Two thousand impressions. A 30% increase in likes. A dashboard full of green arrows… and a public meeting where eleven people showed up.
Most of us in communications have experienced some version of this: the numbers say the message landed, but the community's response says otherwise. When this happens, it’s hard to understand why the numbers aren’t reflecting the reality of engagement.
There is a clear gap between what we tend to measure and what really matters — and that gap is where many campaigns fall short.
I believe the era of reducing audiences to numbers is over. The organizations that stand out today treat communication as relationship-building, and they measure success by the strength of those relationships.
Why this matters now
Public institutions are communicating into a trust deficit. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 61% of people globally hold a moderate or high sense of grievance toward institutions. It also found that a record 69% worry that government leaders, business leaders, and journalists purposely mislead them. This crisis extends to interpersonal relationships as well — Pew Research Center reports that only 34% of Americans believe that most people can be trusted in general.
At the same time, attention is fragmenting. Pew finds that the share of U.S. adults who regularly get news on TikTok rose from 3% in 2020 to 17% in 2024. Psychologist Gloria Mark's research shows that average attention on a single screen has fallen from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds.
The result is that people are harder to reach, and they are more skeptical once you reach them. Volume alone can't solve either problem.
Reach: Meeting people where they are
Reach still matters — but in a fragmented landscape, reach means being present in the channels, voices, and spaces your community already trusts. That lands much differently than pushing a message out through only the channels you control.
For example, during my time at a B2G (business-to-government) SaaS (service-as-a-software) company, we found that it was speaking with and working alongside community leaders — city council members, local politicians, and county treasurers — that moved the needle, not merely posting aimlessly on the internet. We invited people who had already built trust within their communities to join panels with one another, cultivating a space for new relationships to form and for others to learn. We invited both our current clients as well as those who had no connection with our product. This let our reach grow authentically through real-world conversations, and new partnerships formed beyond what we'd imagined.
At a time when only a fifth of the public trusts the institution delivering a message, the messenger becomes as important as the message. Market research from Edelman, an industry-leading global communications and PR firm, has consistently found that people trust people similar to them and their local community more than distant institutions. Real reach builds alongside those relationships.
Relationships: The true goal
Valuing relationships just as much as numbers is not a new idea — it's just become more overlooked as quantitative metrics have gotten easier to track. In their foundational 1998 study, Ledingham and Bruning identified five dimensions of an organization-public relationship: trust, openness, involvement, investment, and commitment. Their research found that how people perceived these dimensions shaped their behavior toward the organization. “Awareness” alone did not. Read that list again and notice what's missing. It says nothing about impressions, frequency, or likes. Every dimension describes how an organization shows up for its stakeholders over time.
Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta make a similar case in "The Trust Crisis" in Harvard Business Review. They argue that trust is earned through demonstrated behavior, not declared through messaging. Their broader work frames trust as a judgment people make about an organization's competence, its motives, the fairness of its methods, and its real-world impact. Pure communication can make those things visible — but it cannot substitute for them.
For example, our impact with Painting Pandas (a Carnelian Advisory client) grew significantly when we advised them to reinvest their communication efforts into seeking to work alongside organizations with real roots in the Austin community — not only spending marketing dollars on donation posts. Through that shift in priorities, they were able to gain a partnership with the Austin Parks Foundation and host dozens of new community events. Ultimately, people were far more likely to donate when they saw us in their neighborhoods alongside an organization they already know, following through on our mission. The reason? Trust.
This is why I push back when clients ask simply for “more reach,” more clicks or more likes on social media. Awareness of an institution without the necessary trust behind it is ineffective — without community participation and support, growth stays trapped behind the screen.
Scaling impact: Measuring what actually resonates
If relationships are the product, our metrics have to change. The communications industry has been saying so for years. The AMEC Barcelona Principles 3.0 direct practitioners to measure outcomes and impact for stakeholders and society, not just outputs. They call for combining qualitative and quantitative evidence. They state plainly that advertising value equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of communication.
The OECD's 2024 Trust Survey reinforces the point. People who feel they have a say in what institutions do are markedly more likely to trust them. Participation isn’t a byproduct of good communication — it is the main outcome we should be measuring.
In practice, that means asking harder questions. Did people act? Did they come back? Did community members feel heard, and would they say so in their own words? You find those answers through listening sessions, follow-up surveys, partner feedback, and sustained participation over time. Even within online metrics, some numbers matter more than others. Engagement, click-through rates, retention, and shares won't measure a relationship in its entirety, but they tell you far more than views or impressions about whether your content moved someone to take action.
What the evidence tells us
Taken together, the research points in the same direction. Trust is low. Attention is scattered. The field's own standards reject vanity metrics. And the scholarship has told us for nearly three decades that relationships, not only reach, drive behavior. Organizations that keep optimizing for volume — despite what the research shows (Edelman, Pew Research, Harvard Business Review, Smith, Ledingham & Bruning, AMEC, OECD) — are following the wrong path.
The ones that stand apart look different. They invest in trusted messengers. They show up between campaigns. They measure resonance through what their communities actually do and say. That approach is at the heart of how we think about Carnelian's Strategic Advisory work: communication strategy as a long-term relationship, not a broadcast schedule.
The question worth asking
The next time a dashboard lights up green, ask one more question: If this campaign disappeared tomorrow, would your community notice? Would they miss the relationship, or only see fewer emails in their inbox?
The good news is that the answer is always within reach. It lives in your community, and all it takes is showing up to listen.