Tone of voice development | poverty charity

Project: Tone of voice mini guidelines

Client: Help Close By, a poverty charity (pro bono)

I worked with Help Close By, a poverty charity, to develop its foundational tone of voice guidelines and copy for the first incarnation of its website. With three distinct audiences - investors, service providers and service users - the charity needed tailored communication to speak to each group in a language they understood.

For service providers, we created copy around safeguarding and signposting to build credibility, carefully choosing our words to support this. For service users, we crafted clear, direct messaging to explain the support available and how they could access it.

Working closely with the founder and trustees, I devised a consistent charity tone of voice. Through target audience research, I identified key terms and phrases, as well as words to avoid. This all came together in a tone of voice mini guide including a ‘word bank’ which the team could draw on when creating content for social media and other channels.

This mini-project laid the foundation for the charity. A larger project would have involved identifying its brand archetypes, tone of voice analysis for its key competitors and examples of its tone of voice in action.

Five years on and the charity is rolling out its service nationwide, guided by a clear roadmap which I subsequently created.

What the client said

Duncan Catterall, founder of Help Close By said:

Fuschia’s copy has been vital to our progress. From our earliest stage where we needed to recruit people to work on the project, including getting our board of trustees together, having good thoughtful copy that illustrates what we’re trying to do was really important. Early on, the app was just an idea with a ton of technical ideas on how it would work. Having Fuschia re-articulate these ideas in a way people could understand has been so important, especially as our whole purpose is to enable groups and organisations that may not have a huge amount of technical knowledge about systems and software. We’ve since grown into a registered charity and have now got huge community interest ahead of our imminent release. Fuschia has made copy for our site, print materials and PR campaign, some of which are ready on file for the weeks and months ahead. Fuschia writes beautiful copy and will be able to distil your ideas into something your audience will enjoy and respond to. I thoroughly recommend her. 

Need help building trust and credibility? Check out my tone of voice services for changemakers.