Increasing Trust Amid Decreasing Attention

Kate Schmidgall June 12, 2025 | 15 MIN 30 SEC READ

This week I had the joy and privilege of co-leading a session with Evan Feinberg at this year’s Leading Locally conference hosted by BitterSweet Creative's beloved client, Council on Foundations. In a room of leaders and comms practitioners at philanthropic and community foundations, we asked: How do we build authentic audience relationships and public trust through storytelling as the trusted voices that we are? Sharing here the major beats and would be very grateful to hear your thoughts!

Speaking personally, my mission here today is to inspire and equip you with a few thoughts and tools I’ve refined over my twenty years consulting for impact-driven, change-making organizations as a journalist-storyteller, entrepreneur, and nonprofit leader. For the past 15 years, alongside many others like Dave Baker and Obiekwe "Obi" Okolo, I have built BitterSweet – a community of other risk-inclined creatives who have canvassed the country and the world (especially the global south) listening to the stories of people creating hope in every context imaginable: In slums and in schools, from minefields of wars long lost to frontlines still shifting day by day, from the foothills of the Himalayas, to enterprising towns of Africa, healing lands of South America, and all of the above within these United States.

As writers, photographers, and filmmakers we have logged many thousands of listening hours knee to knee with people eager to share, be seen and heard, and celebrated for the overcoming, healing complexes that they are. Any suggestions and story practices I offer here today have been learned from those people whom BitterSweet makes a practice of listening to – the indigenous women of the Guatemalan Highlands (our latest story! ✍🏼 Holly Harris, 📷 Steve Jeter), the Black cowboys and land farmers of Detroit, the urban growers and peace-builders of Chicago, the young authors and artists of Winston-Salem and Denver, the migrant families and children growing up in the mobile home parks outside Atlanta, and the many, many people we’ve featured from BitterSweet’s home city of Washington, DC.

That to say, I feel at home in this room as I know you know these stories as well as I do—and your work makes them possible. So as we get started, I begin with gratitude for the stories you carried into the room here today and we can set an anchor in the fact that nationwide there is no shortage of reasons for hope and examples to inspire.

Declining Trust

So we begin with context—and we find ourselves in a context of crisis with public trust declining and our social fabric degraded. Within the past year, many reports have been published on our topic of social trust and by and large they each paint a portrait of 2025 and the years ahead marked by growing worry, grievance, and violence.

Research published by Independent Sector shows 75% of people are worried about the direction of our country while 94% are worried about growing divisions and lack of national unity.
In its 2025 Trust Barometer, Edelman reported that in the U.S. less than one in three people now believe that the next generation will be better off compared to today.
The same report shows that 61% of people say they hold a moderate to high level of grievance against business, government, and the rich.

Perhaps most alarming, Edelman reports that now 40% (4 in 10) people say they believe hostile activism is a viable means to drive change. Amongst younger people ages 18 – 34, this number changes to 50% (1 in 2).

Given this, it’s worth asking, who do Americans trust? Who are the voices, the trusted messengers, who have the greatest potential to speak with authority, and build unity in this context?

“It’s you,” I said to a room full of leaders from all over the country investing philanthropic dollars and resources of all kinds into change-making organizations in their particular places.

Independent Sector reports the nonprofit and philanthropic sector is the most trusted of all the sectors – much more than government, business, or media.

57% of people express high trust for nonprofits (+5% increase YoY)
37% of people express high trust for private foundations (+6% increase YoY)
While 45% believe nonprofits are making things better (which is more than 2x business, gov’t, media)

It’s important to point out that these two groups are the only two which have seen increases over the past year – all other institutions have seen decreases in trust. What do we trust this sector for? To do the right thing, and solve our country’s greatest challenges.

Independent sector trust in nonprofits and philanthropy

As we face our moment with gusto and guts, it’s worth naming the counter forces and challenges we face in our storytelling, content production, audience building work.

Fragmenting Attention

With the proliferation of smartphones, social media, and streaming services over the past twenty years, we now live within the Attention Economy – where human attention is commodified for profit and gamed for addiction, where algorithms are the new editors determining what’s view worthy and relevant – and doing it differently for each of us.

In 2004 (the year I graduated college), attention spans were 2.5 minutes on average. Today they are 12 seconds for millennials and 8 seconds for Gen Z. Gloria Mark, author of the book Attention Span and UC professor of informatics, has been tracking attention since 2003 and published research showing that on average we:

Switch tasks every 47 seconds
Switch apps/docs about 560 times per day
Check email 77 times per day
TV/Film cut lengths have drastically shortened – changing over the years from 12-13s to about 2-4s today – and that might even feel long, if you’re on TikTok or Instagram.

In my generation, attention fragmentation is presenting in symptoms of fatigue, burnout, memory loss, social disconnection and isolation, which spiral into hours of mindless consumption. Medical research shows this heightens stress and lowers emotional resilience. Now with generative AI gaining steam and producing new content at an unfathomable rate, I find myself wondering what this means for us in terms of saturation. It’s a flashflood of content well beyond anything we’ve seen to date.

So, given these forces within this context, how do we build meaningful relationships with audiences and public trust through storytelling as the trusted voices that we are?

Instinctually, and through conversation with some thoughtful Gen Z’ers, a few important edges are emerging:

Prioritize authenticity, deprioritize perfection – this means focusing on genuine, relatable stories that are more gritty than grand.
Engage the profound – rather than exploiting emotions and always hitting the heartstrings, think about how to encourage a sense of meaning and connection to a bigger purpose, a bigger story.
Simplify without oversimplifying – counteract the effects of cognitive overload and binary reductionism with clear, concise messaging. Personally, I think that complexity and humor is the winning combination.
Encourage reflection – develop a flavor of content that prompts introspection and aims to connect with viewers’ needs and the questions they’re asking.

A side note on humor: Given the gravity of the issues we are facing and trying to solve, humor might sound glib or disrespectful of the seriousness of the work – but I offer you this: In my experience, the people suffering through are never needing a reminder of the seriousness of the situation. More often than not, they are radiant, defiant in their joy, holding to their dignity and keeping their humanity through humor and hospitality.

This crystallized when I met Rudy Balazhinec, founder of a Ukrainian humanitarian aid organization. When we met for the first time, we went into the conversation very somber and Rudy stopped at one point and said, “Why are you so serious?” Which caught us off guard, but over many weeks with Rudy in Ukraine we learned: Laughter is resistance – a refusal to be made less by the forces that come against. “Joy is our healing,” said Rudy. Even, of course, as their hearts are still breaking.

Also worth saying that humor was THE most consistent request from the Gen Z’ers I spoke to regarding content preferences. It seems like the way I, among the oldest millennials, was told social security would never be available to me—Gen Z’ers have gotten the message that, “everything is a crisis and the world is ending, so at least let’s have sense of humor.”

End sidenote.

Ongoing Avalanche

When we talk about an avalanche of content, I hardly think we need statistics to tell us what we’re currently living. But I was in the last class to graduate college without social media being part of the experience, so I still find it shocking that every minute 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube and in 2023 TikTok users created 1 billion videos PER DAY. AI-generated content now accounts for 30% of all digital content and 90% of the world’s data was created within the past two years.

And it is not slowing down. So, we have an opportunity to ask some fresh questions about what we create, why, how, and for whom.

While this avalanche of content roars through every channel, Council on Foundations has also pointed out that there is a vacuum – and at this point you shouldn’t be surprised that it weaves nicely with things we’ve already discussed and is also a vacuum that we can collectively fill to meaningful effect.

And with that, we turn to our core work of storytelling.

Too often we see more of the same when it comes to organizational or institutional storytelling:

Who, not how profiles – usually portraying founders as heroes, volunteers as altruistic saviors, and participants as grateful, somewhat desperate beneficiaries
“We’re changing the world” yet the world of our audiences remains unchanged – increasing skepticism
Neat, no nuance – there is no story without conflict, and yet the sector seems to always want to tie things in a bow
Bland and boring – lost artfulness. An artful approach can engage the imagination and break through boredom in new, refreshing ways.

Committing to More Dimensional Storytelling

Every time BitterSweet begins a listening and discovery process with an organization, we start with a character triangle. There are four layers within the triangle which represent character categories:

First, we have Participant - individuals who have interacted with your programs or services. These are people who have been on a journey and can reflect on that journey in terms of personal transformation.
Second, we have Staff and Volunteers – these are people who can speak to unique methodology, efficacy, struggle, day to day challenges or organizational hopes.
Third, we have Community Partners – third-party organizations or individuals who can provide an ecosystem perspective. What different does your organization make in the broader context it operates in? What institutional relationships are important? Who can add texture to the issues and dynamics at play?
Fourth, we have Leadership – these are founders, executives, board members – people who can reflect on the history of the work as well as the vision for the future, the horizon. Where are we going and what do we hope is true ten years from now as a result of what we’re doing and learning today?

At the top of the page there’s a horizontal line – this represents a person’s history with the organization. On the right side of the page we have ‘seasoned’ and the left side of the page we have ‘fresh’. With the hundred organizations I’ve done this with, when it comes to storytelling, I’d say 98% over index on the top and bottom categories and almost completely neglect their middle groups. This is where I think we have the most potential to unearth stories like Un Architecte – the story of the master craftsman; one of my favorite films produced by BitterSweet to date (🎬 Brandon Bray Steve Jeter) – and develop peripheral vision for ecosystem stories that will fill the social sector’s narrative vacuum.

Note: The triangle is upside down to suggest weight/volume of listening needed in order to distill essence and uncover new story dimensions and/or identify new voices to include.

Once you’ve added all your typical characters to the diagram, the work of weaving a dimensional narrative is simply starting to trace zigzags across the sheet, connecting the perspectives of a variety of characters to one another and clarifying the patterns, truths, and universal principles that they illuminate. That said, there is no shortcut for the deep work of listening and the recurring work of curiosity.

Many organizations are surprised how much they learn when they take time to listen to their own staff about the work they do and the reasons, ways they do it. Leaders are wonderful story voices of course, but in my experience they’re overleveraged and sometimes much too polished to provide the grit and texture required for more authentic and less perfect storytelling. And they’re busy, so…always good to share the load and develop new spokespeople and ways of telling stories that show our authentic ‘why’.

If you’d like to receive the Character Triangle worksheet or talk to me about storytelling opportunities for your organization, let me know.

Otherwise, I would love to hear from you and how you’ve thought about things along these lines. Peace.

By Kate Schmidgall, Bittersweet Creative Founder, Director

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