In the UK alone, there are currently 170,283 registered charities – more than enough to overcrowd a marketplace, split donor attention and drive down funding. All of this competition means that charities need to do everything they can to stand out from the crowd – starting with talking with one voice across every channel.
As someone who has worked independently with dozens of charities in the UK over the last fifteen years (helping out small community charities all the way up to national organisations), I’ve seen first-hand the damage that inconsistent messaging can do to confuse your supporters, slow your fundraising efforts and undermine all your hard work.
Imagine you picked up your charity’s annual report. Sat down to read your Instagram feed. Opened an email to recruit new volunteers. Started writing your next grant application. Did you sound like yourself? Like your organisation? Consistency in your brand voice and messaging across every channel doesn’t just help people recognise you, it reinforces your values and your impact – allowing your brand voice to work overtime for you.
But it can be tricky getting it right. Here’s how to create (and stick to) brand voice guidelines that mean your charity really does sound like itself no matter who your supporter is or where they’re hearing from you.
Why charity messaging consistency is more important than ever
Before we jump into how to create and enforce consistency in your brand messaging and voice, first we need to understand why it’s so critical to getting it right.
Public trust in charities is at an all-time low. Their recent research found that only 50% of UK adults say they trust charities to deliver on their promises. When your Instagram posts sound like a completely different organisation to the emails you send out each month, when your website gives a different impression to the one your frontline service volunteers give, you’re confusing your supporters and damaging that trust.
Think about the charities you know instantly. Cancer Research UK. Oxfam. The RSPCA. St John Ambulance. Age UK. Each of these brands is so recognisable that no matter where you see them — be that a collection tin on the high street, an advert on TV, or a post on Facebook – you know it’s them. Creating a consistent brand voice takes work, but when it’s done right it can set you apart.
Fundraising — and running a charity — takes up a LOT of time. Time you don’t have spare. Time you could be spending actually doing your job. Spending hours tweaking emails to ‘sound right’, debating with your team over who decides what your brand voice is and trying to rewrite messages that have already gone out is wasting everyone’s time – and, let’s face it, you’re already stretched far too thin as it is. Having crystal-clear brand voice guidelines saves time and therefore money.
Your brand voice is a marketing asset. The more your supporters hear it, the bigger impact it will have.
What’s the difference between brand voice and brand tone?
Your brand voice is how you communicate across every channel. It’s your charity’s personality. It’s the you that comes across whether you’re posting on Twitter or writing your annual report. Are you authoritative? Knowledgeable? Research-led? Friendly? Casual? Hard-hitting? empowering? Supportive? Are you a nerd for goats? Your brand voice is who you are.
Your brand tone is how you shift your voice to suit your audience. If your brand voice is warm and friendly, your tone might shift when thanking a major donor versus chatting with a volunteer versus supporting a member of the public who uses your service. You aren’t changing your voice, you’re shifting your tone to suit the conversation.
Too many charities I’ve worked with suffer from a lack of brand voice consistency because they’ve never actually sat down and defined what their voice is. Instead, each team member has a loose idea of what brand ‘sounds like’ and so communicate using a tone that fits with their personality. Suddenly your fundraising team sounds corporate and transactional, your service delivery team sounds sterile and removed and your communications team sounds breezy and chatty. To your supporters it can sound like three completely different organisations all trying to run around the same payroll.
Create your charity brand voice guidelines
If you want your supporters to know who you are and what you stand for no matter where they encounter you, you need clear brand voice guidelines. And I’m not talking about a Word document gathering dust on a shared drive somewhere. You need actionable, accessible brand voice guidelines that every team member can reference whenever they need it.
Here’s how I work with my clients to create their brand voice guidelines.
Audit your current communications
Find every example of your charity communicating publicly over the past six months. Yes, absolutely everything. Social media posts, emails, your annual report, grant applications, website copy, volunteer newsletters, donor thank-you letters, campaign materials, online adverts, anything you can think of. Put it all in a folder.
Read through everything. Do they sound like they come from the same organisation? Where do you notice inconsistencies? What sticks out as sounding most like ‘you’? What doesn’t sound like your brand at all? In one audit I did for a mental health charity, their website talked about “clients”, their social media use “service users”, their fundraising materials talked about “beneficiaries” and their annual report referred to “people we support”. Same group of people, four words.
Define your charity’s values and mission
To create a strong foundation for your brand voice guidelines, you need to start with your core values. Your brand voice should be driven by what your charity does and why you do it. Get together your trustees, key staff members, (and service users if applicable) and ideally long-term donors to workshop answers to these questions:
– What are our values?
– What makes us different to other charities?
– How do we want people to feel after they’ve interacted with us?
– What would be so wrong that we’d never say it?
– If our charity was a person, how would we describe them?
This isn’t something you can knock together in ten minutes. I usually run at least a half-day workshop to really drill down into your answers. Because they will form the basis for everything you do next.
Define your brand voice
Use the answers you discovered in your values and mission workshops to come up with 3–5 descriptors for your brand voice. What word best describes how you communicate? Be specific.
Here’s an example from a homelessness charity I worked with:
Dignified – We believe in the dignity of all people. When we communicate, we do so in ways that uphold that dignity. We don’t aim to shock with salacious pictures or language, talk down to people or use pitying language.
Informed – We know what we’re talking about. Our messages and communications are rooted in the latest evidence, the lived experiences of our staff and volunteers, and deep subject matter expertise. We aren’t afraid to speak about homelessness and its causes using authority.
Hopeful – At [charity name], we recognise that there are many awful things in this world. But we never communicate despair. We always hope with our supporters that things can improve, and prove every day that they can.
Direct – We value transparency and clarity above all else, which means we communicate in ways that are clear and straightforward. We don’t use jargon, we don’t exaggerate and we don’t talk down to our audiences.
Get into the nitty-gritty
For each of your brand voice characteristics, define:
– What exactly does it mean for us?
– What do we sound like when we don’t follow this brand pillar?
– What would an example sound like?
Create actionable brand voice guidelines
The most common pitfall of brand voice guidelines is making them comprehensive but not useful. Creating brand voice guidelines is fantastic – but only if everyone who needs to use them can do so easily. Open up that folder of resources you collected earlier. How on earth are you meant to create Instagram posts that sound ‘hopeful’ or ‘dignified’ in a month’s time from your workshop? They need to be accessible, in-useable, and practical.
Include the following in your guidelines:
- Guidance on vocabulary you use. Words you avoid. Phrasing ideas.
- Get specific on grammar and style. Do you use contractions? Always capitalise key terms? How do you approach punctuation in social posts? Do you use the Oxford comma?
- Do you prefer short, punchy sentences? Long, complex ones? Active voice or passive? First / second / third person?
- Formatting guidance. Email salutations and sign-offs. Headings. Lists.
- Lots of examples showing ‘before and after’ your brand voice guidelines, and template copies for emails, social posts, etc. that your team can directly use.
Tailor your brand voice to each channel
Your brand voice won’t change between communications, but your tone will. And different channels will have different rules – you won’t be able to use the same template for your Twitter feed as you do for your annual report. Make a seperate page in your guidelines for each channel your charity uses:
- Website
- Emails
- Social media (platform by platform)
- Printed communications
- Face-to-face conversations
- Phone conversations
- Grant applications
Define how your brand voice works in each of those contexts. You brand voice is consistent, but your tone will shift depending on where your supporters are hearing from you.
Embedding Your Guidelines Throughout Your Charity
Establishing guidelines for your charity is pointless unless they’re put into practice. I’ve encountered too many elegant brand voice guidelines that have never been implemented or referred to because they’re simply not embedded into the culture of the organisation.
Training & Onboarding
All staff and volunteers that speak on behalf of your charity should be trained in how to use your brand voice. This isn’t something that can be covered in a hour-long meeting with someone reading through guidelines. Engagement is key.
Host workshops that ask participants to practice using your guidelines. “How would we explain this service change to existing users?” “How would we reply to this comment on social media?” “How would we word this funding application?” By learning through doing your brand voice will stick.
Include brand voice guidance as part of onboarding for all new staff and volunteers. When people join your charity they should know how to talk about what you do, as well as what you do.
Creating A Review Process
Have processes in place to review communications before they go out. Obviously not every social media update needs to be cleared by your CEO before posting. But internal procedures should be in place to ensure that everything is brand voice compliant before going live, especially those that are high-profile or high-risk.
Have brand voice champions in each team; people who understand the guidelines and can help colleagues quickly if they’re unsure. Foster a culture where people feel comfortable asking “Hey, does this sound like us?”
Auditing & Refinement
Set regular periods to review your brand voice guidelines are being adhered to. Schedule quarterly or six-monthly audits of your communications looking back at your previous work. Are your brand voice guidelines being used? Where are the gaps? Are there sections of your guidelines that could do with more explanation?
Remember that your guidelines aren’t set in stone. As language changes and your charity grows your guidelines will need updating too. The homelessness charity I mentioned at the start of this article reviews their vocabulary guidelines every year because homelessness language is constantly evolving.
CRM Software for Consistent Messaging
Arguably the most useful tool you can utilise to ensure brand consistency across your charity is using a good **CRM for charities**. Many organisations view customer relationship management software as a way of storing supporter details but modern CRM software for charities allow you to be strategic with your communications and ensure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Central Hub for Supporter Communications
A good CRM for nonprofits acts as the single source of truth for supporter conversations. If your fundraising team, volunteers team, service delivery staff and your communications team all use the same CRM then everyone can see what other people have said to your supporters, when and how.
No more scenarios where a supporter gets sent two conflicting letters from different parts of your charity, or someone is thanked for making a donation they never made. I’ve worked with charities where the same person received 3 versions of the same appeal letter in one week from three separate parts of the charity. Fortunately none had been sent out yet but you can only imagine the damage that would have occurred to that relationship!
Template Management
You can create and manage brand-approved templates within your CRM directly tied to your brand voice guidelines. Rather than each member of staff creating their own emails from scratch (and inadvertently presenting the brand voice differently each time) they can instead use templated emails and sales letters that you have crafted and approved in line with your brand voice guidelines.
Software like infoodle CRM allows you to create template libraries with permissions so that only approved templates are used for external communications, whilst allowing for personalisation where necessary.
Using templates doesn’t mean your communications have to be robotic. Well-crafted templates offer your staff the best of both worlds allowing for personalised communications that are structured and consistently convey your brand voice.
Segmentation
Just because your brand voice is consistent it doesn’t mean that your tone should stay the same in every circumstance. Tone should change depending on who you’re talking to and where you’re talking. A good CRM software for charities allows you to segment your supporters precisely so you can adjust tone where necessary but still be within brand voice guidelines.
You may speak to major donors differently to how you communicate with volunteers. You might word things differently to service users than to corporate partners. You may communicate differently to long standing supporters compared to someone who has just made their first donation. By segmenting your audiences in your CRM you can tailor your tone to suit whilst remaining within your guidelines.
For example, your brand voice could be “warm, with lots of evidence” but your tone when writing to a corporate foundation about a grant may be more formal and fact-heavy than the tone you would use when thanking someone for their first donation which might be warmer and include the stories you’ve been able to support through their donation. Both communications would still sound like your charity, you’re just adapting it based on context.
Workflow & Approval Processes
Your CRM for nonprofits can also have approval workflows applied to communications to ensure another pair of eyes review them before they’re sent out. Set rules so that certain communications must be approved by someone else before hitting send. This is great for organisations that have multiple staff creating supporter communications, or perhaps involve lots of eager volunteers in your supporter communications.
Build quality control into your processes rather than relying on everyone having a diligent eye.
Reporting
Your CRM should have robust reporting facilities that allow you to analyse how and when you’re communicating with your supporters. You should be able to see who is sending communications, to which audiences they’re being sent and how often.
If your CRM tells you your volunteer team are emailing your supporters every fortnight but your fundraising team only contacts them quarterly then you can start to address that imbalance. If your reporting shows that one particular team consistently ignore your templates and create their own you can pinpoint that team and provide additional support or training.
Integration With Other Channels
Look for a CRM that integrates with your other communication tools. Your CRM for charities should slot into your email marketing software, your social media scheduling tool, your website forms and ideally even your offline communications too. If it integrates with your other tools then your brand voice guidelines can flow through into every area of your supporter engagement.
You want every interaction your supporters have with your charity to feel like it’s from the same source. Someone filling out your website form should receive an automated email, perhaps a social media response and then a phone call from your team. Not only should each of these pieces of communication be on-brand and compliant with your guidelines, but they should all sound like they’re from the same organisation. Software integration means this can happen seamlessly.
FAQs About Charity Brand Voice Guidelines
As someone who helps charities develop brand guidelines week in, week out, I often hear these questions.
Here are my answers:
“Our staff don’t have time to check guidelines”
You’re making it too hard. Simplify. Reference cards. Templates. Incorporate it into your processes. Systems. Make it easier to communicate on brand than not.
“Our team needs to sound different”
Tonally, yes. But they shouldn’t sound like a different organisation. You want your fundraising team and service delivery team to sound like the same organisation, speaking differently to different contexts and audiences. If they’re currently complimenting each other by sounding like separate entities, you have a brand consistency issue.
“Our voice guidelines stifle creativity”
Good guidelines should give you freedom, not limit creativity. By clearly setting out who you are, and how you communicate that consistently, you remove doubt. Your guidelines should provide answers to the basic questions so creative energy can be expended on doing your job better, not wondering if something is “on brand”.
“We can’t afford to pay for brand consultancy”
You don’t need to. Don’t let someone over-complicate it for you. Yes, some big-brand consultancies can offer charity brand advice, but lots of charities create awesome brand voice guidelines using in-house workshops. You need resource – namely time and people committed to seeing the process through – but you don’t need a big budget.
UK Charity Sector Benchmarks
Who do you look to within the UK charity sector who consistently speak with the same voice across channels?
How do you feel when you interact with Cancer Research UK? Whether you’re reading one of their research publications, browsing their website or watching a social media post their voice is competent, authoritative, hopeful and research-led.
The RSPCA always sounds passionate, animal-focused and galvanising.
Brand guidelines didn’t fix these organisations voices overnight. But they did help. And more than that, they invested time and resource into making sure those guidelines were active across the organisation. They use systems – like intelligent CRM systems for charities – which help build consistency in.
There is a reason competitors in the UK charity sector fight so viciously for supporters. We’ve got more charities per head of the population than anywhere else in the world. Trust is a luxury that can only be afforded once you’ve proven yourself to the public. And we’re expected to do it all with less and less government funding, increasing regulation… all while supporters interact with multiple charities through multiple channels at the same time.
If it wasn’t important, marketing teams across the sector wouldn’t feel like they do every time they log into Twitter. Consistency is crucial. And brand voice consistency is a huge part of that.
How do you know if your consistency efforts are successful?
Here are a few questions you can ask:
- Do your supporters know when something is from your charity, even if there’s no branding?
- Do your staff feel confident creating a magazine article, blog post or social media update thats clearly “on brand”?
- Pull together a selection of marketing collateral across channels. Score each for how well they stick to your agreed voice. Repeat every few months.
- Do your supporters ever tell you they feel like they “know” your organisation? Do they say your communications are clear or easy to understand?
- Has the time taken to produce and review your communications decreased?
Every brand voice guideline will be different
The more frequently asked questions I answer on this blog, the more I realise that there is no “one size fits all” solution to anything to do with charities communicating effectively.
That said, there are definitely “best practice” principles that apply to every charity. One of those is consistency.
Finding a voice that works for your charity, then sticking to it. Across every channel. Every piece of communication.
If you do that, everything else is easy.
Sounds simple right? It isn’t. I’ve helped charities who’ve poured thousands of pounds and months of staff time into developing fantastic looking brand guideline documents, only to watch them gather dust on a shelf.
Successful brand voices are built. And part of that build process is making sure it’s actually implemented. Really. Consistently.
That means clear guidelines that people can actually use. Brand guideline documents that are easy to understand at a glance, backed up by training, quality technology like a solid nonprofit CRM and good procedures.
There is no single trick to successfully brand speaking consistently across lots of channels. But if you’re serious about making it happen you need to ask yourself, are you doing these things? And if not, what can you change?
