Establish credibility
Organisational credibility – the quality of being trusted and believed in is essential in building working relationships with key partners and communities:
- Credibility helps initiatives to attract support, establish and sustain their activities and attract key partners to help them achieve their goals. In particular, grassroots community initiatives can struggle to be seen as credible by professional groups.
- Credibility is a quality that can be both hard to develop and difficult to sustain. Support for an initiative can quickly wane if supporters’ belief in its ability to deliver change falters.
- Know your community, gather information and data to support what you are doing
- Ensure that ‘successes’ are widely communicated to reassure both internal and external supporters that the initiative is being effective and moving forward.
- Ensure integrity by endorsing best practice for rural communities, including on issues of confidentiality.
- Gather supporters with individual credibility, including key respected figures in your community.
- Create organisational credibility by building reliable working relationships with national and local stakeholders.
- Create a website and use social media to convey your messages.
- Establish an identity beyond rural areas by working diligently with local and national media, funders, supporters and partner organisations to ensure that positive messages of progress are widely communicated.