Striking the right tone
Crohn’s & Colitis UK
Verbal brand refresh
Crohn’s & Colitis UK has to be very clear about what it says – and how. We helped them to find the right words.
What we did
Discovery workshops and calls
Positioning, messaging
TOV principles and spectrum
Vision, mission, values
Verbal guidelines
Roll-out: Tone ‘Top Trumps’ cards
Every year, 25,000 people in the UK are told they have Crohn’s or Colitis – but most of us don’t know anything about these conditions, let alone how to live with them.
For the UK’s largest inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) charity, explaining the devastating impact of IBD to an uninitiated public demands a very different tone from telling someone who’s recently been diagnosed that it’s going to be OK.
But Crohn’s & Colitis UK were struggling to talk to all their different audiences and still sound like one cohesive brand. That’s when they turned to Lark for help.
We ran a series of in-depth brand language workshops with every team in the organisation, teasing out the key principles and concerns that govern the work they do every day, to develop their new tone of voice.
We then produced a comprehensive brand language guide, including a tone spectrum with clear advice on how to dial up or down certain tone principles depending on the audience.
The new verbal guidelines also included positioning copy, a message deck – with supporting proof points for each of their eight key audiences – and annotated ‘before and after’ copy examples.
We also worked with the charity to update their vision, mission and values statements, to make them sound more authentic and bring them in line with Crohn’s & Colitis UK’s bold new tone of voice.
All the new brand language guidelines were uploaded to a digital hub for every team member to access, but some people prefer something they can hold in their hand – or fit in their pocket.
So, alongside the digital guidelines, we produced a set of Tone ‘Top Trumps’ cards to act as a pocket-sized shortcut for all the organisation’s content producers.
Crohn’s & Colitis UK were so impressed with our brand language
work, they asked us to create and produce their (award-winning!
awareness campaign, It Takes Guts.
