In my last few posts in this blog and in my Content Marketing Musings newsletter, I’ve laid out the process of building a mission-driven nonprofit brand, using the brand pyramid framework. This week, I highlighted the importance of creating a personality for your brand. Every brand has a personality — a set of human-like characteristics, traits, and qualities that describe the brand to create a unique and relatable identity. We establish an emotional connection when we think of a brand regarding human traits. Today, I want to discuss an important element of brand personality — brand voice.
What is Brand Voice?
A brand voice embodies the unique and consistent style, tone, and language in which a brand communicates, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and overall writing style. Brand voice represents your organization’s unique perspective and the values you stand for. A brand voice is a reflection of your brand’s personality. It sets you apart from the crowd. Your voice should never change and should always reflect and enhance brand personality.
Tone
Tone includes the emotional quality and attitude expressed in communication, from formal and professional to casual and conversational. This can change slightly depending on the target audience and communication channel. For example, a tone can be more casual in social media because you’re telling stories about your programs, not asking for donations. The tone in direct mail appeals could be more urgent. However, a brand’s voice should never change.
Why is Voice Important for Mission-Driven Organizations?
Voice is a critical aspect of good storytelling. Storytelling drives a deeper commitment to a brand by uniting stakeholders through shared experiences. Nonprofits and faith-based organizations must tell the story of their mission in a way that both inspires stakeholders to want to help and gives them hope that they can make a difference. The voice must be realistic and clear about the problems your mission addresses in the present, but also hopeful for the future. It must also always active. Your organization must always be DOING something, feeding someone who is hungry or sheltering someone who was homeless, for example. And your brand voice always asked for engagement from your stakeholders. Your brand voice invites stakeholders into the story and put them to work once they were there.
How to Create a Brand Voice
While working for LSS, we created a whole new brand. In developing our brand voice, my team created a list of words we use and words we don’t use. It was important to us that we don’t ever generalize our clients or the situations they are in. Being homeless does not define a person, so we never use words like “the homeless”. We say “people experiencing homelessness.” We don’t want to minimalize them as individuals in any way.
We also examined our core values and crafted a personality that matched those values. We wanted to make sure that our voice reflected our actions. So, since our values were faith-based, integrity, compassion, stewardship, leadership, innovation, excellence, and visionary, we chose these personality traits: thoughtful, dynamic, innovative, fun, engaging, accessible, faithful, and loving. We then created a brand voice that reflected that personality.
We also developed a specific brand tone, one of hope and renewal. Our clients come to us to change their lives for the better and we are proud and humbled to be a part of that restoration. Our storytelling is permeated with that uplifting tone, even when talking about the need for our services. We think this specific brand voice and tone makes our stories more meaningful and our messaging more impactful.
Now it’s your turn.
Establishing a consistent and clear brand voice is a critical element of telling stories. Our shared stories make an organization human. It’s important not to lose that message with a tone that does not resonate with the culture of your programs or the focus of your services. With the right brand voice, you will give prospective donors and partners a face to relate to and a mission to get behind.
Given your brand personality and your core values, what would your voice and tone sound like? Here’s a worksheet to help you get started.
If you’d like my help in building your organizations brand, please schedule a discovery call today. I’m looking forward to working with you!
