If you work in local government right now, you already know the problem. Disinformation spreading faster than you can correct it. Residents who’ve made up their minds before you publish a word. A national political climate that contaminates local conversations like smoke through a vent. You know the feeling of doing solid work and watching it get buried under a comment section full of people who wouldn’t know a capital improvement plan from a campaign contribution.
You don’t need me to describe it. You’re living it.
What you may not know is that researchers have spent the last several years studying what actually builds trust in local government—not what feels right, not what worked in 2012, but what the data shows. Last month at the Transforming Local Government Conference1 in Dallas, three independent organizations presented findings that converged on the same answer.
This is the good news you’ve been waiting for.
Elizabeth Steward, VP of marketing and research at Envisio—a strategic planning platform that works with local governments—partnered with Arizona State University, the National League of Cities, and survey firm Polco to study trust across three diverse communities. Their stated goal: identify where trust breaks down and provide empirically-grounded steps to strengthen it. Chris Morrill, executive director of the Government Finance Officers Association, shared GFOA’s rethinking public engagement framework—built on years of working with finance officers navigating fiscal transparency and community resistance. David Swindell of Indiana University’s Public Policy Institute added fresh survey data collected in Indianapolis just weeks before the conference.
Three organizations. Three methodologies. Same answer.
The research identified four indicators of trust in local government: competency, openness, integrity, and fairness. Competency is what it sounds like—residents believe you deliver quality services worth what they pay. Fairness means you treat people equitably and make decisions they can respect even when they disagree. Openness means you’re transparent, you inform residents, and you welcome their involvement. Integrity means you act in the community’s best interest, you’re honest, you take responsibility, and you do what you say you’ll do.
Those four indicators describe what trust looks like. The researchers then asked what actually drives it—what moves residents from skeptical to believing.
Two factors rose above the others: openness and integrity. Not service quality. Not communications volume. The behaviors that built trust were informing residents, acting in the community’s best interest, and taking responsibility when things go wrong.
Read that list one more time. Every item is a governance behavior first. Communications is how you demonstrate it.
Then the researchers asked residents how informed they felt about their local government’s activities, events, and services—not at all informed, slightly informed, somewhat informed, or very informed. Then they measured trust and confidence against each level.
Residents who described themselves as very informed: roughly 80% confidence in their local government, 81% trust that it would do the right thing.
Residents who described themselves as not at all informed: zero. On both measures.
Not low. Zero.
Sitting in that session, I stopped taking notes and had to resist the urge to yell “Hell yeah”—because that’s exactly what successful local government leaders have been saying for years. Communicate often, and on the channels where your residents are already getting their information. Now there’s real research to back it up.
That gap is not a communications problem. It is a governance problem with a communications solution. Residents who know what their government is doing, why it’s doing it, and what it costs are dramatically more likely to trust it. The organizations that understand this don’t treat communication as outreach. They treat it as a core governance function—as essential as the services themselves.
Steward laid out four takeaways from the research that practitioners can apply immediately.
Transparency matters—but only if residents can find it and understand it. Putting your budget online is not enough. Residents won’t go looking. You have to bring it to them.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Transparency doesn’t matter if you’re not actively telling people where to look and what it means. And data always requires storytelling and context. Numbers without narrative don’t build trust. They create confusion.
Measure progress, show results, and take ownership. This one is more specific than most organizations practice. Taking ownership isn’t just accepting blame. It’s explaining how something went wrong, naming the corrective steps, communicating updates on those steps, and building an organizational culture where accountability is the expectation—not the exception.
Welcome resident participation. When residents have real avenues to engage—and when their input visibly shapes decisions—trust follows. The City of Dublin, Ohio, one of the three communities in the Envisio study, demonstrates what this looks like at scale. Dublin’s trust levels run around 70%, well above national benchmarks. They got there through multi-channel engagement including surveys, mobile apps, social media, and traditional outreach—proactive communication that includes sentiment analysis, and survey responses that have fed directly into policy decisions including renewable energy.
I had identified Dublin as a high-performance communications organization years before I knew they were in the study. The research confirmed what I had found independently. That’s corroboration running in both directions.
How You Engage Impacts Trust, Too
The GFOA framework adds something critical to this picture. Morrill’s team makes a point that more local government leaders need to hear: low-quality engagement can actually harm trust.
Showing up to listen when the decision is already made, running a public meeting that produces heat but no light, engaging on issues where resident input can’t meaningfully influence direction—these don’t just waste time. They erode the credibility you need for the moments when engagement matters. The discipline is knowing when to engage, designing it for quality over quantity, and giving residents real tradeoffs to work through rather than a comment form to fill out.
Here’s what all this means for you right now. You cannot fix what is happening in Washington or your state capital. You cannot control the national news cycle or the bad-faith actors who weaponize it in your comment section. What you can control is your corner of the world. The research says that corner matters enormously—and that the organizations doing this work with intention and consistency are building something that lasts.
Trust is not a crisis communications problem. It’s not a rebrand. It’s not a content calendar. It is years of doing the right thing, engaging your public honestly, and delivering content creative enough to earn attention—over and over and over again. The research doesn’t make that easier. What it does is confirm that the work accumulates. That it matters. That it’s worth it.
Next week: what this looks like when an organization actually builds the drivers of trust into its DNA—with a case study from my own career that the research, it turns out, describes almost exactly.
Onward and Upward.
My attendance at the Transforming Local Government Conference was supported by AFI. My editorial content is independent.