Shaping Tone and Voice at FREENOW: A Content Design Leadership Story
Hello…
Thanks for stopping by. This is a story about my work leading on the development of tone of voice guidelines for FREENOW, in 2022.
If you're a copywriter or content designer reading this, you probably already know how essential a tone of voice is, but for everyone else, here’s a quick run-down of why every brand needs one, and why FREENOW in particular had a need at this time:
A brand is not just a name; it's an experience. A great set of tone guidelines serves as the bridge between products and users, campaigns and customers. It’s a tool to shape perceptions, build trust, and make any brand a meaningful part of users' digital lives. Whilst we’d set up some guidelines for writing at FREENOW back in 2019, they weren’t being widely adhered to outside of the central teams, and a new rebrand gave us an opportunity to give everything an overhaul.
In the wake of rebranding, a covid-driven restructure and several name changes and mini mergers, FREENOW found itself at a content crossroads. We had…
A collection of markets and teams that were once distinct entities, now trying to work together to create content and build our product
A range of different voices and experiences depending on what market our users found themselves using our product in (our brand was present across 11 markets at the time)
Some confusion about what great product and marketing writing should look and sound like, a new visual brand identity, but no clarity on content
Enter…well, me 🙋🏼♀️
I saw an opportunity to solve two problems with one project: bringing together a group of people who weren't really working well together and creating proper, functional tone of voice guidelines (along with a whole heap of other great writing guidelines) to finally get our content coherent across all our touch-points. We could launch these guidelines to the business at the same time as the new branding rollout 🤝
Before I dive in, let me just give a little shout out to my awesome team, and some of the other great humans who contributed to this project…
UX Writer
Localisation Manager
Brand Designer
Local Marketing Managers
Copywriter
Stock imagery, but you get the gist ☺️
So…
Back to the story of FREENOW’s tone of voice. My first step was to get everyone else collaborating and feeling involved. I had a hypothesis that part of the reason people weren’t getting along and weren’t following feedback was that they didn’t feel they, as senior stakeholders, were adequately involved in decision making when it came to content. So I wrote myself a little project plan, and set to work on my first goal: getting everyone to work together, properly.
Any good project starts with research, whether that’s desk-based competitor research, or speaking directly with users. So, I decided to get all of the local teams to contribute to that research and put together a project kickoff and remote workshop where they could input into the tone dimensions.
In addition to the workshop, we also ran surveys with users, and had access to swathes of market research done by our lovely brand team 🤩
A sample of my project plan inputs
Goals and objectives
Metrics for success
TOV is utilised accurately across all markets
Readability testing
Get teams working better together
Develop a clear, usable TOV and update all related guidelines
Deliverables, dependencies
Scope and budget
Tone of voice deck for all key markets
Supporting documentation
Workshops
Dependency: brand decks
Timeline, schedule, comms
First draft completion and second stage research by October 2022
Rollout Jan-May 23
Workshops & first stage research by mid Sept 22
Develop all tone of voice documentation
Update all existing product writing documentation
Budget amount set
The workshops
I tasked the stakeholders with finding 2 examples… one of a tone of voice in action that worked (in their opinion) and another where a tone of voice wasn’t being used at all, or wasn’t being used well, across our brand and any other consumer brands.
We had some great examples come through, showing us what worked well, and what didn’t…
I then asked them to use a tone of voice scale to state where they believed the FREENOW tone of voice should sit against multiple markers, taking our new branding into consideration.
As you can see, whilst we had some outliers, there was actually more agreement than I’d originally expected.
After completing the workshops with local market teams, my team and I put together a draft for them to give input on, which I oversaw.
Immediately after the session, I saw a softening in the attitudes of some of the people involved. Slack messages I saw in shared channels became far less frosty, and they continued to bring me examples and thoughts after our initial session, to hear my input and give me theirs. My hunch that these teams just wanted to feel they were equal contributors was correct, it seemed. Working relationships were growing 😍
Once I’d shared, received input, tweaked (and yes in some cases respectfully rejected) all the feedback received, my team had a document shaping up nicely. We were somewhat limited by (though enthusiastic about) our new branding, as the team definitely wanted the tone pillars to match the brands ones, which meant I had some concerns about how clearly these guidelines would be understood by everyone, in particular our external contractors. I wanted to do a bit more validation work.
Testing the tone of voice…
To further validate the document as it stood, I arranged for the team to send some writing tasks using the proposed new tone of voice to some of our freelancers, to test how well they wrote to it (as people who hadn’t been involved in defining it). The results were mixed, some people’s written responses were bang on, whilst others missed the mark a bit. We also piggy-backed on some brand focus groups and shared some copy examples, using the new proposal, with participants to see what resonated with them. From both these exercises we learned a few things:
Simple copy scored more highly with our focus group, so how might we balance our brand voice with simplicity?
For writers who hadn’t been involved, our guidelines weren’t yet clear enough, we were trying to meet the expectations of every stakeholder but losing a bit of sense in the process
People felt like some of the written content resonated with them and was clear (which meant we weren’t a million miles away from done)
From previous work, I knew that even the best tone of voice documentation can be subjective, and this bit of research had helped me confirm just that to the stakeholders on this project. One person’s ‘go getting’ isn’t exactly the same as another’s… With that in mind, I set about putting together tangible examples that related to our product and brand experience to help people know exactly what each part of the document meant for their writing in practice, and how to flex it for different scenarios.
Some examples from the finished tone of voice deck
Expanding the tone of voice …
With the overall tone of voice done, and heavily focused on our Riders, it was time to apply it to some other use cases. As a marketplace business, from the outset I wanted to ensure we gave just as much attention to the content we created for our drivers, a group with a different set of needs and demographics. Unfortunately, we saw some pushback from the business on this due to timelines, however I was keen to ensure we did something.
I tasked our driver copywriter with setting up some quick interviews with our drivers and our internal driver services teams across markets to understand what resonated with them. This was a great teaching opportunity, as she hadn’t yet done any hands-on content research work, so I acted as her assistant on the day to help her out, and we used it as part of her personal development plan.
We showed them examples of communications, both typical marketing ones and in-product content, that we’d developed completely adhering to the overall guidelines (we wanted to prove the need for a specific set of guidelines for drivers, and to do it quickly).
Our drivers did not hold back their feedback 🫣😬
“That sounds like TikTok, you’re not TikTok”
— Driver
“This doesn’t make any sense to me, it feels fluffy”
— Driver
“Why do you talk about yourselves so much, what do we need to know?”
— Driver
Humbled, in a hurry and armed with this user feedback, we set about defining the driver tone of voice guidelines, with examples too…
More examples from the finished tone of voice deck
Rolling out the tone of voice
We made a list of all the places that needs updating, and I prioritised it according to prominence and frequency of use and set the team to updating in batches. I got hands-on and helped with this too, to speed up delivery.
We translated the tone of voice into all of our main languages, and created updated versions of our product writing guidelines and inclusive language guidelines for all markets.
I got the tone of voice and an intro to brand included in our onboarding days for new joiners, to make sure not just writers, but all our teams felt like they owned our voice from day 1 at the company.
Myself and a colleague led a roadshow, running writing workshops with all of our local marketing teams and freelancers to onboard them and get them excited.
Governance
To make sure the tone of voice was adhered to and to keep growing the impact of the content team, we put in place editorial guidelines, sign-offs and checkpoints for all content created within the business. This was easier than previous attempts because of the relationships built earlier in the process, but is an ongoing effort due to the breadth of teams, people and languages involved when creating written content.
We also created the TOV channel and the #ask-the-content-team channel - we have a ton of people writing content, and speaking on behalf of FREENOW to users beyond only those mentioned in this story. From customer service and driver service agents, to PR and senior leadership, we wanted to continue offering our expertise and encouraging people from across the business to come to us with their writing or wording queries.