The Samburu community in Kenya dressed in traditional regalia, participate in the Cultural Festival of the Maa community in the Samburu National Reserve in Samburu, Kenya in November 2024. The festival includes cultural dances, showcasing the vibrant traditions of the community. The tribes living in the Samburu region of northern Kenya are among the few to keep their traditions alive. One of the most important parts of the Samburu tribe’s culture is their livestock, which includes cattle, sheep, goats, and camels. 
Photo Credit: Gerald Anderson/Anadolu via Getty Images

Defining your institutional voice in an era of low trust

As institutions enter 2026, communications can no longer be treated as a downstream function focused primarily on visibility, branding, or dissemination. The context in which institutions operate has fundamentally shifted.

Public trust has become increasingly fragile, information environments are crowded and contested, and audiences are more discerning about credibility, intent, and transparency. In this environment, institutional communications must evolve from a tactical support role into a strategic mandate that shapes how institutions are understood, evaluated, and held to account.

This shift is not cosmetic. It requires rethinking what institutional communications exist to do, how success is measured, and how communications functions relate to leadership, governance, and operations. Institutions that fail to make this transition risk being visible but not trusted, present but not persuasive, and active but not influential.

The erosion of default trust
Historically, many institutions benefited from a baseline of assumed legitimacy. Governments, multinationals, development organisations, academic institutions, and large NGOs were often trusted by virtue of mandate, scale, or longevity. Communications therefore focused on explaining programmes, reporting outputs, and showcasing results.

That assumption no longer holds. Trust is now earned continuously and can be lost rapidly. Audiences interrogate not only what institutions say, but how consistently they act, whose voices they amplify, and whether institutional narratives align with lived realities. Misalignment between rhetoric and practice is quickly exposed, often amplified by digital platforms and peer-to-peer networks.

Institutional communications must therefore be positioned first and foremost as a trust-building function rather than a promotional one. This requires prioritising coherence, transparency, and ethical clarity over volume, polish, or reach.

From outputs to meaning
One of the most persistent weaknesses in institutional communications is an overemphasis on outputs: reports produced, workshops held, policies launched, funds disbursed. While these remain necessary, they are no longer sufficient. Stakeholders increasingly seek meaning, relevance, and tangible consequence.

In 2026, effective institutional communications translate technical work into narratives that answer three implicit questions: Why does this matter now? Who does it affect, and how? What does it change?

This does not mean simplifying content to the point of dilution. Rather, it requires disciplined editorial judgment—deciding what deserves attention, what context is essential, and what ethical considerations must be acknowledged. Communications teams must operate as curators and interpreters of institutional work, not merely broadcasters of activity.

Communications as institutional memory
Another critical repositioning is recognising communications as a form of institutional memory. In complex organisations characterised by high staff turnover, fragmented programmes, and multi-year mandates, communications artefacts often become the most durable record of institutional intent and action.

Institutions that treat communications strategically invest in coherence over time. This includes maintaining narrative continuity across leadership transitions, avoiding reactive contradictions, and documenting not only successes but learning, adaptation, and failure.

Such an approach strengthens credibility. Institutions that acknowledge uncertainty and evolution are often perceived as more trustworthy than those that project artificial certainty or uninterrupted success.

Navigating contested information environments
Institutional communications now operate in environments where misinformation, disinformation, and competing narratives are persistent realities. Silence is frequently interpreted as evasion, while poorly framed responses can amplify reputational risk.

Positioning communications requires building internal capacity for scenario planning, issue anticipation, and rapid yet measured response. This does not mean reacting to every provocation, but understanding which narratives pose material risk to institutional legitimacy and which do not.

Equally important is the ability to communicate complexity without defensiveness. Audiences increasingly respect institutions that explain constraints, trade-offs, and dilemmas rather than defaulting to overly polished assurances.

Centring voice, not just audience
A defining feature of forward-looking institutional communications is a shift from “target audiences” to “centred voices.” This involves asking not only who communications are for, but whose perspectives are represented and whose knowledge is validated.

In development, humanitarian, academic, and policy spaces, this often means moving away from extractive storytelling in communities as evidence of impact. Instead, communications should reflect partnership, agency, and contextual intelligence.

This shift is both ethical and strategic. Communications ought to reflect plural realities and avoid the tone of distant authority. Top-down, ivory-tower communication is increasingly ineffective in environments where legitimacy depends on proximity and relevance.

Measurement beyond metrics
Traditional communications metrics, namely, impressions, clicks, and followers, remain useful but are largely insufficient. They reveal little about trust, influence, or institutional credibility.

Institutions repositioning communications should adopt more qualitative indicators: consistency of narrative uptake by partners, citation in policy or practitioner spaces, resonance in stakeholder dialogue, and alignment between external perception and internal intent. This requires closer integration between communications, leadership, and programme teams. Communications cannot assess effectiveness in isolation from institutional outcomes.

Communications as stewardship
Positioning institutional communications ultimately requires a shift in mindset, from messaging to stewardship. Communications teams are stewards of institutional voice, credibility, and memory. Their work shapes how institutions are understood today and how they will be judged tomorrow.

In an era of heightened scrutiny and fragmented trust, institutions that invest in this strategic repositioning will not only communicate more effectively, they will govern more responsibly.