What are Content Standards?

Content standards are a set of guidelines that determine how we design and write content.  In this instance, we’re using these to validate our content for our digital channels but in theory, they can be used for any customer-facing channel or internal communications at Group or Brand level.

It’s best described as:  ‘Content standards ensure we give our customers what they need, when they need it and in the way they expect it’

(‘Content Design’ by Sarah Richards, 2017)

Why we need them…

Content standards provide a level of consistency across all content but also can be used to ensure there is a minimum standard that all content should meet.  If we consistently check our content against these standards, we can be much more confident that we are doing the right thing for our customers.  They can also be used to check against good customer outcomes:

E.g.

  • Did we meet the customer’s need?
  • Did they understand the content and its intention?
  • Did the content enable them to get to where they needed?
  • Does our content account for any vulnerabilities that would prevent meeting the customer’s need?

 

What the content standards include

There are several elements included in our standards.  Each element is important in ensuring both consistency of the content itself and providing a minimum standard that all content must meet.  These elements include:

  • A practical style guide which outlines how we write for digital channels.  This includes sentence and paragraph length, using punctuation, contractions and abbreviations.
  • A breakdown of the Vanquis Tone of Voice which is made up of 3 pillars: Be Human, Be Genuine and Be Optimistic.
  • A look at how content standards flex across our digital channels (more details below).
  • How we check and validate our content for readability (ensuring we are inclusive of customers with literacy issues).

 

Writing for digital channels

As you may expect, designing and writing content across channels means considering the differences of each channel.  It’s still important that we are consistent across our channels.  This means that customers, whether they be on our app, on our social channels or reading an email we’ve sent them, get the sense of one organisation with one communication style.

Customers will consume our content in a different way from one channel to another.  So even if a piece of content covers the same topic or highlights one process, we must reflect that one person may be reading the content on mobile web and their usage may differ from someone sat at a desktop.  In a similar way, we can adopt a different tone on our social channels to how we might talk on a Persistent Debt email.

You can access the strategy behind our content standards via the link below.  This will also be hosted on the Vanquis Bank intranet site.

 

Access our Vanquis Digital Content Standards here.

 

What’s next for our content standards?

In the future, we’ll be adding the practical style guide and tone of voice to the Vanquis Brand Hub, so that channels owners and content specialists across the group have access to this information.

For more details on Vanquis digital content, please contact Sam Coyle or Corey Gardner-Hobbs