Categories: Charity writing
      Date: Apr 20, 2009
     Title: Charity copywriting or charity copy writing? Describing what you do

Recently we've had a big long think about how we tell others what we do.

The launch of our new website was the perfect time for us here at ngo.media to do this.

Forced to go over all the articles and materials we'd written over recent years, I can admit to being a little embarrassed by dozens of different ways we'd been describing what we do.

Charity copywriters in one place, charity copy writers in another, sometimes charity copy-writers. Then there was copyediting and copy editing. Proofreading, proof-reading and proof reading. We were an agency here, an organisation there. In rare occasions we even capped up NGO in ngo.media.
(A style guide crime in my book.)

back to basics

So, we began making a list. And it got longer. And longer. After all, how could ngo.media help charities to write excellent publications and improve their writing and editing, if we didn't have our own house in order&quest;

It was the stuff of dreams for pedantic writers. We've had, meetings about hyphenation and semi-colons. Emailed each other opinions on quotation marks and apostrophes. We batted around descriptions of our services, to come up with one line that we would use on everything we put out from now on:

"ngo.media is the leading editorial, copywriting, publications and training agency working only with charities, socially driven organisations and ethical businesses."

It was like a cleansing. An un-tying of the knots the English language sometimes wraps us up in.
We've recently done the same for Homeless Link, going into the organisation to hammer out how the organisation describes itself.

Through interviewing various staff, we established the charity's editorial values, its various audiences.
And now we're helping Homeless Link to cascade the new editorial style guide across the organisation.

How to create a basic style guide: six top tips

Here's our six top tips for creating a very basic editorial style guide for your organisation:

Write a one line description of your organisation and what it does. Hammer out the rough edges, and then put it up on your organisation's intranet, or on an internal blog, so everyone can refer to it when writing about your organisation.
Think about how you would describe your organisation if you had 20 seconds to tell someone who new nothing about charities at all. What needs to go in? What would you leave out?
Come up with five words that describe your organisation's editorial approach. Are you honest, information-based, opinionated, formal, informal, positive, inclusive... even just these words will influence the tone everyone writes in.
Make a list of the difficult style issues your organisation frequently encounters, and make a decision about them. Do you work with 'the homeless', 'homeless people' or 'on homelessness'. Do you capitalise the first letter of job titles? Are you an agency, a charity, an organisation, or what? Don't bother trying to decide on everything just concentrate on those issues that most frequently come up.
Make "a naughty list" of jargon that should never be used, and frequent spelling mistakes from your organisation. Keep this list up to date on your intranet and invite others to contribute.
Pick a newspaper or media style guide to be the default for your organisation. When anyone is writing, they should refer to that style guide for instructions on anything you haven't already accounted for in your own guide. Here's a few to get you started:

The Guardian Style Guide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide

The BBC News Style Guide
http://www.bbctraining.com/pdfs/newsstyleguide.pdf

The Telegraph Style and Grammar Book
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/1435295/Telegraph-Style-Book-Introduction.html

The Times Style and Usage Guide
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/tools_and_services/specials/style_guide/