A guide to running a tone of voice workshop with your team

Senior content designer Nia shares a project she led with Redbridge Council to design tone of voice examples for different types of communication. Find out how we explored the differences and relationships between voice, tone, style, and language. And get a step-by-step guide to running a tone of voice workshop with your team.

Defining your organisation’s tone of voice is important. It helps you connect with your audience in a way that feels consistent and authentic. 

Tone of voice is more than how you write. It’s about how your audience feels when they read your content. When it’s used consistently, it helps build a connection, trust and loyalty.

Last summer, we worked with the digital team at Redbridge Council. We helped them develop their tone of voice guidelines. Together, we explored how they could adapt their tone for the type of content and their audience’s needs. 

In this post, we explain 

• the approach we took, 
• how you can run a similar workshop, 
• how to start developing tone of voice examples for your organisation.

Voice, tone, style and language – what’s the difference?

These terms are often used interchangeably. But each plays a role in shaping how your organisation communicates.

Voice

Your voice as an organisation is the thing that stays consistent. It’s usually developed from your values or principles as an organisation. 

For example, at Content Design London, one of the pillars of our voice is ‘warm’. If you visit our website or follow us on socials, you’ll see that we’re conversational and friendly. We do this because we want to be approachable and inclusive.

Tone

When you are talking, you adjust your tone based on who you're speaking with and why. The same applies to content. It's about the feelings you want to convey, and that will change depending on the situation or audience.

Style

Style is the way we write. It includes details like:

• how we punctuate!
• when we use upper and lower case,
• sentence and paragraph length,
• whether we use an active or passive voice.

Style contributes to tone because it affects how our writing feels to the reader.

Language

The words and phrases we choose to use add to our tone. For example: 

• how we describe people,
• internal terminology versus the words people use,
• how we describe things.

Academic language creates a more formal tone, for example. While everyday language sounds more conversational.

Running a tone of voice workshop

As part of our work with Redbridge Council, we ran tone of voice workshops with the digital, comms and contact centre teams.

The aim was to evolve existing tone of voice guidelines to better reflect the council’s values, and help teams communicate more effectively with residents. 

The workshop helped us to:

• understand the relationships between voice, tone, style, and language,
• explore examples of tone in real content and what makes them work,
• define the tone for different types of council communications,
• rewrite content examples to bring these tones to life.

If you want to refine your organisation's tone, we'd recommend running a similar session. It can work well in person or remotely using video calls and shared documents.

It’s a good idea to invite people from across your organisation who create or influence communications, such as marketing teams, customer service teams, or senior leaders. Everyone brings different experiences and insights that can make your guidelines stronger.

Here’s how we ran our first workshop.

1. Start with examples

We began by introducing the team to the concepts of voice, tone, style, and language. We used examples to show how each element works and how they come together to create a specific tone of voice.

If you’re looking for examples, take a look at how the team at Wix rewrote their error messages. Or how Monzo uses tone of voice across different channels. 

2. Review the tone of existing content

Next, we looked at examples of content from the council website. Using a highlighter test, the team worked together to highlight anything that: 

• felt dismissive, unkind or harsh in red,
• left the reader at a dead-end in yellow,
• felt reassuring, supportive and kind in green.

This was a great way to start thinking critically about tone.

3. Define a tone spectrum

We then went on to identify the main types of communication the council produces, and agreed on a short list of appropriate tones for each.

Here are 2 examples: 

Relational content: content about services that might be emotive, like benefits or homelessness.

Appropriate tones:

• Supportive
• Reassuring
• Respectful

Urgent or emergency information: content in response to something urgent as it happens, like flooding or road closures.

Appropriate tones:

• Instructive
• Clear and concise
• Reassuring

4. Rewrite content together

Finally, we worked in pairs to rewrite content using the agreed tones. We did this by considering: 

• how the reader might be feeling in the moment,
• the words we choose,
• the style of the writing,
• how we frame the message.

This practical exercise helped the team see how tone of voice could be applied, and gave us a series of examples that people across the organisation could learn from.

If you get stuck, try asking: “How would you say this to a customer or user if you were talking on the phone?” 

Developing a tone table

After the workshop, we tidied up the examples and put them into a ‘tone table’. 

It includes the content type, appropriate tones, and examples that show the tone in action.

Here’s a screenshot.

Once you have a draft tone table, you can test it with colleagues. Ask them to use it when they’re working on some content and see if they can: 

• identify an appropriate tone based on the content type,
• understand how the tone is used in the example,
• use the tone consistently as they develop their content.

Running a similar workshop could help your organisation create tone of voice guidelines that reflect your values and work with your audience. It’s a simple but effective way to improve how you communicate.

What has worked for you? 

Have you tried something similar? What’s worked well for your team? Let us know by emailing nia@contentdesign.london.