Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Tone of Voice
RBG Kew
Using consistent tone to build audience trust
The role
Senior Copy Editor at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, helping teams across the organisation create great content by providing editorial guidelines, best practice advice, and a writing and editing service.
The problem
How could Kew use a consistent tone of voice to build audience trust as part of a brand perception shift strategy aiming to reposition the organisation as a scientific powerhouse?
When I joined Kew, there were no organisation-wide tone of voice guidelines. I reviewed materials produced by different teams, such as signage in the gardens written by the Interpretation team, blogs written by the Digital team, and leaflets written by the Marketing team. It was clear that Kew’s audience was having a different experience depending on who had written the materials.
My input
I was responsible for creating Kew’s tone of voice guidelines, but I knew that I needed the teams who would use the guidelines to feel ownership, otherwise I’d create a PDF that was never looked at.
I wrote a blog for Kew’s intranet explaining the importance of tone of voice in building audience trust. I was clear that I would be asking for help from every team to create an authentic tone. I used this blog as a starting point for conversation when engaging teams with the project.
I held workshops with the Digital, PR, Marketing and Interpretation Teams. I asked them to bring all their audience data so we could understand who we were writing for. I also asked them to bring outside examples of good and bad writing from their disciplines, so I would know what their ‘good’ sounded like. And I got their thoughts on how Kew could bring its science to the front and center of its content.
I took the output of the workshops and identified common themes.
I converted these themes into draft tone of voice principles, accompanied by do and don’t examples, and reflecting the importance of accessible and inclusive language.
I held a second series of workshops with the same teams to refine the principles and examples, ensuring continued buy-in.
I presented the final principles to the Head of Marketing for sign off.
The outcome
Five simple tone of voice principles to guide Kew’s writing.
As part of my role, I reviewed and signed off marketing and interpretation materials and worked closely with the Digital team on their content. Over the weeks, I saw greater consistency across Kew’s editorial output.
I regularly held creative workshops, for example to generate names and descriptions for events and exhibitions, where teams referred to the tone of voice principles without my prompting, showing that they were truly co-owned.