Public Organizations Should Build Trust—Not Likability

Sixty-Seven.

That’s how many votes our operations levy failed by when I was the Public Relations Director for a large Washington State school district.

10,000 people turned in a ballot for our February special election, and the difference was 67 votes. Had we influenced just 34 of them to put their trust in us, it would have passed. We would have secured over 15% of our district’s operating budget.

Like almost every other district in the state who fails in the first campaign, we bounced back and passed the levy in April. Fine. But we could have avoided the painful conversations: here’s what—and who—are on the chopping block if we face a double levy failure. Even labeling potential program and staff cuts decimates morale, and that takes years to rebuild.

Why did we lose?

It wasn’t an awareness issue. They knew us. It wasn’t because we hadn’t been communicating. We had been communicating constantly—social media posts, newsletters, community events, award announcements, feel-good stories about teachers and students doing remarkable things. Our engagement numbers looked great. Our follower counts were growing.

We lost because we had spent two years putting marbles in the wrong jar.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Legendary research professor and author Brené Brown has a beautiful metaphor where she describes trust as a marble jar. Every day you do something to genuinely build trust with someone, you make a deposit. You add a marble.

Over time, those deposits accumulate, and when a moment arrives that requires someone to put their trust in you, you make a withdrawal. You reach into the jar and hope you’ve built up enough trust.

In our case as a school district, we thought we were putting marbles in our community’s trust jar to prepare for our most important moments—a budget shortfall, a difficult policy decision, a levy vote.

Our problem—like most public organizations—wasn’t that we weren’t depositing marbles. We were. Every day, diligently, consistently. The problem is we were depositing marbles into the likability jar and expecting to make withdrawals from the trust jar.

Go to almost any Washington State school district or municipality website right now. Scroll through their social media feeds. Read their last three newsletters.

What do you see?

You’ll see the student of the month. The employee appreciation post. The championship-winning team. The stunning photos from the community event. The heartwarming story about a custodian who organized a coat drive.

Beautiful content. Shareable content. Content that reliably generates comments like “So proud of our district!” and “This is why I love our community.”

None of it is wrong. In fact, all of it is genuinely good.

But here’s the question I want you to sit with: Does any of it tell the community what that organization is actually trying to accomplish this year?

Does it describe the specific, measurable goals their leadership team has committed to? Does it show the community what they’re doing differently than they did last year—and why? Does it give stakeholders evidence that their investment in their public institutions is producing the right results?

Or does it just make some people feel good about a system they already liked?

Most public communications programs are built, implicitly, to generate warmth. To create affinity. To make stakeholders feel positively about the organization. That’s not nothing. It’s important. But it also does not build trust.

Likability is what you feel when the organization posts a great photo. Trust is what you feel when a leader has been honest with you about a hard problem and showed you how they’re solving it. And they do this proactively as part of their culture, not just when it’s time to soften the blow on a decision that’s already been made.

Likability is built through visibility and positive sentiment. You build trust through demonstrated competence, honest and proactive communication, and follow-through over time.

Likability gets you likes. Trust gets you a community that’s excited to invest and work alongside you.

And the playbook that most districts are running—communicate more, tell better stories, shine a brighter spotlight on the good stuff—is optimized almost entirely for like. It’s a machine designed to fill the likability jar. Which means that when the moment comes to make a trust withdrawal, you reach in and find it empty.

That’s not a communications failure. That’s a system issue. Our school districts and local governments have been fed best practices for how to build trust that are completely backwards.

The standard playbook is to convince people that you’re trustworthy, which is not the same as building trust.

There’s a framework in marketing called the Know-Like-Trust factor. The idea is simple: before someone will take a meaningful action—buy something, vote for something, extend grace during a difficult moment—they need to first know you exist, then like what they see, and finally trust you enough to act.

Most organizations understand this. Most organizations also stop at the second stage and say they’re trying to build trust.

Think about it in concrete terms. What does a “know” communication look like for a school district? A news mention. An enrollment postcard. A new family welcome packet. Pure awareness.

What does a “like” communication look like? The soccer team photo. The teacher of the year announcement. The back-to-school video with upbeat music. Sentiment-building.

What does a “trust” communication look like?

Here’s where most districts go quiet. Because to build trust, communication is harder. It’s less photogenic. It requires your organization to be accountable to something specific.

Trust-building communication looks like this: Here are the three goals our district committed to this year. Here’s the progress we’ve made on each one. Here’s where we fell short, and here’s what we’re changing because of it. It looks like a superintendent who stands in front of the community and says, “This is what we said we’d do, this is what we did, and this is what we’re going to do next.” 

It looks like a strategy, a plan to act on that strategy, and actual promises—not values statements that could apply to any organization in the country, but specific commitments that your community can hold you to.

It looks, in short, like an organization that trusts its community enough to be vulnerable and direct with them.

Most district communications programs don’t look like that, because the system they’ve inherited is optimized for likability. It was built to feel productive. And it does feel productive. The engagement numbers go up. The comments are positive. The school board is happy with the coverage.

Meanwhile, the marble jar that actually matters sits half-empty.

The numbers tell a clear story.

The 2025 PDK Poll—the longest-running, most comprehensive survey of American public attitudes toward public education—found that just 13% of Americans would give the nation’s public schools an A or a B. That’s down from 26% in 2004. Cut in half over twenty years, during a period when districts have invested more in communications, storytelling, and community engagement than at any point in history.

Washington State’s own enrollment data projects a 5.4% decline in K-12 students by 2030. Families are making different choices. And all the social media posts in the world haven’t moved the needle.

More communication hasn’t solved the trust problem. It has, in many cases, made it worse because high-volume positivity in the face of real community anxiety reads not as transparency, but as avoidance. Your stakeholders aren’t scrolling past your soccer photos thinking, “Wow, great district.” Some of them are thinking, “They’re not telling me what’s really going on.”

This might suck to hear, but you can’t wake up Monday morning and decide your district is a high-trust organization now. A rebrand is not how you build trust. It’s not a new content strategy. It’s not a commitment to “more transparency” in your next all-staff email.

The system has been optimized for likability. That means the system has to change. Not just the content calendar, but the underlying strategy that drives it. The questions your communications team is asking. The metrics your leadership team is tracking. The way your strategy is written and whether it makes real, accountable promises to your community.

That kind of change takes time, intention, and usually some outside pressure to make it stick. I know, because I’ve been on both sides of it, as the PR Director who was running the likability machine without fully realizing it, and now as a consultant who helps public institutions make the shift.

The shift is real. It’s achievable. And the districts that make it don’t just pass ballot measures, they build the kind of community relationships that make the next budget crisis survivable, the next labor negotiation less adversarial, and the next school board meeting less terrifying.

But every day you spend filling the likability jar is a day you’re not building the reserves you’ll actually need.

If you’re a public leader and you recognize your organization in this post—if some part of you read the list of communications activities and saw your own content calendar reflected back—that recognition is worth something. It means you’re already asking the right question.

The next question is: where does our organization actually stand?

The first marble goes in the right jar the moment you know what you’re actually measuring.

AJ Garcia is the co-founder of Herringbone Strategies, a boutique public sector consulting firm that helps school districts and local government organizations build genuine community trust. Before founding Herringbone, AJ served as a Public Relations Director for a large Washington State K-12 school district.