Evaluating our Tone of Voice

Background

Last year, we worked with communications agency Creative Bridge to review the way we communicate with customers, with a particular focus on tone of voice.

This project involved workshops attended by Leeds Federated staff and customers, where we discussed what qualities our tone of voice should have in communications. We wanted our voice to reflect the following:

• Our mission of building futures together
• Our objectives to sustain, engage and grow
• Our values of passion, honesty, excellence and innovation

With this in mind, we came up with the 3Ps, which all future communications should follow:

Purposeful – always focused on why we exist and what we do.
Positive – emphasising what we can do to support and help people and communities, not making excuses for what we can’t do.
Personal – communicating in a relaxed, natural way that does us justice.

Creative Bridge then went away and created 10 sample letters, showing how our new tone of voice guidelines can be put into practice when writing to customers. These sample letters include:

1. Anti-social behaviour report acknowledgement
2. Breach of court order
3. Complaint acknowledgment
4. Ending tenancy
5. Financial Inclusion
6. Fire doors inspection
7. Gas check access
8. Home bid contact
9. Home offer
10. Untidy garden

Please see what you think of the new letters

You can access all these letters from the Documents widget on this page.

You should see a folder at the top of the Documents widget named ‘Tone of Voice – read these first’. This folder contains the full Tone of Voice guidance document, along with the following:

• Gas check access letter before redraft, with notes from Creative Bridge on what needs to be improved
• Redrafted gas check access letter, with comments from Creative Bridge

We feel that these letters are a good place to start before moving on and reading the other letters, as they illustrate the tone of voice used before and after the redraft.

Share your thoughts

We’d love to hear what you think of these letters. What do you like about them? Is there anything that doesn’t seem quite right, or could be improved?

Once you’ve read the letters, please use the forum tool on this page to comment with your thoughts and discuss them with your fellow Challenger Panel members. Any discussion that takes place here, online, will help set the foundations for further discussion at the next in-person meeting.

Your feedback will help us to finalise our approach to tone of voice when communicating with customers, so we really appreciate your time and effort. We will continue to review our letters in line with your feedback and will notify you when there are new letters to review.