What are our key principles?
We’re
- Calm and reassuring
- Warm and approachable
- Straightforward
- Down to earth
We use
- Everyday language
- Short sentences
- Bullet points
- An active voice
We aren't
- Trying to be energetic and lively
- Trying to be someone’s ‘best friend’
- Complex
- Full of jargon people don’t understand
We avoid
- Using financial jargon and acronyms
- Long and complex paragraphs
- Being patronising
- Being self-important
What's an 'active voice'?
Writing in an active voice makes our content more engaging to the reader. The subject in the active voice is doing the verb's action. Here’s some examples:
| Passive voice:
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The letter was mailed by Becky
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The form should be sent back to us
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| Active voice:
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Becky mailed the letter
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Send the form back to us
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Who's our audience
Our ‘voice’ needs to speak to (and must take into account) the following distinct audiences at all times:
- Current StepChange clients – those who have received debt advice from us, and are either on a solution or still able to sign up for one
- Potential StepChange clients – including website visitors, and those who have been recommended to us by third parties
- Our internal audience – all our colleagues at StepChange
- Our external partners – all of the organisations and people we work with
- People and organisations we want to – such as regulators, MPs, the media, civil servants
‘Flexing’ our tone of voice
There are certain instances in which we ‘flex’ our tone of voice to suit our audience.
Press releases are a good example of this. The convention for press releases is that they are written in a style designed to enable a journalist to “drag and drop” the story straight into their own copy, without having to rewrite it. For this reason, these are written in the third person (so we talk about “StepChange” rather than “we”, for example). They also use language and style similar to that of a mainstream newspaper.
Another example of this is the way we flex our tone when communicating with people or organisations (such as creditors) as part of a business relationship. Here is some example content from one of our B2B welcome packs:
We estimate that the social cost of problem debt to society is £8.3bn a year through the additional strain on health services, lost productivity, lost jobs and longer-term reliance on welfare and support services.
With predicted rises in interest rates and further pressure on those living on welfare payments, we expect the need for our services to continue to increase, and without the continued support of our funders we won’t be able to meet that demand. Our main source of funding is a model called fair share contribution (FSC).
The text is more formal, uses more complex language and longer sentences than we ordinarily use in client-facing content. This would also be the case for much of our policy work, such as responses to consultations. In these cases we might be dealing with regulators, government departments and others with whom a more formal tone is appropriate.