7 Things That Separate Comms Teams That Build Trust From Teams That Just Push Content

I brought in a web and mobile app developer, a data storyteller, a full-time social media manager, and digital video journalists. Specialists. Each one recruited for a specific skill that did not exist in our city's comms team before I arrived. 

But here is what made it work: they all sat inside communications, not scattered across IT or other departments. And every one of them understood the full production cycle. In a newsroom, the reporter does not hand off to a chain of people. They think through the whole story, from what matters to how it reaches the audience.

That is different from most government comms teams, where one person writes press releases, another person runs the website, and nobody is thinking about the story from beginning to end. When you are a two-person or five-person team, you need people who can think that way even more. Not generalists who know a little about everything. Professionals who bring a real skill and understand how it fits into the whole.

It took me three years to get approval for a full-time social media position. An elected official asked in a public meeting, "What's this person going to do, sit on Twitter all day?" Yes. That is a full-time job. And it is not nine to five. It’s around the clock. And when residents have questions, they expect answers. And they’re not going to come to City Hall to tell you. They’re going to go where they’re living their lives; online.

My developer and data storyteller did not sit in IT. They sat on my team in communications. The 311 system, the website, the open data portal all ran through my team. Not because I was territorial but because the resident experience is a communications function.

When I see tech projects built in a basement IT department that nobody in comms knows about until launch day, I know exactly what is about to happen. The tool will work. The experience will not. And comms will be asked to clean it up.

If your team is not at the table when the website gets redesigned, when the chatbot gets built, or when the 311 system gets updated, you are not doing communications. You are doing damage control. And you’re not putting the residents first. 

This is not a crisis plan in a binder. It is everything you do for the year before the crisis.

We built a social media following of 500,000 people in a city of 250,000 before COVID hit. We were not building it for a pandemic. We were building it because that is how you talk to people now. But when the pandemic came, we did not have to start from zero. We could go right to them. We already had established communications channels and relationships. We were getting calls from the governor's office asking who was doing our videos and who built our data dashboard. 

If you are just starting to build those relationships with residents now, that is okay. But, start today. Not when the next emergency hits.

Not just during business hours. Not just at a public meeting at 7 PM on a Tuesday.

The people that need something from their city usually need it when they are not at work. At night. On weekends. During an emergency. And sometimes they just have a question and need someone to respond.

We eliminated our call center 12 years ago and moved everyone to the 311 app. People thought we were crazy. But it worked, because we went to where residents already were instead of asking them to come to us.

Even a two-person team can build a rotation for after-hours coverage. This is not about being available every second. It is about building a system that does not go dark when the office closes.

The best stories in your city are happening in public works, parks, code enforcement, and the fire department. If your comms team only hears about them after they are over, you are too late.

You cannot connect those stories if they are isolated in a department, disconnected from centralized messaging or from your residents. All of these pieces have to come together. When you do that collectively, that's where the magic happens.

Your comms team needs a relationship inside every department. Not a formal reporting structure. A relationship. The kind where someone in public works texts you a photo of a crew fixing a water main at 2 AM because they know you will turn it into something residents see and appreciate.

I remember the day during a crisis when our mayor said she had not had a chance to take a shower and looked awful. I told her: this is perfect. This is what we all look like right now. Everyone will be happy to see that you are human, like all of us.

That moment built more trust than any polished press conference could have.

Government comms teams that wait for perfect design, perfect copy, and perfect approval lose the moment. And they lose the trust. Residents do not connect with brands. They connect with people (and elected officials) who show up honestly.

Not everyone needs to be replaced. When we had longtime employees who said "I don't know how to do that," the answer was not to show them the door. It was to teach them. Upskill them. Help them. Empower them with the tools to do the job as it exists today.

We held brown bag lunches where people could come in and learn. Social media is not a four-letter word. AI is just another tool, like Excel was twenty years ago. The people who roll up their sleeves and start exploring it get comfortable. The ones who refuse to evolve get left behind.

The combination is what works. Fresh perspective from outside alongside institutional knowledge from inside. If you only have one or the other, you are either all ideas and no context, or all history and no momentum.

Two-thirds of cities spend 5% or less of their budget on community engagement. And 81% of engagement practitioners say limited resources are their biggest challenge (Granicus, 2026).

That is the reality. And it is not changing anytime soon.

Which is exactly why these seven things matter. You may not control your budget. You may not get the three new hires you asked for. But you control how your team is structured, what skills you invest in, and whether comms has a seat at the table or just a seat in the hallway.

The teams that build trust are not the biggest. They are the ones that got these seven things right.

Jolean Fleck leads people and organizational development and has spent her career building teams that last. On Episode 3, she said something I have never forgotten:

"If the people closest to the work don't feel comfortable raising their hands and saying, I have a crazy idea, or when they do, they get shut down or belittled or ridiculed or, you know, something negative happens to them because they open their mouth. They will never do it again. They have learned the lesson and everybody watching also learned the same lesson. You are not interested. And when someone shows up with a different idea and they see a negative outcome, you have just shut down innovation for your organization. For as long as you're there."

If your team is not safe enough to bring new ideas, none of the other six non-negotiables matter.

Next week: pick one of the seven. Have a fifteen-minute conversation with your team or your boss about where you stand on it. That is how this starts.

Talk soon,

Dana