Necessary Behavior

The problem

Necessary Behavior is an online, distributed social-justice organisation. The Editorial, Social Media, and Newsletter teams produce and publish content in multiple channels every day. As these teams kept growing, their writing became inconsistent.

To bring consistency and provide guidance, I took the initiative to create a content style guide.

Activities

Since the team worked across time zones, I ran most activities asynchronously.

• ✓Stakeholder interviews
• ✓Desk research
• ✓Competitor analysis
• ✓Qualitative and quantitative user research
• ✓Affinity mapping

Setting the stage

I began with a competitor analysis to understand how other organisations structure their style guides. I drew inspiration from:

• ✓Mailchimp — clear and extensive structure
• ✓Buzzfeed — thematically similar to Necessary Behavior
• ✓UX Content Collective — strong accessibility guidelines

Brand

To understand how key stakeholders viewed the brand and how they wanted it represented, I sent out a survey asking them to complete statements using verbs and adjectives.

I then created an affinity map to group their responses. This became the foundation for defining the brand's voice and tone and helped validate the existing principles.

Voice

To help writers understand the brand voice, I wrote short descriptive blurbs.

• Sour 🍋 — We're sour about the violence people have experienced.
• Confident 💪 — We are a place for people who need help. We want them to feel confident with what they know and who they are.
• Informative 💬 — We inform our readers about controversial and sensitive topics. Whenever possible, we provide resources for those who want to research themselves.
• Empowering & Inspiring ✊ — We believe that it's okay to make mistakes. Everyone should live as their best self and feel supported by like-minded individuals. Everyone should believe they can make change.
• Inclusive 👭 — We want our readers to feel like they're part of our cause. Everyone's emotions are valid and it's really important that we all have a voice when it comes to social injustice. After all, we want to provoke action and thought to change the world as we know it.

Tone

To define tone, the CEO and I agreed to let readers evaluate existing content. With help from the data analyst, we compiled top-performing posts from different platforms.

I used Microsoft's Desirability Toolkit to ask readers to describe the samples.

I combined the most common descriptors with my affinity map to create "this, but not that" tone guidelines. This gave writers enough flexibility to sound authentic while staying aligned with the brand.

Feedback

To reinforce the credibility of the style guide, I involved the CEO in presenting it to the entire team. This helped integrate the guide into the writers' daily workflow.

“Oh, I love this! I really like the topics and little blurs about what this means exactly and think it really helps guide what we're trying to convey.”

Impact

The style guide became a practical tool for 16 content writers across the Editorial, Newsletter, and Social Media teams. It helped them produce more consistent content in terms of voice, tone, and style.

Next steps

After gathering feedback from the team, I identified several areas to expand in future editions.

• Page structure
• Tone per article type
• Citation style
• Images and media
• Trigger warnings