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Hey everyone, it’s me, Sam Villegas, Principal Consultant with Raftelis. I’m part of the Strategic Communications Group, and I’m here to talk to you about trust.
Why is trust important to a local government or a utility? In essence, trust enables you to do all the things that you want to do successfully. So whether that’s setting new fees, setting new rates, creating a new program, or changing a policy, building the trust of your community will help you do that much easier.
So how do you build trust? Well, three ways.
First, you’re going to communicate a whole lot – transparently and truthfully – with your constituents, your community, and your customers, with a key emphasis on truthfully.
Secondly, you’re going to engage meaningfully with your community. You’re going to let them have a say in some of these decisions that you’re making. Getting their buy-in is one way that you have a more positive, successful outcome.
And thirdly, you’re going to follow through. You’re going to do what you said you were going to do. All three of these things together help you build trust with your community, which helps you succeed.
So, how are some ways that Raftelis has helped our clients build trust with their community? I can think of two pretty good examples.
The first example is in Alabama, we worked with a utility there that experienced a violation of the Clean Water Act. Now, this was through no fault of their own, but immediately the community was very angry with them. And one of the things that they’d stopped doing was communicating, on the advice of their attorneys. So they asked us for some help in rebuilding that reputation.
The first thing we did was walk them back to communicating with their community. And one of the key ways we did that was to talk to the community first and get a sense of what folks were specifically thinking. What were they angry about? What were their impressions of this utility? And then go back to the utility and talk to them about their values so that we could develop a plan that highlighted their values and also addressed some of the issues that the community brought forth.
One of the things that was important to this utility was to make sure that the community knew that their employees were also community members who cherished their water supply, who cherished where they lived, and really deeply cared about the work that they did. And so going forward, this utility highlights employees as members of the community. They’ve worked really hard to insert themselves and get involved in lots of community committees, commissions, and boards. And over the last few years, they’ve really rebuilt that reputation with the community, and folks see them as part and parcel of their community, not just some entity that’s doing something.
In another case, a utility in New Jersey was dealing with PFAS, which are those forever chemicals that we’ve heard about in the news. This can be a really scary thing to learn about if you’re a customer and you find out that these contaminants are in your water. Well, this community was extremely angry at this utility. They felt like they had let them down, like there was a dereliction of duty.
What was missing was this utility wasn’t communicating with their customers about all the things they were doing. And they were doing everything right. They were changing their operations so that they were delivering water that had the least amount of PFAS in it. They were planning to upgrade their treatment system. In fact, they already had plans in place, and they were going to be a national leader in PFAS treatment. They were seeking federal funding and state grants to help pay down the cost of that treatment. And they were holding the polluters accountable so that their customers weren’t going to shoulder the burden of the cost. They were doing all these great things, but they weren’t telling folks. So at Raftelis, working with them, we put a plan together for them so that they were communicating clearly, transparently, they were engaging with their audience, and they were following through on the promises they made to get that water treated for PFAS.
So these are the things that we do. Just to sum up, to build trust in your community, you’re going to want to communicate a lot, probably more than you ever think is needed. You’re going to want to make sure that communication is transparent, truthful, clear, and accessible to all audiences. Secondly, you’re going to want to engage with your community. You want to give them a voice in the decisions that you’re making so that they have buy-in and they have a share in that decision. And then finally, follow through. You want to do what you said you were going to do. And in the end, all of these things build trust, which helps your community thrive.
For more information on how our communications team can help with building community trust, contact Samantha Villegas at svillegas@raftelis.com.
