Voice and Tone

Defining a voice and tone is extremely helpful when aligning with other teams, stakeholders, and content across the company. Since I had little experience designing a voice and tone style guide, but one was much needed at the company - here is my approach to kick start things so marketing could then take over, be the owner, and expand.

Summarized Approach

• Surveyed employees for 3 words that described the company
• Interviewed SMEs about their experience at the company
• Researched voice and tone style guides from other companies (i.e., what to include, what not to)
• Structure borrowed from Mailchimp and included other components found useful to help include our own initiatives like best practices for plain and inclusive language
• Then designed a learning path to help folks use it to help write learning content in the company
• Marketing took over where I left off and expanded it into a full editorial style guide

Editorial Style Guide

Writing Learning Path