Earlier this month, a group of professional communicators gathered at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Just the fact that those 39 people, who represented 19 different organizations and some 50,000 professional communicators, were all together in one place was historic enough. But what was truly amazing was that this huge ad-hoc committee actually achieved consensus on three major, industry-wide recommendations.

As much as we might like to give credit to the meeting’s participants, this unusual achievement is more a function of the severity of the problem than the ability of the group to cooperate; they were addressing trust—or specifically the lack thereof—in corporate America.

The summit was the product of the PR Coalition, a collection of organizations representing all the major communications groups (PRSA, IABC, PAC, Arthur Page Society, Council of Communication Management, Council of PR Firms, PRSA’s Counselor’s Academy, the Institute for Public Relations, IPRA, NIRI, National School PR Association, and Women Executives in Public Relations) to share information on what each group is doing in the area of research, initiatives, etc.

Increasingly, the group felt that it should do more than just meet and share information, it should pool its collective clout and take a stand. Unfortunately, the Enron/Worldcom et al. crisis provided the perfect issue: Restoring public trust in America’s big businesses.

So invitations were sent out, a facilitator was hired, and on January 14th, the representatives met. (I was there representing IPR’s measurement commission.) The introductions alone were impressive. Not only were the world’s leading organizations focused on corporate communications represented, but their leaders represented some of the best known names in corporate America (Accenture, Allstate, Northwestern Mutual), as well as prominent academic institutions (the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, the Corporate Communication Institute at FDU, Global Public Affairs Institute).

The meeting took place at Florham, the 1897 country estate of Florence Vanderbilt and Hamilton Twombly. Apparently, the Twombly’s only spent 11 weekends a year there, but I can’t imagine how they could ever leave the place. The ballroom was worthy of Versailles. I’m convinced the marble pillars and elegant surroundings contributed a generous helping of gravitas to the tone of the discussions.

Our goals were clear: Create tangible deliverables concerning restoring and measuring trust, resulting in actionable recommendations to corporate leaders as a basis for our organization to develop programs.

The group was divided into three, each charged with tackling a specific aspect of trust:

Not surprisingly, I was assigned to the third group. Our assignment was: How to encourage corporate management to define and measure trust. After several hours of lively discussion, we reported back to the group as a whole. It was then up to the entire group to achieve consensus on our recommendations, ultimately narrowing it down to three:

At the end, the product of our work was far more than a press release, or even a set of recommendations, it was the notion that a diverse group of professional communications advisors could come together and take action.