Over the past 20 years Edelman has studied trust and its implications for society. Edelman Trust Management builds on this heritage, enabling organizations to benefit from trust’s predictive and protective power.
Trust is the ultimate currency that drives business results—it can make or break an organization. Our extensive R&D process, augmented by the partnership with world-renowned academics and business leaders, demonstrated that trusted companies build strong relationships with their stakeholders, have license to operate and, if mistakes occur, can rebound from them faster.
Edelman Trust Management is a suite of powerful, flexible analytical tools and consulting services that help companies better understand the extent to which they are trusted—and discover how they can best manage and build the trust of their audiences, stakeholders and shareholders.
Reputation is an essential but backward-looking concept, an outcome of the past. Trust implies a projection; it involves a judgement that mobilizes both rational and emotional components, direct and indirect experiences. That’s why Trust is such a powerful KPI. Trust is forward-looking and predictive in nature; it also implies a relationship between an organization and its stakeholders and an element of risk. The more trust there is, the more the risk is accepted, leading to a stronger, more fluid relationship, conducive to business resilience and performance.
Through a two-year validation program, we demonstrated the tangible business value if trust.
At the heart of Edelman Trust Management is the Edelman Net Trust Score (ENTS), a simple, audience-agnostic metric that assesses the trust capital of an organization. Trust capital is an organization’s most precious asset, one that, even if immaterial, has strong influence on performance. Members of the C-suite who wish to protect and promote their organization’s interests and harness the power of trust for their business should consider ENTS a critical KPI.
To diagnose trust, we partnered with world-renowned academics and business leaders to unearth four key dimensions that drive corporate trust:
ENTS and the four dimensions are applicable and calibrated across all audience groups, markets, and industries to drive communication and business decisions at the highest level.