GUEST POST // Creating a Digital Style Guide: 4 Tips for Your Nonprofit
By Allison Manley of Kanopi Studios
In order for your nonprofit to engage supporters and bring in funds, crafting a solid marketing plan is essential. While your organization’s exact content strategy will vary somewhat based on your audience, you’ll likely be able to reach large numbers of supporters through digital marketing channels like your website, email, and social media.
Online engagement with nonprofits has been increasing in recent years. But with the amount and variety of information that potential supporters have access to on the internet, your organization will need to work harder to stand out from similar nonprofits and promote your cause.
To make your marketing reflect your nonprofit in a cohesive, memorable way, you’ll need to establish a distinct brand, which encompasses the messaging you use across all platforms as well as the look and feel of your marketing materials. Putting together a digital style guide will help keep your organization’s branding consistent from one platform to the next and tie each piece of content you create back to your overall digital strategy.
In this article, we’ll walk through four tips for creating an effective digital style guide:
Define your nonprofit’s messaging clearly.
Understand your organization’s audience(s).
Highlight visual elements of your branding.
Take all your marketing channels into consideration.
Once you’ve made your digital style guide, you can distribute it as a reference to anyone who may be creating content within your organization. The guide will also be useful for any outside help you bring in, such as a nonprofit web design agency that will help you optimize your site to reflect your unique brand.
1. Define your nonprofit’s messaging clearly
Your mission needs to be at the heart of all the marketing content your organization creates. Instead of selling a product or service like most brands, you’re selling your impact, which prompts supporters to donate, volunteer, or otherwise engage with your nonprofit.
In your organization’s digital style guide, place your mission statement on the first page so that you can always refer back to it as you create content. Then, make a section in which you further define how your marketing materials will keep your mission at the forefront, including examples of emails, social media captions, or blog posts that spotlight your nonprofit’s impact.
Besides making sure that your messaging reflects your mission, you’ll want to design all your marketing materials so they sound like your organization wrote them. Include notes in your style guide on the following aspects of writing:
Tone: How do you want your supporters to view your organization when they read your marketing messages? Are you optimistic, passionate, trustworthy, or something else?
Mechanics: In written materials, do you typically use the Oxford comma? Do you prefer the spelling conventions of American English or British English? What other grammar and stylistic rules are important to your organization?
Descriptive wording: For example, does your nonprofit “help” people or “partner with” them? Are your event sponsors “businesses,” “retailers,” or “corporate partners”? What words do you like to use when discussing your organization’s purpose, and what words do you prefer to avoid?
Above all else, Getting Attention’s guide to nonprofit branding recommends prioritizing actionable and memorable messaging. When making decisions for your digital style guide on the specifics of brand messaging, make sure that your branding reflects your organization’s purpose and values as accurately as possible.
2. Understand your organization’s audience(s)
For many nonprofits, it’s easy to say that you’re trying to market your impact to a wide audience and turn that mindset into designing for mass appeal. But knowing what population groups actually engage with your nonprofit will allow you to focus your efforts for a more effective marketing strategy.
The supporter data your nonprofit has collected in the past will be your most useful tool as you go about researching your audience, which you can do in three easy steps:
Determine what demographics your nonprofit attracts. Common demographic factors to look into include age, gender, location, education level, wealth, and family status.
Analyze supporters’ past engagement metrics. Considerations here include type of involvement (donating, volunteering, attending events, etc.), frequency and recency of engagement, amount of money donated to or time spent working with your organization, and motivation for support.
Segment your supporters. Combine your analysis of demographic and engagement data to create several groups of supporters who share similar characteristics. For example, you might create a segment of older, wealthy, recurring donors who respond well to direct mail. Or you may have a segment of young social media followers who don’t yet have the means to donate but enjoy supporting your cause by volunteering.
For each major segment, create a persona to help you understand who those supporters are, how they think, and what platforms they use to engage with your nonprofit. Include the personas in your digital style guide so you can reference them as you create different types of content.
3. Highlight visual elements of your branding
The part of your digital style guide that will contribute most to consistency across platforms will be the visual branding section. The visual elements of your brand connect your nonprofit’s mission and values to its image. Supporters will identify a piece of content as coming from your organization based on how it looks and commit those ideas to memory.
When you create your style guide, you’ll want to add enough detail that readers will be able to visualize what you’re talking about, but not so much that they find it overwhelming. Concentrate on a few important elements that will apply to most of your marketing materials, including:
Fonts. For visual variety, choose two brand fonts, designating one for headings and another for body text. Keep in mind that using more than three typefaces can give your content a cluttered look. To help avoid this problem, specify not only what fonts you’re using but also which style or weight of each (for example, state that body text should be in Poppins Light instead of just Poppins).
Colors. Most brands pick one or two main colors and a few variant shades that they can use across a variety of platforms. Instead of just writing the names of colors in your style guide, include the six-digit hex codes that you can type into any graphic design tool to get the same exact shades every time (so instead of “bright yellow,” you would list #f2e129 or #eded24).
Logo. Use your brand fonts and colors to design a simple but memorable logo that you’ll include across all marketing materials. Add a few variations on your logo (for example, one featuring your organization’s full name and one with an abbreviation) to your style guide so that you can adjust based on the available space in each piece of content.
Images. Any photos or graphics you use in your marketing materials should reflect your organization’s mission and appeal to your audience. Include some guidelines for different types of images in your style guide, as well as a few examples.
As your organization evolves over time, you might want to update your visual branding, which will mean making changes to your digital style guide. But detailing each of these elements will serve as a good starting point that you can adapt later on.
4. Take all your marketing channels into consideration
Your digital style guide will be most effective if it’s applicable across all of the marketing platforms your nonprofit uses. So, as you create the guide, make notes of any variations or specifications in content design that apply to each platform.
You’ll especially want to take note of the following communication channels:
Your organization’s website. If you need inspiration for how to incorporate visual branding and mission-focused messaging into your website, you can look to other organizations’ sites, like those on Kanopi’s list of the best nonprofit websites.
Social media. Your style guide will apply differently if the social media platform you’re dealing with is text-based like Twitter, image-based like Instagram, or video-based like YouTube or TikTok. Therefore, you should include separate notes on each social media site that your nonprofit uses.
Email marketing. Many email marketing services will allow you to create headers using your company branding and change the font of the body text. You can take your emails to the next level by adding personal touches as you share your mission with supporters.
Direct mail. Even though you’ll be sending paper copies of direct mail, your digital style guide will apply as you type up your message before printing. A customized letterhead is a great way to incorporate your visual branding, and you’ll want to edit your message carefully to ensure that it fits your standards for tone and mechanics.
As you add new forms of communication to your organization’s marketing strategy, remember to update your style guide to reflect those changes and make the content creation process easier.
Wrapping up: Nonprofit digital style guide examples
Ultimately, your digital style guide will be unique to your organization. But if you need some inspiration as you create your guide or want to see what the tips in this article look like in practice, check out these examples of great nonprofit style guides:
A digital style guide will help your nonprofit get its message across clearly and make it stick in supporters’ minds as they engage with your various marketing materials. Make sure to include sections on your organization’s mission statement, messaging standards, target audiences, visual branding, and specific applications for each communication channel. If you have questions as you develop your guide, partner with a web design agency that can help you adapt your style guide to your nonprofit’s overall digital strategy.
This guest post was written by Allison Manley.
Director of Marketing & Communications at Kanopi Studios
Allison is a recovering (and award-winning) designer who applies her creative and organizational skills to marketing strategy for Kanopi. Her diverse, multi-disciplinary background — which in addition to design includes glassblowing, publishing, podcasting, and figure skating — contributes to strong relationships to which she offers a broad perspective.
Her job is to tell the story of Kanopi by sharing information, writing, working with staff and partners, and keeping the brand cohesive across all channels. And since she maintains this site and wrote this, she can say she considers it a privilege to be able to work every day with fun, smart people who make her job easier; her colleagues keep clients so happy with solid work and processes that the clients, in turn, are obliging in helping Allison with case studies and positive feedback.
When not keeping the Kanopi brand on point, Allison is working on double jumps on an ice rink, chasing small children, or organizing something somewhere.
