4 Ways to build + measure trust in your grantmaking organisation

Trust is the bedrock of every meaningful relationship. It’s the confidence in a person’s words, capabilities and intentions. Trust is also crucial in grantmaking, where grantees are relying on the grantmaker to provide support and funding. 

Trust guarantees a positive relationship between the funding organisation and the grantees. And with mutual trust as a bedrock, your organisation’s impact can grow.  

How to build trust in your funding organisation

Let’s consider the various ways to foster trust in your organisation.

1. Have a supportive culture

Building trust in your funding organisation begins with creating a favourable environment for your team. Traits of trust should feature prominently in the organisation from its policy to daily interactions. Empathy and humanity should be the order of the day; encourage employees to show care to one another and also build meaningful interpersonal relationships.

Prioritise regular positive communication and welcome constructive feedback. Also, integrate your team into the decision-making process; give them a voice and make them feel heard. Champion diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) so that employees will feel united regardless of their background.  

At its core, trust is about safety. If you can make your team feel safe, you’re well on your way to enhancing trust in the organisation.  

2. Ensure transparency

Just like keeping unhealthy secrets damages relationships, silos in your organisation breed distrust. To effectively create an atmosphere of trust in your charitable organisation, be open and keep everyone in the loop. Transparency makes it clear what the goals, situation and challenges of the organisation are.

Also, transparency makes your position on an issue clear; people will know where you stand and won’t have to guess where they stand with you. Once that confidence is there, trust will grow. 

3. Take the lead

Leading by example is another effective way to breed trust in your organisation. To create an atmosphere of certainty, demonstrate confidence first. Show faith in your team and their capabilities. Shun micromanagement by all means; instead of breathing down employees’ necks when tasks are assigned to them, give them the benefit of the doubt.

Allow flexibility. A remote or hybrid setup highlights your optimism that your staff will deliver regardless of where they operate.     

Interestingly, taking the lead is equally applicable to your relationship with grantees and grantseekers. As a funding organisation, you can build external trust by allowing your grantees to spend the funds as they deem fit. Also, instead of requesting superfluous details and reports, consider skipping the bureaucracy

This is the strategy behind trust-based philanthropy, a funding model based on partnership, trust and accountability. By adopting trust-based grantmaking, you nurture the feeling of dependability with nonprofits.     

4. Keep your word

Fostering trust demands that you stand by your word and perform your duties. If you make promises to your staff, stay true to them. Likewise, if you assure a grantseeker that funds will be made available by a specific date, ensure that it happens. 

Keeping your word shows that you’re reliable and eliminates doubt from the minds of your employees and grantseekers.    

How to measure trust in your grantmaking organisation

If building trust matters, measuring it is equally essential. 

Trust measurement encompasses any form of research carried out to determine how your employees and external entities perceive your brand. The process of measuring trust informs whether the programs implemented have altered how people feel and act towards your brand. It also indicates whether any such change is for the better or worse.   

However, measuring trust isn’t as plain sailing as we would like it to be because trust is a qualitative value. It’s personal, relative and contextual. To effectively gauge it, your organisation needs to find a way to quantify it. Below are various ways grantmakers can measure brand trust.

1. Analysis of organisational data

A good way to measure trust is to observe the internal workings of your organisation. If there’s mutual confidence and reliability among your workforce, it’s indicative of a good level of trust. The degree of a general feeling of safety among employees also demonstrates how much trust there is in the grantmaking organisation.      

External trust matters too; tracking it involves assessing how grantseekers interact with you. How often do they come to you for funding? Did the rate of grant applications drop after you started insisting on trivial details? How often do current grantees present their challenges (or even failures) to you?

Evaluating your interaction with grantees and grantseekers speaks volumes about how much confidence these external organisations have in your brand.   

2. Surveys

A survey is a great way to quantify the trust people have in your grantmaking organisation. Rated answers from your staff and grantees to the metric questions will give you a good idea of their trust towards you. 

A popular way to conduct a survey is by asking for a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score from grantees. You could also request an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from your staff while asking grantees for a Net Promoter Score (NPS). The higher the number of their responses, the better. 

Though these methods might not directly quiz the respondents on trust, they gauge other elements such as loyalty and satisfaction which are relevant when tracking trust in an organisation.         

3. Questionnaires

A questionnaire is an excellent tool for measuring internal and external trust. With it, you can pose questions to your staff and other organisations. These questions could border on whether they’ll recommend your organisation to others as an excellent place to work or as a good grantmaker.

You could also ask them what they like most about the organisation, how they generally feel about it as well as what they think could be done to serve them better. 

This allows them to voice their thoughts about your brand. By reviewing their responses, you can get a feel of the level of the trust reposed in your organisation.

A best practice when using this method is to ensure that there’s space for respondents to write their own answers. It will help accommodate each respondent’s detailed thoughts which might not match the multiple-choice options.

Building trust as a grantmaker isn’t something you achieve with the flick of a switch. It requires persistence and consistency. By having a supportive organisational culture, being open, honouring your word and leading by example, you’ll gradually build trust in your grantmaking organisation both internally and externally.