Designing voice & tone.
(And promoting good writing.)
50% reduction in editing time | 4x page views and 40% boost to completion rate
The team: Visual Identity/Brand Designer (contractor); Content Designer (me)
Part of HR Assured’s digital transformation was the drafting of a new set of brand guidelines. I wrote a Voice & Tone guide that captured the principles, style and messaging I’d used when rewriting HR Assured’s website.
The challenge
After a lengthy project writing the new website and all marketing assets (including emails, brochures, workplace relations magazine, newsletters, etc.):
I could see writing in the style of the old website creeping in whenever I edited emails and blogposts by other staff.
To protect the brand, and for the sake of consistency, I wanted to prevent any public facing communications that might be inconsistent with our newly established voice and tone.
It was taking too long for me to edit regular workplace relations blog posts written by Associates and Partners, mainly due to the writing style: passive voice, wordy, double spaces after full stops, structural issues, lack of storytelling. The audience for these posts was a general one with no legal training, and the posts were attracting few readers.
The solution
I created a Voice & Tone guide to be part of our new brand guidelines, to record the style and messaging of the new website, and to assist other teams and contributors to stay on-brand whenever they communicated outside (or inside) the company.
To illustrate the principles discussed in the V&T guide, I wrote the guide in the style recommended by the guide.
I had a lot of fun with this, as you can probably tell when reading it.
To further promote on-brand writing in the company:
I created a ‘Good Writing’ resource library on the company intranet.
I wrote and ran several Plain English writing workshops for company lawyers, including sections on storytelling, writing in active voice, and structuring blogposts for engagement.
I purchased hardcover copies of Everybody Writes, by Ann Handley, and gave one to every workshop participant.
I started ‘office hours’ for anyone in the company to ask for advice on specific writing projects, or general writing advice.
I started a writer’s group, one lunchtime per week, open to anyone at the company. Members could write, share work and receive feedback, or just talk writing. I purchased several AlphaSmart Neo distraction-free word processors using my own money, and gave them to members. One member later published a short story collection, while another wrote a successful indie video game. Go team!
Results & lessons learned
I reduced the time I spent editing blogposts by 50%.
There was a shift in the company towards better writing, evidenced by the improved quality of emails, newsletter and increased engagement with the website articles (analytics measured 4x page-views; increased dwell time consistent with estimated read time, and a 40% increase in people scrolling to the end of the article, consistent with having read to the end).
Some people simply weren’t interested in writing, or thought their writing was fine and didn’t need improvement. Fortunately, enough people embraced the opportunity to learn more about writing to improve standards (and reduce the amount of editing I needed to do).
I received positive feedback from leadership, and verbal acknowledgement from the CEO of the importance of good writing in all aspects of the business.
I learned that it’s really, really hard to change people’s habits when they’ve been doing things a certain way for most of their life or career!
I learned that lawyers love using passive voice precisely because it’s unclear and ambiguous and attributes actions (and consequent blame) to no specific individual (i.e. the lawyer or their client). No one owns anything in passive voice.
And I learned that using double-spaces after a full stop is a lawyer thing, and originated in the days of monospaced typewriters where a single space might be insufficient to clearly separate sentences, so lawyers would habitually hit their typewriter spacebars twice to make a bigger space. Why this ancient tradition carried over to the age of modern keyboards is one of life’s mysteries.
Templates and other brand assets
As part of the Brand Guidelines, I also worked on the content for a series of Microsoft Word templates, previews of which can be seen on the third page of the Voice & Tone guide.
