Introduction to building trust and trustworthiness

Building trust and trustworthiness is a natural next step after an organisation has performed an assessment of its trust and trustworthiness.

Building trustworthiness involves taking steps to become a better, more trustworthy steward of data. Whereas building trust involves taking steps to become more trusted, for example, by partners, stakeholders or community groups. Building trust and trustworthiness can also involve entire ecosystems, industries or sectors taking steps to become more trustworthy and trusted.

Both of these activities are crucial, and will be important for organisations at different times depending on their trust-related challenges and needs. An organisation developing a new service that uses data about people may have to build its trustworthiness by improving its data security and privacy practices or upskilling its employees. In order to attract users for that service, the same organisation might need to build trust by publishing records of internal decision making or by engaging with people through an ethical advisory board.

Reasons to build trustworthiness

As an organisation develops or grows, it will need to regularly assess the degree to which its data practices are fit for purpose, and build or improve upon those data practices where necessary. Similarly, as an organisation's circumstances change, it will often need to take steps to build its trustworthiness to meet those new circumstances.

If working through the activities in the 'Assess' section enabled you to identify areas where you feel you should seek to raise your level of trustworthiness, then the tools and resources in this section will help you take steps to become more trustworthy in that element of trustworthy data stewardship.

Reasons to build trust

A developing organisation will not only need to build its trustworthiness, but also its trust with other organisations. In some cases, building trust with people and organisations may simply be a matter of communicating or demonstrating trustworthiness by being transparent about data practices – how an organisation collects, manages, uses or shares data. In these cases, the guidance and resources provided in the ‘Demonstrate' section can help organisations communicate and therefore build trust.

However in many cases, building trust will require more than simply demonstrating your trustworthiness as a steward of data. It will require organisations to actively engage with partners and stakeholders to communicate plans, gather feedback and incorporate those views and preferences into how the organisation operates and the projects it chooses to pursue. For example, publishing the minutes of internal meetings where decisions are made not only provides transparency and enables stakeholders to know what you are doing, but it also gives those stakeholders the chance to have an impact on the direction setting and decision making of an organisation which can really build trust between organisations and members of their ecosystems.

The goal should be meaningful engagement at a point in a project or process where change is possible and not to seek feedback when a project is already signed off or delivered. For instance, an organisation might seek to build trust in a new service at the early stages of development by engaging in a co-design process with potential partners and customers to help ensure that the new service meets the needs and expectations of relevant parties. This can help ensure the new service is deemed trustworthy and is in turn trusted. It can even build trust in the organisation as a whole.

If the ‘Assess' section helped you identify any members of your ecosystem that struggle to trust you, then the tools and resources in this section will help you build trust with those parties.

Activities 4–6 in the 'How to assess trust' section of the guidebook can also help organisations engage with their partners, stakeholders and wider ecosystem, and some of the worksheets and resources within those activities can be repurposed as engagement or interview guides.

Reasons to bolster trust

Organisations should also ask themselves whether they are taking steps to ensure that their existing levels of trust do not diminish or subside. Sometimes what is needed is not to build more trust, but to ensure current levels of trust stay the same. And although it often takes time to build trustworthiness and trust, organisations can lose trust overnight. To learn more about how, specifically, trust can break down and ways of mitigating against that, see our report, ‘Designing trustworthy data institutions’.