Soapbox Engage Blog

Whether you’re focused on animal welfare, children’s healthcare, environmental conservation, or historic home preservation, your nonprofit is unique in its cause, how it approaches its work, and who it impacts.

And, whether you know it or not, your nonprofit has a unique brand voice! Your brand voice encompasses how you communicate your cause, your values, and your organization’s personality. Like a fingerprint, it is specific to your nonprofit and your nonprofit alone.

Learning how to tap into this voice on your nonprofit website is critical for successfully connecting with your organization’s audience and being effective with your marketing and fundraising efforts. In this post, we’ll walk through four tips for creating a strong voice in your web content. Let’s begin!

1. Define your brand voice.

First, spend some time defining your voice, especially if the idea of a brand voice is new to you. More likely than not, your organization already has elements of a strong brand voice. Going through the process of identifying those elements and using them more intentionally will empower you to use your voice consistently and effectively.

Here are some steps to take to define your brand voice:

• Review your mission, vision, and values. Always start by taking a close look at the foundation your nonprofit stands on—its mission, vision, and values. To inspire and connect with the people who care about your cause, your voice should be fully aligned with everything that your believes in and works toward.


• Choose words that describe your organization and what it stands for. For example, an organization focused on children’s literacy might choose words or phrases like education, nurture, love for reading, inclusive, and future-oriented. Word choice is not only important for crafting written communications (blog posts, web page copy, etc.) but can also guide the creation of other communications assets, like videos, podcasts, and graphic design elements.


• Select your core messages. Working off of your mission, vision, values, and word list, write out some core messages that you want your communications to convey to your audience. Continuing with the children’s literacy example, one of your core messages might be “Our organization ignites a love for literature and learning in every child.”


• Outline tone guidelines. The tone of your brand voice conveys your organization’s personality and gives your voice an emotional quality. For instance, if you want your organization to have a friendly but knowledgeable tone, you’ll want to outline guidelines to avoid jargon, keep sentences short and easy to read, and cite reputable sources to back every claim you make.

Once you’ve gone through this exercise of defining your nonprofit’s brand voice, you can use it alongside top nonprofit web design best practices to begin creating impactful web content. For instance, you might start using some of your chosen brand voice words in visually appealing calls-to-action across your website.

2. Tailor your content to your online audience.

As you create content, remember that to get results—whether that means more awareness for your cause, more people signing up for your volunteer program, or more donations—you need to ensure that what you’re creating resonates with your online audience.

Chances are you feel pretty comfortable about addressing your audience, but it’s important to frequently revisit who makes up your audience to ensure your messages are always hitting the mark.

Here are a few ways to continuously review who your audience is:

• Visit your database. Your database is where your organization captures a wide range of data about its supporters, including their demographics, engagement histories, giving preferences, and communications preferences. Review these general details to get a feel for who you’re talking to each time you write web content.


• Conduct surveys. Go a little deeper and enhance the existing information you have on your audience by conducting surveys. You can send surveys out via email or social media, and even incentivize supporters to fill them out by hosting a fun giveaway for respondents. Ask open-ended survey questions that will help you cater your communications, like, “What do you like to read about on our blog?” or “Tell us what you think about the information provided on our ‘About Us’ page.”


• Create an audience persona. To help guide your communications, consider creating an audience persona. This is a fictional person that encompasses the typical characteristics you see in your audience, like age, location, and engagement level. For instance, your audience persona might be a member of Gen Z who lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys reading your blog and attending your events. A persona like this is useful because it allows you to picture a specific “person” as you create your content and consider whether your content and your voice will resonate with them.

For any communications or marketing strategy to work, you have to think about the audience on the receiving end of your messaging. After you’ve reviewed who your audience is, think through ways that you can ensure they see your brand voice coming through your content and have it resonate with them. Consider asking a few members of your audience that you know well for feedback on some of your future communications!

3. Inject passion and empathy into your web content.

No matter the particulars of your nonprofit’s cause or brand voice, you want your community to know that you truly care about the issue you’re tackling and the people you’re serving. This is why you need to ensure you’re injecting passion and empathy into all of your web content.

When your supporters see how much you care about your cause, they’ll be inspired to care, too. And, better yet, act!

Here are a few ways to ensure that your audience can feel your passion and empathy through your content:

• Share meaningful stories. People respond positively to stories because they’re able to identify with the characters in stories who work to overcome challenges. You can share stories from your beneficiaries, volunteers, staff members, donors, and more. Just be sure to ask for permission before you do!


• Show appreciation and gratitude. Generally, nonprofit web content is meant to help inspire support in some form. One of the best ways to inspire people to give is to show your appreciation and gratitude for the giving your nonprofit has already seen. Having this attitude of gratitude will make it clear you see and value all the contributions to your cause.


• Use powerful visuals. Saying that a picture is worth a thousand words may be cliche, but it’s true! Visuals help to communicate emotion and capture the heart. Try sharing visuals of your team at work or beneficiaries in need to make your content stand out.


• Be authentic. You want your audience to see your nonprofit not as an organization but as a community of people who are working together to make positive change. You can make your nonprofit more human by being authentic. Don’t be afraid to share the challenges your organization is facing alongside the triumphs.

Writer and activist Maya Angelou once said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

By communicating just how passionate you are about accomplishing your mission, you’ll encourage your audience to feel invested in your work. That feeling will do more than any one blog post or web page could on its own to encourage support now and in the future.

4. Focus on being consistent with your voice.

Imagine attending a speech given by a famous public figure. The speech is full of solid logical reasoning, emotional statements, and great imagery. The next day, you see a tweet from the same public figure talking about the same subject.

Though the tweet is different from the speech you heard the day before, it’s still clearly coming from the same person. This is because adept communicators know how to be consistent with their brand voices!

Being consistent with your voice means that your audience can recognize your nonprofit’s core messages whether they’re in the form of a flyer, a video on your website, a series of emails, or even the copy in one of your Google Ads. Plus, voice consistency helps to ensure that all of your nonprofit’s communications will work in harmony to inspire support and present your organization as professionally as possible.

A communication best practice for any type of organization is to create a brand guide, also known as a style guide or identity guide. A brand guide is a written document that outlines everything that goes into your brand. This will include your visual identity but also your brand voice.

With a brand guide, your entire team can have a single resource to turn to when creating communications for your nonprofit, ensuring that everything is aligned with your voice!

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Your nonprofit has a voice that is all its own, and cultivating and using that voice can make your nonprofit’s website content—and any other form of communication—stronger and more effective. Follow these four tips to get a leg up on creating your brand voice, and don’t forget to keep your audience in mind!