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Charities need to manage their image on Google to maintain trust, says PR expert

Governance | Vibeka Mair | 19 Oct 2011

Charities need to understand how they appear in Google to maintain public trust in their organisation, according to Richard Sambrook, global vice-chairman of PR agency Edelman.

Sambrook was speaking at the Charity Finance Leadership Forum on charities and public trust this week. He said Google is the first place people go to gather information, especially when they hear about a crisis, so charities must be aware of what content is appearing.

In his presentation, Sambrook provided findings from the Edelman Trust Barometer on the level of trust globally in NGOs and other global trends relevant to the issue of trust and confidence.

The Edelman survey quizzed over 5,000 people in 23 countries, who were college-educated; aged 25 to 64; in the top 25 per cent of household income per age group in each country, and reported significant engagement in business and political news.

It found 61 per cent of this group trusted NGOs, a slight rise on 57 per cent in 2010. Overall, NGOs were the most trusted institutions globally when compared with business, government and media.

However, though trust in NGOs was high, Sambrook warned that public trust was a very important, but volatile, commodity:

“Especially for the charity sector in a downturn, it is crucial to maintain and build trust,” he advised.

Sambrook said it was crucial that charities understood how they appeared on the web and search engines as this was now the first place that people went for news and information. Some 29 per cent of survey respondents went to an online search engine to find news as their first port of call, compared with 19 per cent going straight to an online news site and 15 per cent using traditional print. Only 11 per cent went straight to the company website in the first instance.

“In the digital age it’s not straightforward,” said Sambrook. “The public get information from multiple voices and channels. Social media conversations especially can be turbulent. You need to understand all these channels and manage the message, especially in a crisis.”

He continued that informed publics needed on average to hear something three to five times, often from multiple sources, before they believed it.

Sambrook also said developing and building trust was "non-negotiable" for a charity:

"If you've built trust, it will take longer for a negative message about your organisation to get through. It's a protective shield," he advised.

After his presentation, Sambrook also addressed the issue of transparency in maintaining public trust, after a delegate said the public did not seem to care much about transparency and accountability:

“The public don’t seem to care,” agreed Sambrook. “But I don’t know whether the charity sector will be able to get away with not much public scrutiny in the future. My instincts say that sooner or later we’ll have a much broader public interested in measures and effectiveness.”

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