Public Trust Communications Toolkit

The Challenge: Facing significant headwinds in Canadians’ trust of the foods they purchase, Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) and the Public Trust Steering Committee knew that Canada’s agri-food value chain needed support in its ongoing efforts to grow and maintain public trust. Our recommendation and ultimate engagement was to develop a set of universal communications tools that could be adopted by over 500 agriculture and food organizations that span the entire Canadian food system. 

The task was to identify, aggregate, and summarize best practices when using social, online, and traditional media to gain public trust (maintain social license) as well as how to manage potential public trust issues.

​The Solution: With over a decade of relevant expertise, we developed a public trust implementation toolkit that was designed to equip each CFA stakeholder with best practices they could use to adopt and evolve their public trust initiatives. Completing a review of global research, interviews with leaders from across Canada’s food chain, and the creation of keystone Canadian case studies, the final deliverable comprised 16 sections and 150 pages of actionable best practices. It also included in-depth information and tools Canada’s agriculture and food organizations could employ to measure and monitor public trust on an ongoing basis.

​The Outcome: Once complete, we presented an overview of these best practices, tools, and resources at a conference attended by representatives of Canada’s entire food system in Ottawa. After extensive review by the Public Trust Steering Committee, the toolkit was made available to organizations across the country for use in their public trust communications initiatives.