Flickr Photo: GreencolanderI'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer without thinking.

Let's say you had $100 you had to give to someone else. It doesn't matter who you give it to, just that you give it away to a single person. Who would you give it to?

Is the first person you thought of a family member? A close friend? It probably is.

So, why wouldn't you give it to the first person in need you encounter on your way to get a latte in the morning?

The answer is trust.

You have a relationship that indicates to you that your $100 gift will have some meaning to that person, and that it will be used in a way that is satisfying to both the recipient AND you.

We know trust is a key ingredient missing in our sector these days. Paul Light of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, conducts a regular survey about public trust. The summary of his latest study shows that trust is still declining: fewer and fewer individuals think that nonprofits are doing a good job, and more and more individuals think nonprofits are doing a bad job.

There are a lot of reasons for this mistrust, and some of it is certainly rooted in some very real problems in our sector. But the majority of nonprofits are doing good, and doing it well. We have a task ahead of us, then: we have to show the American public that we can be trusted with their attention, their time, and their money.

How have most nonprofits chosen to respond to this crisis in confidence? With a placebo.

Courtesy of WNYC's RadioLab, I learned a lot about placebos on my flight to Detroit this week. Interesting thing about placebos is that in clinical studies, they are almost always about as effective as the real treatment. For about 15 minutes. Simply being told that your finger won't hurt anymore can make your finger stop hurting for a while. (After that while, you may really need some burn cream to keep the pain under control.)

Nonprofits have administered a placebo to the public -- our response to their painful lack of trust has been to tell them it's all OK. We show them low admin costs and expect this to cure the pain forever.

Paul Light's mantra is "Measure something!" That's certainly the first step. We need to get better as a sector at measuring our impact on our communities. But I think we even need to do more than measure our impact. The real medicine here is to show them, not to tell them. We need to open our kimonos and really involve our stakeholders in our organizations.

It's our obligation now to do more than talk at the public. We need to engage them in relationships. We need not only to tell or stakeholders what we're doing, we need to tell them how we are doing it. We need to invite their feedback along the way. We need to use blogs to tell the story of our work every day, our struggles and our successes. We need to share the images of our communities in Flickr. Our staff need LinkedIn (or FaceBook or MySpace) profiles. We need to operate as if we do our work in the middle of the street, where everyone can see what we are doing, and anyone can contribute.

On occasion, our stakeholders will see our warts. But when they see how often our work is beautiful, they will love us anyway. And they'll want US to have that $100.

What does this post have to do with technology? Not a lot. But social media tools are making it so much easier for us to build relationships and operate transparentlyw, we can't afford not to figure out what they will mean for our organizations.

Many thanks to @tet3, @sdm, @melaniecj, @eikonoklastic, @sarahgilbert, @jasonsamuels, @clynnpete, @greenskeptic, @chiscarlett, and @danielbachhuber for participating in my late night twitter polls.