand for something that you're working towards something and then you don't come through in a way that your supporters expect you to — there's a dissonance that presents as a lack of integrity. And so much of trust comes down to authenticity, credibility, integrity, these buzzwords that you hear. But then you need to figure out how those concepts trickle down to the real world everyday — actions that leaders take or staff at social impact organizations.

Where Is Trust Going?

When looking at the statistics about trust being lost in these institutions, we have to ask:

• Where's that trust going? 
• Is this a zero sum game? 
• Is the trust just being lost or is the trust moving somewhere else?

That’s all the more reason, no matter the scale of your organization, that the relationships that you are building or the champions that you're building or the advocates that you're building, the voices and the people on the ground who are having conversations with friends and families and neighbors, that's where trust is being built and where trust is going. This might be a more challenging problem for larger digital-first organizations.

If we look at what's happening in the media space where trust in mainstream media is being replaced by trust with individuals with a microphone or a video camera, we might be able to apply that same logic to how people are assessing the credibility of any given organization as well. But it does run contrary to some of the data around bigger brands having more trust. And maybe what it really comes down to in that case is that those brands have built and earned that trust over time. 

Think about international relief organizations, like the Red Cross for example — they have generally good brand trust and brand value.

Trust Must be Retained

But this also, think about recent things that happened with a huge lack of trust in FEMA during some of the 2024-2025 hurricanes. And that's just a point that you can't just hang onto that trust and expect it to last forever when culture is changing so rapidly. So the trust balance is being recalibrated in terms of how people assess the credibility and the trustworthiness of any given organization. 

To go a little deeper on that, what it really comes down to is people are tired of the institution speak. This is a big problem in politics and we've seen what that has led to recently with the 2024 election. One of the big reasons that Trump has the appeal that he does is because he doesn't speak like a politician and a large amount of people in the country are tired of being talked to in political-speak. 

There's some truth to that in the nonprofit and social impact space. We've observed that oftentimes nonprofit organizations have that kind of nonprofit industrial complex voice that nonprofits speak in. That sounds good if you're deep in the social impact space, but when you're trying to reach everyday people, it just might not resonate. It might be working against trust. We're in a really fluid place right now.

The Power of Impact Storytelling

Before we move into the science, there's one more thing that's really important that we put in the art category for social impact organizations, which is effective impact storytelling. It’s something that you hear all the time in the space. We're all talking about it, but we consistently see a lack of proper time and attention going into impact storytelling. And this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest way to build trust with your community. 

If you think about a partner, a donor, or a volunteer who supports your cause, believes in your mission or is a customer, if you're a social enterprise, their return on their investment in time, energy, or resources into your organization is progress on the mission. They want to see traction and they want that to be clear. And so if a supporter of an organization is giving them their trust in one form of another and then not getting a return on investment or that value, they're going to start to lose trust and the organization is going to start to lose credibility. 

Supporters are going to start to think:

• What's actually happening here? 
• Why am I not seeing progress? 
• Am I making a difference at all? 

There's more than one way to do social impact storytelling. Some people are more motivated by personal stories. Most people — even people who think they aren't — are. Of course people are motivated by statistics, transparency, and financials as well. But that impact storytelling is a really important part of it. And it is an art. It is a creative act and you need to think about it in that way.

The Science of Trust Building

Let's go into the science of trust because this is something that is actually studied by real scientists. And there's a lot to learn in this space around what the building blocks of trust are from a scientific standpoint. And there's some really interesting and potentially even unintuitive answers to that question.

Reliability and Consistency

One of the most important elements of building trust is reliability and consistency. And when you learn this, it makes a lot of sense because in certain ways we could actually frame this entire article around trust through the metaphor of interpersonal or personal relationships. 

If you think about a good friend — do you want a good friend to be reliable and consistent, or do you want a good friend to be unreliable and inconsistent? Of course, you want your friend to be reliable and consistent. But oftentimes in the social impact space, we have a goal of being reliable, of being consistent, but then things don't go according to plan. 

Think about how we [social impact orgs] show up in the community, and how we do our communications. Whatever we're doing to build trust, to build credibility, to build relationships, if we don't do those reliably, if we don't do those consistently, then we are subconsciously communicating to our supporters that we are not trustworthy.

There's also a spectrum here of expectations. To go back to the friend analogy, there are friends that never commit to anything and they want to keep their options open at all times. And then there are other friends that say they'll do everything. And then they don't show up half the time. There's a spectrum of expectation setting — and where your follow through falls within that expectation setting. And as an organization, you have to be aware of that spectrum too. You don't want to over-commit to the work. You also don't want to under-commit to the work. In either case, you need to be delivering on what you commit to. That's the reliability part. The consistency part is the pace. It’s the drumbeat.

The framing around setting expectations is really intriguing. We think about that a lot in terms of working with clients and building trust with clients. We want to make sure that our expectations are aligned around what we're going to deliver, when we will deliver it, and how much it will cost to deliver those outcomes and be really upfront and transparent about that. 

This lesson has been learned the hard way over the years. If you set expectations too high to win a new relationship or a new partnership, and then you can't deliver on those expectations reliably and consistently, that is a disaster. And in general, that's a really bad way to build trust and credibility, and you're going to just let people down and disappoint them.

Transparency and Honesty

The next key principle for trust building, based on science, is transparency and honesty. We touched on this a little bit when we talked about impact storytelling. But maybe this is actually the one that people feel — whether or not they are justified in this feeling — like this is where institutions have let them down. What we've observed in culture recently, is that there hasn't been honesty, there hasn't been transparency in mainstream media even throughout the recent pandemic. Though we could debate back and forth about how transparent and how honest various institutions were at different times. 

But with certain institutions, like the CDC, our belief is that they had good faith in all of their communications. But in hindsight, they probably would've done some things differently around how they messaged and communicated different stages of the pandemic. And of course it was a rapidly evolving situation. But the sense that we get is that a lot of people don't feel like they can trust some of these institutions — largely because they feel like they're dishonest — whether or not they actually are dishonest or are as dishonest as people feel like they are.

Let’s move away from the institution and down to the individual leader level. And what we mean by that is that there's an element of vulnerability about the health of your organization or the effectiveness of your organization. And that starts with leaders. Leaders often need to set the tone on what institutional vulnerability looks like. It's really hard when you're doing social impact work, where the stakes are high and people's lives are on the line. 

So the natural gut instinct as social impact leaders is to spin it. And we do that. And a lot of us are really good at that. We need to get that next donation. We need to get that next grant. So we're going to tell the story that's going to get us there. The problem is, there's the other side of that coin, and that's being vulnerable with what's working and what's not, and being able to look at yourself in the mirror and admit those things and then — in an even more scary way — admit those things outwardly. It's so much easier said than done.

Demonstrating Competence and Expertise

The next pillar of trust building, from a scientific perspective, is demonstrating competence and expertise. And this is especially true for nonprofits and social impact organizations. 

Again, we're tying back into impact storytelling. A lot of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit leaders don't consider themselves to be experts or don't think about themselves as experts. But they really are. And this is odd to say because a lot of social impact organizations and leaders and employees are literally experts in their field category: scientists, researchers, maybe even from the policy and advocacy space. But they assume that people don't care as much about their cause as they do, or even sometimes the opposite. 

What we've experienced is there's a lot of really interesting stories that our clients tell us. And our first reaction is — Why aren't you telling your community about this awesome story?

This is incredible. And they're like — Oh, they won't care about that. 

Yes, they will. 

We sometimes forget, in this space, that even your most diehard supporters are not nearly as on the pulse of whatever issue you're working on as you are because you are doing this every single day. You have a unique vantage point because of that. And so demonstrating that expertise and being kind of like a newscaster on what's new for your issue area, or where the new challenges are. What are the new obstacles? What are the new opportunities? Your supporters want to hear that. This is a good way to build trust and also a good way to deepen relationships and provide more value to your community.

You've got to bang that drum. It goes back to the reliability and the consistency point. You can't just be an expert once. You have to continually bang that drum and remind your audience and remind your community or your participants that you know what you're doing. 

This is in contrast to the last point around vulnerability and failure. 

That is the million dollar question. That's the art. And the art and the science need to balance one another. There's actually been a huge trend towards vulnerability, at least in terms of leadership and throughout a lot of the culture change that's happened as of late. And there have been situations where some people take that so far that it does degrade trust. 

If it feels like vulnerability is almost a performative act — which in certain cases it is — then we have a pretty good sense of this. Our physiological and our psychological instruments for picking up on these subtle nonverbal things is actually really advanced — probably from an evolutionary perspective. And we're getting better and better at sussing out bullshit across the board — whether that's cause marketing and messaging that's inauthentic, or greenwashing, or fake vulnerability.

We need to find a balance for each leader in each culture, in each organization. 

We find it interesting that some of these different scientific pillars can be in direct contrast with one another — and that leads nicely into the last one.

Empathy and Understanding

Empathy and understanding can go too far also. But it is a really important element to building trust. And if we go back to the metaphor of how you build trust with a good friend or a family member or someone in your personal life, a lot of that is empathy and understanding. It’s being there and hearing something hard that your friend is going through. Or being there in a way that shows that you're listening and that you care and that you're putting yourself in your friend's shoes. 

This is also true when it comes to understanding your supporters. We've talked about this before. Why don't people understand how important this cause is? How can they not see it? Well, if you approach that instead of from a critical standpoint through a lens of empathy and curiosity, that's a more constructive approach to building understanding of your supporters — then ultimately, also trust with them.

Another place where performance shows up a lot is in collaboration and partnership. A place to gain trust through empathy and understanding is through strong partnerships, through strong collaborations. Even though that’s all the rage in our sector, a lot of people don't do it very well. And so it becomes a performance. 

You can really degrade trust if you aren't doing that partnership and collaboration because you're signaling that you care and that you understand and that you empathize. But when the work gets down to it and you ignore those contributions from a partner or collaborator, you're going to hurt your trust.

Building Trust with Internal Teams

Let's talk about building trust with internal teams, because this is equally important, especially as leaders. We need to build trust not just externally with our supporters, but also we need our team to trust us. We need our team to trust that we are moving the organization in the right direction. So there's a couple elements that we've thought of over the years around how to build trust with your internal team and your staff.

1. Recognizing Excellence

One of these is recognizing excellence, which is another fancy way of just saying celebrating wins. We've talked about this previously, but one way to build trust — not just with any individual but with your team at large — is to elevate people when they've come through and contributed in a meaningful way, in a way that shines brighter than usual in a way that's helping to move your mission forward.

Recognizing excellence in an executive director role is all about positive reinforcement of the behaviors and the results that the business or the organization needs. And so you identify who is living those behaviors, and it's like we both have five-year-olds. We celebrate the things that they do great that we want to see more of. And not meant in a condescending way, making a comparison to a five-year-old, but really as human beings, that's one of our signals, especially in social settings of how to show up, is to see what's being praised. And so that's how we think about it, is the things that are being praised or the things that are wanted for others to adopt.

In reality, we're still all just a bunch of kids walking around in adult suits right now, at the end of the day, at least from a psychological perspective.

2. Challenge Stress

Another interesting one is this concept of a challenge stress, which is a fancy way of saying giving people assignments or responsibilities that are going to be challenging, but doable. 

This gives trust in an interesting way, you're basically setting people up for difficult success because if you think about someone being in a role where everything's just super easy and it's like autopilot, that doesn't work for most people. Some people are maybe happy with that and don't get bored, but a lot of people start to feel stagnant in that role.

And a challenge, stress is a way to make them authentically achieve growth as an individual. So the idea is that if you give someone a challenge that's not doable because the situation or the conditions aren't right, or it's just something that's literally not within the capabilities of an individual, that's just frustrating. If you have this task ahead of you and it's literally impossible, you're not able to achieve it. 

But if you help people stretch, if you reach a new state or achieve something that they didn't think they would be able to — but you saw in them that they were able to — that is a way to build trust. You're showing your employee that you can help support them, whether you're doing the work or not, you're providing the conditions and the growth opportunity to allow them to actually make a positive difference in their own career, in their own personal development, not just for the organization.

That works for some people. It maybe works for fewer people than some think. It's really an individual personality or even life circumstance factor there — whether or not someone wants to be challenged in that way. As a leader, the natural instinct is to attempt to set up those challenge stressors. And we've learned that doesn't always work. It can just be stressors for some people, and that can come down to all sorts of life circumstances. Maybe the individual just doesn't have a lot of brain space to put into a challenge at work because something really hard is going on at home.

What is pretty consistent across the board — and relates to this — is that as leaders, we have to set our teams up for success. We need to create the conditions for someone to be successful, understand what they're being asked to do extremely clearly, and understand exactly what success looks like and know where they stand at any given time on that spectrum. What may be a challenge for some people, may just be execution on a singular expectation for other people.

And going back to some of the scientific principles of trust building, we think about empathy. We think about transparency. Practicing those things will allow you to right size what a challenge stress looks like.

3. Autonomy and Flexibility

Another one that's really interesting is giving your team some level of autonomy and flexibility. And this goes both ways actually, in the sense that this is something that we've done a lot at Cosmic in that we work a four day work week. We have pretty flexible schedules. We're a fully remote team, and so there's a lot of trust in the team to do what's right and to not micromanage their hours or how they even break down their activities and work to some degree. And we didn't get there right away in the early days especially. We had a much more involved managerial style.

Largely, we were all sitting in the same room, and there was just looking over people's shoulders and being curious about how far along they were on any given project. And so we've had to give that up a lot in our transition into a fully remote team. But what we've learned is that when you trust the right people and give the right people that level of autonomy and flexibility with their schedule, it pays back in dividends. And to be blunt about this, it has to be the right people because you give some people this autonomy and this flexibility and they will take advantage of it.

This also exists on the spectrum in terms of the individuals on the team. Yes, offering somebody agency and freedom to do their work is really important. And as a leader, it's possible to err on that side maybe a little too much where they’re given too much freedom without enough structure. It's important to learn to build in more structure, partly because some individuals thrive with just a singular direction and a singular outcome that they're supposed to hit and let them run wild. Other people need a little bit more structure and support along the way, either because they're learning a new job or they thrive from that verbal input and back and forth. That's part of what their need is as a colleague. 

One of the things that's really useful to do when setting somebody up to take the reins on a project and have a ton of freedom, is to define exactly when you need to hear from them. So needing to hear from them at this point, this point and this point, and needing them to come with questions at certain moments. Otherwise, bring options. Bring ideas. Be there for them. That's one of the techniques used to build structure for someone who needs that within a job that comes with a lot of agency.

This has to be case dependent on someone's particular learning style. So even thinking about a more junior level employee versus a more senior level employee. You have to use your discretion with this. But we've seen situations where if people don't have enough direction or that scaffolding of support, they can have the open canvas problem or blank canvas problem where they don't even know where to start. 

Having some level of support and structure, but also some level of autonomy, we can all relate to either an experience or hearing an experience from a friend of someone who's been micromanaged and they feel like they don't have any of that flexibility even to do personal things that need to happen in the workweek or whatever, or that autonomy to have some agency over how the work is done, can be a recipe for burnout, especially for certain types.

Showing Vulnerability as a Leader

As a leader, showing vulnerability can be difficult, and we’ve struggled with this at certain times because there's this sense of wanting to be a confident and strong and assured leader and not making mistakes as a leader. And then there's also this balance there where you don't want to be this inhuman person. Everyone knows that leaders are people too, and we have our own struggles that are personal or professional. And a lot of leaders struggle a lot emotionally, mentally because of stress or whatever it is, even mental health. 

The word ‘mistake’ is a really good place to start because you can admit a mistake and plot a path towards correcting that mistake or learning from that mistake. If you are a leader that struggles to show vulnerability in your work, a really easy place to start is to identify a mistake that's been made and talk about what was learned from that and how you're going to correct that and talk about it openly. The other thing to consider is be really mindful about how and when you're showing your vulnerability.

This is going back to the performative vulnerability part. Showing vulnerability oftentimes in one-on-one check-ins where it's a little bit more private and there's an opportunity to open up because there's more comfort with that. But also, there's a little bit of a bonding that comes with an individual sitting in front of you saying, trusting you with something really, really precious, and trusting you to care for that thing. And that is a really powerful bonding moment. That same sharing might not happen at all staff meetings or in front of a hundred people at a presentation. So there's an element of just being mindful about, and also  thought needs to go into why you're being vulnerable. We can't treat our teams and our organizations as our personal therapists. That can be really damaging actually.

For many leaders, there have been times when there's been a choice to not share something with the group that could have been helpful. Often this happens when we’re not showing up at our best because there were things going on personally outside of work that were affecting the ability to be a good leader. How much of your baggage do you want to air in front of the whole team? Especially when a big and important job of leadership is to stay motivated and to show up the way you expect your staff to show up. 

It’s not always easy because we're all just people at the end of the day, and we all have our own struggles. There have been times throughout the last 15 years at Cosmic that have been really hard. But we had to show up, and we hate to say it, but just put a mask on and pretend that things were okay when they weren't.

Most of the time, that was the right call. But there were probably some times where there could have been, tactfully, a little bit more transparency. And often there's catching yourself after the fact realizing that you could have handled that better. Thinking about making mistakes, sometimes it can feel like you’re not coming through in the way that you should have in a one-to-one. You can just say, “Hey, sorry, how things went just now. That wasn't on you. Is there anything we need to work through?” and just have that transparent conversation. And people are usually really receptive to that. We've also found that oftentimes people are like, “Whatcha talking about? There's nothing. It's in your head.” But that’s not always the case either. So again, an art and a science, there's a balance to it

And it's no different than your friendships or your family. If you work with people that you trust and you respect and appreciate seeing eight hours a day, five days a week, or four days a week, then trust your gut. Trust your instincts on this. There's no singular playbook that's going to be a one-size-fits-all.

Building Trust Helps You Drive Change

As we’ve said, trust building is both an art and a science. Today, there’s a cultural shift away from institutional trust and toward personal relationships. But social impact leaders can use the scientific principles of reliability, transparency, competence, and empathy to navigate this complex terrain and lead effective organizations. 

Whether building trust with external supporters, funders, or internal teams and individual employees, the key is balancing authenticity with excellence, vulnerability with confidence, and personal connection with professionalism. When leaders can stay mindful of both the intuitive and evidence-based approaches to building and maintaining trust, they can foster the credibility and relationships necessary to attract and retain employees, supporters, and funders while driving meaningful change.

That action might be a call to action to donate, sign a petition, or join a virtual or in-person event or activation. 

The overall goal is moving someone from being aware and having some level of trust into actually taking action. This doesn't work sequentially in the real world, but it's an effective overall content strategy and a way to think about activation efforts. 

If an organization only does one of these three funnels all the time — especially only bottom of funnel where they're just asking people to donate, volunteer, and asking for support — but isn’t giving anything back or showcasing impact or building trust, they're not going to activate their community.

Applying the Funnel Beyond Major Donor Fundraising

Major donor fundraisers should be nodding vigorously at this framework. Fundraisers constantly talk about bringing donors along this continuum. Every think tank focused on fundraising has a version of this concept. But what's powerful is applying this method to the entire community and audience.

Fundraisers constantly think about the 10 major donors in their portfolio and how to get them from aware to engaged to ownership, using high-touch, often personal techniques in that space. But for marketers and program managers, this applies to their work too. They can bring along their community and audience through this funnel.

One technique many organizations use is some sort of email drip campaign—automated or triggered email campaigns, sometimes thought of as email journeys. A very simple way to get started is to build these steps into the email journey and build levels of engagement into that sequence to level people up.

Balancing Content Across the Funnel

The distinction between this framework for fundraising and broader activation is important because there are similarities and differences. This framework functions almost like a check when producing content. When putting content out on LinkedIn, through an email newsletter, or through any other activation work, organizations should constantly think about balance between these three core stages.

It's important not to do too much top of funnel content all the time. While top of funnel content gets a lot of engagement and attention — and should be the highest performing content with regards to reach, engagement, comments, and likes in the digital world — balance is key.

For example, an organization might host an open community event. This is a top-of-funnel event. There's no ask at all, not much storytelling about the organization itself. It's simply inviting everyone to be part of the community and getting people activated. This is a brilliant strategy, but if that's all an organization ever did, it would probably have zero impact on fundraising long-term.

This framework should be thought about largely from a content perspective, but it can also be applied to more bespoke, high-touch actions for fundraising. It has many different applications.

Viral Content Strategy vs. Targeted Content Strategy

Some organizations employ what could be called a brute force strategy—getting so much attention that it almost organically eventually leads to bottom of funnel results. But that only works if you literally go viral where you have huge, huge, huge amounts of attention. 

For example, on YouTube, organizations can be really successful with a massive account if they produce content that is broadly applicable for all different ages and demographics — content that is entertaining. It’s a lot of work to produce well and not an easy feat. That kind of content is hard for social impact organizations to produce, so when they are successful, everyone gets excited about breaking the mold.

But there's also a completely different strategy: having a very small, targeted audience and producing really high quality, valuable content for that audience, never expecting to reach even thousands of people, but being extremely persuasive with the type of people being reached for a bigger ticket ask. This essentially describes major donor fundraising.

Organizations need to figure out what the balance is for them. Are they trying to reach millions or be valuable to a niche audience? The sweet spot for many is somewhere in the middle: not trying to reach millions, remaining fairly niche, but being broadly valuable to their core audience without getting so niched down that there's only a potential target audience of a thousand people in the world.

Getting Started: From Theory to Practice

When organizations approach activation work, the process should start at the beginning with the question: 

The question can be framed as: If you could wave a magic wand, what are the outcomes you would wave that wand for in the next one to three years?

Put all content strategy aside, put marketing and branding aside, and focus just on the organization. What are the goals? Maybe some of this comes from the strategic plan. 

Interestingly, the answers to this question almost never match the strategic plan — there's sometimes overlap, but it's often framed in a different way, which can be really helpful.

The Reverse Engineering Process

Start with what your organization is trying to achieve. Then reverse engineer. Based on those goals, what are some of the raw ingredients available to work with from a content standpoint, storytelling standpoint, brand standpoint, strengths standpoint, and differentiation standpoint?

The process looks at: 

• What are the goals? 
• What are the raw ingredients available to create with? 
• What's the capacity either internally or from a budgetary standpoint to invest in this work in a way that is sustainable over time?

Once you’ve answered these questions, then determine how to measure success in these activation efforts. What are you trying to do? Touch a thousand new donors? Convert a hundred major donors into becoming recurring givers? This depends on the actual goals for the organization.

A High-Level Framework

To break it down at a high level:

1. Think big - Use the “If I could wave a magic wand…” question
2. Put KPIs behind that vision
3. Figure out resources
4. Start building activation plans - Consider using the Minimum Viable Strategy framework

Starting Small: A Practical Approach

One practical starting point is to pick one person in the audience and try some things with them. Whether or not they know about it, the exercise becomes: we're going to try to convert this person into a giver, and we're going to try different techniques to see if we can get them there.

This might be an easy and achievable way to get this work started. For executive directors, this approach sounds powerful but can also feel daunting. Where to begin? Who on my team gets on board with this? How should they be coached? How do they build confidence to dive into this work?

Alternately, rather than a single person (which might have too many individual variables like what's going on in their personal life), a slightly larger sample size might be better — perhaps 10 or 100 people. This provides some redundancy while still being manageable.

Why Activation Should Be the Top Priority

The daunting nature of activation work is real. But when social impact organizations feel stuck, feel like they're not getting the attention they deserve or want, or feel like people don't care as much about their cause as they do, activation is the answer to all of those questions.

At the end of the day, if organizations want to get traction and make progress, they have to activate. Whether that's a small group — maybe 10 lawmakers who need to pass a bill or bring it to Congress — or the entire next generation of climate action leaders worldwide, the power of activation is undeniable.

The Human Element of Activation

At the end of the day, there's a human being who's going to make a decision about whether they're going to write that letter or make that donation. What are the fundamental human factors that go into deciding whether someone will spend time, money, attention, or social capital on what they're being asked to do?

The Core Human Decision-Making Factors

No matter what digital techniques or in-person techniques are put into play, organizations are trying to convince people to make a decision. How do human beings make decisions?

Organizations should consider:

• Can we make it easy for them to say yes?
• Can we tell a story that makes it feel like it really impacts them directly?
• Can we build a community of like-minded people, or people they want to be around?

The Role of Trust and Priming

When looking at why someone said yes to an activation, it's worth considering: how much priming had been done? How much trust building had already happened before the decision to say yes?

If a person was invited by a personal friend to be part of a group, that formed personal trust. A trusted spokesperson or close friend is probably the most powerful form of trust possible.

Key Takeaways

For organizations ready to improve their activation work, the appeal is to make sure there's an activation plan, because this is often how action actually happens:

• Think about modern content creation - Understand how to break through in the attention economy
• Build trust over time - Use consistent, ongoing engagement rather than only big splashes
• Remember the top, middle, and bottom of funnel model - Make sure all three buckets are being hit
• Be distribution-first in efforts - Think about channels before creating content
• Focus on the human element - Understand how people make decisions and what makes it easy for them to say yes

More than anything — Go out there and activate your community.