Saving for a rainy day: The trust bank and crisis comms

Last week at PRWeek’s conference in Chicago, Lindsay Kurtz, director of brand communications at McDonald’s, discussed the importance of businesses making daily deposits into a “trust bank”. The idea is that if brands make small, regular deposits of goodwill with their customers, if - or more likely when - a crisis hits, there’s something in their account to draw on.  

As someone specialising in crisis comms, I usually meet businesses when that account is running low or sometimes already in overdraft. It’s a fantastic analogy, but I think it’s also worth reading the fine print when considering what a healthy balance can - and can’t - do for you.  

What trust can and can’t buy you 

The most obvious thing a trust bank buys you is benefit of the doubt. When you’ve built strong relationships with your stakeholders, they’re more likely to give you space to establish the facts before jumping to conclusions. This doesn’t give you permission to stay silent for ages, but it does buy you some breathing room.  

When dealing with a lower-level issue or an emerging crisis, it can buy you real goodwill too. We’ve supported organisations as they apologised for a mistake and watched, in real time, as people responded positively, not just to the apology but to how they communicated it. When people already trust you, an honest “we got this wrong” is more likely to be accepted as a genuine attempt to put things right. 

But the balance only stretches so far. It won’t give you a pass on the thing you’re known for. For example, if you’ve spent years talking about how much you care about your staff and then a story breaks about them being badly treated, those deposits don’t protect you. If anything, they make the fall steeper.  

It will also not protect you from the same mistake twice. People might forgive a one-off, but when the same problem keeps cropping up, it starts to look less like a mistake and more like a pattern.  

And even with years of goodwill in the bank, you can still lose it all by going quiet, getting defensive or taking three days to say anything. A strong reputation might shape how your stakeholders react to your crisis, but it won’t respond for you. 

Building your balance  

This is not to say building your balance isn’t worth the effort. And the good news is you don’t need a McDonald’s-sized budget to build up trust. Much of it comes down to the smaller, less glamorous things – communicating consistently, not overpromising and being honest when things go wrong.  

Crucially, it’s also about what businesses do, not just what they say. Communications can help build trust, but they can’t manufacture it where the actions of an organisation tell a different story. 

None of this will make you crisis-proof, but it will put you in a stronger position when things go wrong. After all, the point isn't to build up enough goodwill to “get away” with a crisis. It’s to give people a reason to trust how you'll handle it.