Style Guides

One of the most effective ways you can build your donors’ trust and comfort level is by presenting a consistent editorial and visual style across your communication platforms.

By creating an editorial and visual style guide that can be used organization-wide and shared with outside partners, you’ll help ensure clear, consistent, error-free communications across all channels. The standards in your guide—including things like proper logo usage, typefaces, sizes and colors—will go a long way in creating trust-building consistency. And it will save everyone a great deal of time and effort while increasing the impact of your communications.

Take a look at these style guide samples for inspiration:

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

Rotary International

These are on the longer side for larger, more complex organizations. No matter your organization’s size, these can serve as helpful models for your own as they give you a comprehensive look at everything typically contained in a style guide.

If yours is a small or mid-size nonprofit without a guide, you can start small with just a few pages that capture the most important standards for logos, names, fonts, sizes, images and colors.

The most important thing is to get one in place if you don’t already or refresh yours when needed to keep it current.