How to measure trust in community research

🔎 ICYMI: We talk about #trust all the time. But do we really understand it? And more importantly, can we measure it? 👉 Trust provides a license to operate for institutions. It drives participation, compliance, and collective problem-solving. Yet for too long, trust has remained an abstract ideal — hard to define, harder to act on. We partnered with the NYC Civic Engagement Commission to change that. 📘 Our new report offers a practical framework for making trust measurable and actionable. Instead of vague notions, we focus on: ✔️ Observable manifestations — how trust shows up in emotions and behaviors (like confidence, belonging, or civic engagement) ✔️ Drivers of trust — the direct experiences and institutional interventions that shape it ✔️ A 3-phase approach — to baseline, analyze, and strengthen trust through targeted, measurable interventions 🚸 We apply this framework to real-world settings — from participatory budgeting to parks departments — showing how public institutions can measure, earn and sustain trust. 👉 Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/eg4iV_hV (new URL!) (✍️co-authored with Andrew Zahuranec and Oscar Romero) #CivicTrust #PublicSectorInnovation #DataForGood #TrustMetrics #GovLab #NYC #CivicEngagement #MeasurementMatters

🧵 How Do You Measure a Relationship? In neighbourhood health and cross-sector work, we often ask: How do we know it's working? Not just the outputs, but the relational glue that holds it together. I’ve been in projects where a cohesive team just gets stuff done. No fanfare. Just trust, understanding, and movement. It’s something I believe I bring as a neurodivergent dyslexic wired to read people, respond communicatively, and know when to act or step back. But how do we measure that? 📊 Emerging practice across BNSSG suggests: 1)Trust & engagement indices between citizens and services 2)Narrative interviews and storytelling-based reflections 3)Social network mapping to track who connects with whom 4)Developmental evaluation that measures learning, not just outcomes 5)Ethnographic observations of service interactions These aren’t just metrics, they’re lifelines. They surface subconscious bias, adaptive capacity, and the human messiness that makes collaboration real. 🧠 Leadership in Cross-Sector Teams: Top 5 Conditions for Collaboration i) Psychological safety – people must feel safe to speak, challenge, and be vulnerable ii)Shared purpose – not just aligned goals, but co-owned meaning iii)Adaptive space – the “in-between” zone where ideas move from periphery to core iv) Enabling leadership – catalysing conditions, removing barriers, connecting people v)Relational infrastructure – time, tools, and rituals that allow trust to grow This is the work. Messy, human, and deeply creative. If you’re working in neighbourhoods, systems, or cross-sector spaces, how do you measure trust and relational glue? Let’s build the evidence and the story. #AdaptiveSpace #CreativeHealth #NeighbourhoodLeadership #RelationalGlue #ComplexSystems #DYCP #BNSSG #CultureAndCare

Like slimy blobs, communities are hard to control. They move in mysterious ways. This also makes them challenging to measure. ⚡ In very practical terms, the challenge is that attribution (or cause-effect) is tricky to measure, if not impossible, in communities (or social learning in general). This is mainly because the impact is rarely immediate. So, how do we know they are working? 👀 We listen to the stories their members tell. Stories enable learning.🧠 As Etienne Wenger-Trayner says, stories "convey learning that doesn’t impose itself. It’s the listener that chooses what’s applicable to them and their context." And more than that, stories also capture the type of value that's so hard to quantify. 💕 How do you measure connection? Belonging? Support? Inspiration? Confidence? Sense of purpose? Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner propose a value-creation model focusing on real stories of impact from community members. While the model has eight types of potential value, I usually focus on four of them in my practice and client work: 🎯 Immediate value Was the experience of being in the community valuable? Did it feel good? Was there trust and psychological safety in the conversation? Did you build rapport with others? 🧠 Potential value Did you take something valuable from it? This is all the practical and useful stuff you gain by participating in the community: concrete ideas, insights, tools, and resources, as well as less visible things like friendships and relationships. 🌱 Applied value What did you do with it? You don’t have to adapt it faithfully. You can adjust it to your context, use only parts of it, or tweak it with your insights. Even if you fail, the fact that you intentionally did something with an idea is valuable. It teaches you what works and what doesn’t. Applying the idea in your work is as full of learning as getting the idea in the first place. 🌟 Realized value These are the actual results—the KPIs, statistics, and progress. Many people call it "impact," but in community terms, this is you getting closer to the difference you are trying to make in the world. As community builders, we are usually concerned about “immediate value” and “potential value,” as these are the areas where we have more influence or control. Our stakeholders are interested in “realized value," often in the form of numbers. That is why capturing and sharing these personal value stories with leadership and stakeholders is critical. I wrote some of my lessons learned with community impact measurement in this article, including an example to bring it all to life: https://lnkd.in/e5w7dkE3 How do you measure the impact and value your community creates? And what are some struggles you are tackling at the moment? #communityofpractice #buildingcommunityfromwithin #sociallearning