Ask a council, police force or NHS trust what “building trust” actually means day to day, and you’ll get very different answers depending on who you ask. To a comms team, it’s about clear messaging. To an engagement team, it’s about consultation. To leadership, it’s often treated as a vague, unmeasurable outcome that shows up in a resident survey once a year, if at all.

That’s the problem the Trust Pyramid is built to solve. It’s Orlo’s framework for what actually builds public trust, developed from research and from what we’ve seen work across 400+ public sector organisations. Trust isn’t a single action. It’s built from a combination of actions carried out over five layers, each depending on the one below it, running from the everyday basics of honest communication, up to trust itself.

If you’ve read our guides to SAFER, RESIST, OASIS or EAST, you’re already using pieces of this pyramid without necessarily seeing them as one connected picture. The same is true if your world is policing, housing or healthcare rather than central or local government comms: procedural justice, Together with Tenants, and the NHS Constitution are all, in their own sectors, doing exactly the same job. This piece is where they all come together.

Try it yourself: Explore the interactive Trust Pyramid to see what each layer means in practice, with real case studies from UK public sector teams.

The Trust Pyramid has five layers, built from the ground up. Each layer depends on the one beneath it actually being in place, not just claimed.

1. Open & Honest Communication (the foundation): transparency about what, when and why.
2. Listening: understanding what your community actually needs and is concerned about.
3. Engagement: interacting authentically and consistently, not just broadcasting.
4. Experience: delivering on promises across every touchpoint.
5. Trust (the outcome): the result of the four layers below working together.

The reason it’s a pyramid and not a checklist is deliberate: skipping a layer doesn’t just leave a gap, it undermines everything stacked on top of it. An organisation can run brilliant engagement work, but if the foundation of honest communication isn’t there, trust still won’t hold.

Transparency is the foundation for trust. This means explaining what’s happening, when, and why, clearly and without spin, especially when the news isn’t good.

This is also the layer where SAFER does its work. SAFER is about making sure the environments your messages appear in are actually safe and appropriate before you say anything at all, honesty doesn’t count for much if the platform carrying your message undermines it.

In healthcare, the same principle sits inside the NHS Constitution, which every NHS body is legally required to have regard to. Alongside it, NHS England’s “6Cs” values for nursing and care staff name Communication as one of six core values, sitting right next to Care, Compassion, Competence, Courage and Commitment. Same layer, same idea, a different sector’s own version of it.

You can’t build trust around needs you haven’t actually heard. This layer is about understanding your community’s needs and concerns, not assuming you already know them.

This layer is also where RESIST starts. RESIST depends entirely on listening well enough to spot misinformation early, before it’s had time to spread and do damage.

Engagement means interacting authentically and consistently about things that matter to your community, not just posting on a schedule.

This is where EAST is most useful. EAST exists to make engagement actually land, making it easy, attractive, social and timely, rather than technically present but ignored.

Housing has its own version of this layer too. The National Housing Federation’s Together with Tenants charter, now adopted by over 225 housing associations, commits landlords to genuine resident voice, influence and accountability, not engagement as a box-ticking exercise, but as something residents can actually hold their landlord to.

This layer is about delivering on promises and creating positive interactions across every touchpoint, not just the ones your organisation considers “official.”

This is also where OASIS fits. A well-planned OASIS campaign, properly scoped, targeted and evaluated, is what turns a good one-off experience into a consistent one across every campaign you run.

Policing has arguably the most well-researched version of this layer of all: procedural justice. Its four pillars, voice, neutrality, respect and trustworthiness, are about exactly what this layer describes, the fairness of every individual interaction someone has, not just the outcome of it. Decades of research consistently show it’s how people are treated during an encounter, not just what happens at the end of it, that determines whether they trust the officer, and by extension the force, next time.

Trust sits at the top because it can’t be built directly. It’s what’s left once communication, listening, engagement and experience are all genuinely working together. It’s the ultimate goal: building stronger, more resilient communities. Once you have built trust, the job doesn’t stop there, the cycle just continues.

If your team already works with GCS frameworks, you’re likely already operating across several layers of this pyramid without a single model tying them together. The same is true across other sectors, where trust-building has its own established frameworks that map onto the same five layers. Here’s how they all fit:

None of these frameworks compete with each other, and several sit in the same layer without competing there either. Each one is a practical toolkit for a specific layer of the pyramid, built for the sector that needs it. The Trust Pyramid is simply the model that shows how they all add up to the same outcome.

Here’s where most organisations get stuck. The bottom four layers of the pyramid are all things you can point to: a published statement, a listening dashboard, an engagement campaign, a response time. Trust itself is harder. It’s usually treated as something you feel rather than something you measure, which makes it almost impossible to report on, improve deliberately, or prove to a scrutiny committee, an elected member, or your own leadership team.

That’s exactly the gap Orlo’s Trust Indicator closes. Rather than relying on an annual resident survey or a gut feeling, Trust Indicator turns ongoing public sentiment into a single, trackable score, so you can see whether trust is actually moving in the right direction, and connect that movement back to the work you’re doing at the other four layers.

In practice, that means:

• A consistent baseline. Instead of one snapshot a year, you get an ongoing view of how sentiment is trending.
• A way to link cause and effect. If a listening or engagement initiative is genuinely working, Trust Indicator is where you’d expect to see it show up.
• Something you can actually report. “Trust is improving” becomes a number with a trend line, not an assertion.

This is also why the Trust Pyramid and Trust Indicator sit together rather than as separate ideas: the pyramid is the model for what builds trust, and Trust Indicator is how you find out whether it’s actually working.

• Trust isn’t built in one step. The Trust Pyramid breaks it into five layers: Open & Honest Communication, Listening, Engagement, Experience, and Trust.
• Each layer depends on the one beneath it. Skipping one undermines everything built on top of it.
• SAFER, RESIST, EAST and OASIS aren’t competing frameworks, they each support a specific layer of the pyramid.
• The same is true across other sectors: the NHS Constitution, Together with Tenants, and procedural justice in policing all map onto the same five layers in their own fields.
• Trust is the outcome of the other four layers working together, not something you can build directly.
• Measuring trust needs more than an annual survey. Orlo’s Trust Indicator turns ongoing sentiment into a trackable score, so you can see whether it’s actually improving.

Orlo’s Community Engagement Platform is built to support the whole pyramid, not just one layer of it.

• Communication: a unified inbox keeps every public message consistent, even when pausing scheduled content and responding to a live situation at the same time.
• Listening: Social Listening and media monitoring surface what your community is actually saying, across every channel, not just your own, before it becomes a complaint or a headline.
• Engagement: surveys and Voice of the Community tools support ongoing, structured engagement rather than one-off consultation events.
• Experience: a single view across every channel means faster, more consistent responses, whoever’s handling them.
  Trust: Trust Indicator turns all of the above into a single, trackable score you can report on with confidence.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo, including local government, central government, higher education institutions, travel and transport, housing associations, healthcare, policing, fire and rescue, utilities and not-for-profits.

If you want to see how Orlo can support your organisation’s own trust-building work, take a look at our Social Listening and Trust Indicator features, or a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.