This piece was one of the first things we published about the Trust Pyramid, back when the model was new. Since then, we’ve written the definitive guide to the Trust Pyramid framework, covering all five layers in full, so that’s the place to start if you want to understand the model itself.

What’s stayed here is what’s still worth reading on its own: the story of where the framework came from, and two real examples of what it looked like when public sector organisations actually used it.

From conversations with our customers and contacts, we knew that building trust was both a major goal for public sector organisations and an area that presented significant challenges. We wanted to offer a tool to support the customers we work with, not just another abstract concept.

As part of the process, we consulted with people working across the public sector and drew on research from Harvard Business School. We used those insights to build two things together: Trust Indicator, a score-based model inside the Orlo platform, and the Trust Pyramid itself, a framework for the phases required to actually build that trust in the first place. They were never meant to be separate, the pyramid describes what to do, Trust Indicator tells you whether it’s working.

Trust isn’t easy to measure because it’s subjective. How do you know when someone starts to trust you? What signs do you actually look for? It’s not linear either, trust can be built steadily and then knocked back quickly, a high-profile scandal can undo months of work in a single news cycle.

One option is simply asking your community directly, through surveys, focus groups, or other research. Another is using tooling like social listening to analyse mentions of your organisation and track sentiment around it. That’s the thinking behind Trust Indicator: a number of underlying signals, tracked continuously, so organisations can see progress over time instead of relying on a single snapshot once a year.

In an ideal world, organisations would combine several of these approaches, surveys, listening, direct feedback, to capture as broad a picture as possible. In practice, time and budget are always a constraint in the public sector, which is exactly why having one tool that pulls this together matters.

Public sector organisations continue to face real challenges earning the trust of the people they serve. Wakefield and United Welsh didn’t get there by doing everything at once, they identified the specific layer that needed work and focused there first.

If you haven’t already, read the full Trust Pyramid framework to see how the five layers fit together, and where your own organisation might be strongest, and weakest.

If you’d like to talk through how the Trust Pyramid could apply to your own comms strategy, get in touch, we’d be glad to hear from you.

Much of what government expects from Pride in Place engagement, reaching underserved residents, running repeatable and comparable consultation, and evidencing feedback loops over a ten-year programme, is exactly what Orlo’s Community Engagement Platform is built for.

• Reaching residents who don’t respond to standard consultation. Surveys and multi-channel engagement tools help Boards reach beyond the residents who already show up to public meetings.
• Closing the feedback loop. A single, timestamped record of resident input and Board responses makes “playing back” progress straightforward, not a retrospective scramble.
• Ongoing sentiment tracking. Social listening gives Boards visibility into how the wider community feels about the Plan between formal engagement events, not just at them.
• MHCLG-ready evidence. Every interaction logged through Orlo builds the kind of ongoing, evidenced record MHCLG expects to see, both at Plan submission and through the life of the programme.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo, including local government and central government bodies working on place-based programmes like this one.

If you want to see how Orlo can support your Neighbourhood Board’s engagement work, take a look at our local government solutions, or a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.