Around the world, “a Great Trust Crisis — a tinderbox of disaffection that could erupt with unpredictable consequences,” is brewing, Foreign Policy’s Indranil Ghosh wrote in January 2020 (para. 10). That was before a global pandemic and international movement for Black Lives Matter rocked the United States and the world.

Ghosh’s reporting was grounded in the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual survey of 28 countries that assesses global public trust in institutions. According to Edelman, trust in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; i.e., nonprofits) has remained steady at 54-56% since 2018, comparable to trust in business at 53–56% and well above the 44–47% who trust government and media (2019, p. 5). A 2020 study from the BBB Wise Giving Alliance Give.org came to the same conclusion: U.S. adults trust charities more than they trust other institutions, although only 17% said they have “high trust” in nonprofits (Castro, Chng-Castor, Pessanha, Vázquez-D’Amico, & Weiner).

Edelman (2020) notes that, “People today grant their trust based on two distinct attributes: competence (delivering on promises) and ethical behavior (doing the right thing and working to improve society” para. 8). This year, none of the four institutions examined in this survey — government, business, NGOs, and media — were seen as both competent and ethical. While the nonprofit sector performed best in terms of ethics (62% of respondents see NGOs as ethical, versus 48% for business and 31% for government), less than half (46%) see NGOs as competent (Edelman, 2020).

It seems that we trust nonprofits more than other institutions mainly because of perceived ethics, but trust is more fragile and uncertain than people in the sector would like. We know that other trends related to ethical concerns about the sector are taking a significant toll on public trust, — i.e., increasing critiques of “big” donors and nationally recognizable foundations (Moody and Martin, 2020), a rise in public awareness and skepticism about “tainted” donors and dollars (Moody and Pratt, 2020), and the role of megadonors in shaping government and philanthropic policies.

Read the full article about the nonprofit sector building public trust by Tory Martin at Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy.