Digital empathy is new gold standard for building trust

When Basildon BC felt the brunt of residents’ frustration over cancelled elections, it turned a moment of extreme distrust into a foundation for future engagement, writes Melanie Evans, customer success manager at Orlo, and Jude Mason, campaign and creative design manager at Basildon BC. Sponsored comment from Orlo. 

Melanie Evans (left), customer success manager at Orlo, and Jude Mason, campaign and creative design manager at Basildon BC.

In early 2026, Basildon BC found itself in the middle of a significant communications storm following the announcement of local election cancellations.

While the decision-making sat at a central government level, the brunt of the resident frustration landed squarely on the council’s digital doorstep, and at a time when residents already find it hard to trust the public sector in general, this type of situation can quickly escalate.

The way Basildon handled this was by recognising the importance of not just broadcasting the change in elections, but listening to exactly what their residents had to say and how they felt. They also didn’t just monitor the crisis; they used it to prove why the resident voice is arguably the most important metric of all.

Why listening to communities matters when it comes to trust

Building trust isn’t a one-off campaign, it’s a continuous cycle. At Orlo, we look at trust through a four-stage pyramid: communication, listening, engagement and experience.

• Open and honest communication: Being accountable and providing insight into the why, even when the news is difficult.
• Listening: Not only hearing words being said, but understanding the underlying emotion and sentiment of residents.
• Engagement: A two-way street where residents feel their concerns are being captured and reported upward.
• Experience: Ensuring that when a resident interacts with the council, they leave feeling satisfied that they’ve been heard. Closing the feedback loop is always one of the most valuable steps.

This pyramid is an ongoing cycle that loops back around to the start. The more local government organisations do it, the more that trust will grow.

How Basildon successfully listened to its communities

When the election cancellations were announced, the atmosphere in Basildon shifted instantly. The council needed to move from anecdotal “feeling” to hard, quantifiable data to show stakeholders the severity of the public’s reaction.

Using Orlo’s social listening, sentiment and emotion analysis, the team captured 15,600 relevant mentions over just six weeks. This provided a real-time gauge of resident anger and distrust that was impossible to ignore.

These are the key insights:

• X as a primary channel: While many organisations are retreating from X, Basildon recognised many residents were still active and realised that this was where the most unfiltered, critical conversations were happening regarding voting rights, and they listened in.

• Measuring trust: By using Orlo’s Trust Indicator, the council tracked their ‘trust score’ – a quantifiable way to track whether they’re eroding or building trust with their communities over time. At the height of the crisis, as anger peaked on 30 January, their trust score plummeted to -100%.

• Data as evidence: This wasn’t just ‘social media noise’. This data provided the evidence needed for internal stakeholders and MPs to understand the systemic collapse in resident confidence after this announcement.

The council said: “We are fully aware that even as we share clear, detailed information about these situations and the governance surrounding it, people can easily fill the online space with their own narrative. Misinformation spreads like wildfire so we were mindful that we needed to consistently communicate the full facts, linking back to government decision making where possible.

“We also used Orlo to track ongoing, real-time conversations, ensuring that our communications and messaging reflected and answered the questions that were regularly popping up. By employing this tactic, our trust score and engagement increased significantly.”

Top tips for building resident trust

For other local authorities navigating high-stakes events like this one, here are the key takeaways from what Basildon experienced:

• Don’t ignore the ‘indirect’ mentions: Basildon tracked conversations where they weren’t even tagged. If you only look at your @mentions, you’re missing the real conversation.
• Quantify everything: Qualitative feedback is often dismissed or seen as less important. Using a Trust Score, your council can turn the feeling that “people are cross” into a metric that leadership can actually use in strategic meetings.
• Identify emerging themes: Use a trending topics tool to filter out the noise. When 15.6k mentions hit your inbox, you need to know which ones represent the core concerns of the community, and exactly what they’re saying.
• Stay human on difficult channels: Even when sentiment is negative, acknowledging interactions shows the community that there is a person behind the logo who is seeing their frustration.

Basildon BC said: “Not ignoring these emerging themes, even when they were uncomfortable and hard to listen to, helped to present a transparent perspective throughout. This wasn’t a magic bullet, but helped to show that we were listening and taking action.

“We used the rich information that we mined from Orlo to create briefing notes, highlighting some of the key topics and themes. These were then used in our meet the leader and public sessions, meaning we were prepared beforehand and were aware of some of the questions that may be raised.”

Turning distrust into excitement

The turning point arrived when the government reinstated the elections. Because Basildon had been tracking sentiment and emotion so closely, they were able to document the immediate “emotional pivot” of the borough and attribute it to the reinstatement announcement.

The recovery was as dramatic as the decline:

• 73% recovery in trust: Following the reinstatement, the Trust Score climbed from its lowest point of -100% back up to +23.91%.

• Positive emotions: The dominant emotions the team tracked shifted rapidly from ‘anger’ and ‘confusion’ to ‘excitement.’
• A permanent seat at the table: This project proved that social media sentiment and emotion are vital accountability metrics. It has now been integrated as a permanent, official contact channel for the council.

As part of Basildon’s new ‘6 in 26’ campaign, we have segmented these aims in Orlo. This allows them to track sentiment on each of these independently and manage the posts, comments and engagement.

The Basildon experience shows that while councils can’t always control the national narrative, they can control how well they listen to their residents. By providing a platform for the community to feel heard during a challenging time, the council turned a moment of extreme distrust into a foundation for future engagement.

The council said: “Residents’ voices are the main pillar of what we do from a communications perspective. Our work succeeds and fails on what is understood by them, and providing the best service for them is our guiding principle.”

To find out more about Orlo’s community engagement platform for local government, click here.

Main image: AI-generated illustration created with ChatGPT/OpenAI