How to create a charity or nonprofit editorial style guide

A style guide gives your publications an identity. If you start simple and include just five or six crucial elements, you’ll see improvements in the consistency of your outputs and the efficiency of your communications. Expanding and maintaining your charity or nonprofit editorial style guide over time makes it a central touchpoint for all your written communications.

An editorial style guide is a powerful tool. At the most fundamental level, it is a list of the spellings, capitalization approaches, referencing styles and other technical editorial choices you prefer to use in your publications. But a mature editorial style guide is much more – it acts almost like a strategy document, explaining who your readers are and how you aim to reach them via your publications.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to create a basic style guide, how to embed it in your organization and how to update it over time.

But, first, let’s briefly look at why you should create a style guide for your charity or nonprofit.

Why create an editorial style guide for your charity or nonprofit?

An effective charity or nonprofit editorial style guide does five things:

1. It increases accessibility by making sure the language and terminology you use are appropriate for your readers
2. It encourages trust because your organization ‘feels’ the same wherever it shows up
3. It enhances your authority by reducing the possibility of errors
4. It saves you time communicating your requirements to writers, editors, proofreaders and designers
5. It acts as a central repository that you can easily update and maintain

Some of my clients’ style guides are one page long and some are fifty or more pages long, but all of them address these five reasons.

Getting started with your editorial style guide

If you’re familiar with any of the big published style guides, taking the first step towards creating your own might seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

To get you started, here’s a list of five things to include (plus one optional extra).

1. Your name

Write down your organization’s name and any specifics about how it should appear. For example, if it includes the word ‘the’, is this capitalized?

2. Your groups, projects and programmes

Record the names of your key groups (e.g. committees), projects and programmes.

If you know that writers and editors commonly make certain errors, include reminders. For example:

Our main programme is called NatureLife not Nature Life.

3. Spelling style

If you’re in the UK, there are two main options:

• UK spelling with ise endings
• UK spelling with ize endings

If you’re not sure which to choose, I recommend the first option because many UK readers consider it to be standard.

You can also specify a particular dictionary if you like. Chambers uses UK English and gives options for both ise and ize spellings. Merriam-Webster tends to be the default for US English.

(If you’re wondering why I use UK spelling with ize endings on my website, I’ve explained here.)

4. Punctuation basics

Punctuation is a vast topic, so again keep things simple for now. Three basic points to specify are:

• Whether you use single or double quote marks
• Whether you use en dashes (–) or em dashes (—)
• Whether you prefer to use the serial (Oxford) comma or not in phrases such as ‘vanilla, chocolate and strawberry’ (the serial comma would go after ‘chocolate’)

Again, there is no right or wrong answer here. However, UK English tends to use the first option in each case (single quotes, en dashes and no serial comma) and US English tends to use the second option (double quote marks, em dashes and serial comma).

5. Tone of voice

Tone can be hard to define, but when it feels ‘off’ it can damage your brand or reduce readers’ engagement. Consider specifying some basics, such as whether you prefer a tone that is formal or informal, warm or impersonal, or inspiring or informative. Including this information can help writers to submit more suitable first drafts and editors and proofreaders to avoid making amendments that you find jarring.

You might also give a bit of detail about your readers: who they are, what they expect and how they should be addressed. Again, this means writers, editors and proofreaders will be better equipped to help you reach your audience.

6. External resources (optional)

There are two types of external resource that you might want to link to:

• Published style guides: Don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily! There are many long-established style guides, and it may be that one of them is an excellent fit for your organization. Examples include the United Nations Editorial Manual, New Hart’s Rules, The Chicago Manual of Style and the Guardian Style Guide. Some of these require a purchase or subscription, so take care that the users of your style guide will be able to access any resources you link to.
• Other useful resources: Here you can link to any resources that your writers and editors might find helpful. For example, you could link to the official website of the Sustainable Development Goals if your style guide users frequently need to check the goals’ names, targets or indicators. Or you could link to Bible Gateway if you require a specific version of the Bible to be used. You might want to encourage writers and editors to absorb the principles of conscious language by reading the Conscious Style Guide blog. Or, if you need to ensure charity-specific terms are used accurately, you could link to my UK charity glossary for writers and editors.

Including this section is optional, but it can be a great shortcut to a more comprehensive style guide and a way of easily expanding your style guide’s scope and usefulness.

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That’s it! You have an editorial style guide for your charity or nonprofit. If you record (and implement!) these five or six points, it will be enough to ensure a basic standard of consistency across your publications. Readers will start to recognize a style that is yours, meaning they can settle into enjoying and using your content rather than being distracted by errors and varying approaches. And you will get some quick wins by speeding up your briefing of writers and editors.

Naturally, there’s a lot more you could add (we’ll get to this below). But, for now, you’ve fulfilled number 5 in the list of reasons to create an editorial style guide: you have a central record that you can update over time.

My style guide development service can support you to establish or expand your charity or nonprofit style guide.

Adding details to your editorial style guide

Now that you’ve established the basics, you can begin to add more detail to your charity or nonprofit editorial style guide. One crucial area where you may want to do this is around tone of voice. For instance, you might want to specify different tones for different types of publication (e.g. policy papers vs project updates). And you might want to add examples of preferred and non-preferred styles of writing specific to your own publications.

You can also get more specific about the details of technical editorial style. Here’s a quick checklist of elements that most charities and nonprofits will find it useful to cover:

• How you like abbreviations (such as ‘IMF’ for the International Monetary Fund) to be used and introduced
• How you present dates (12 August 2026? August 12, 2026? 12th August 2026? Wednesday 12th August 2026? So many possibilities!)
• How you present times (12-hour clock? 24-hour clock? And what punctuation will you use around the numbers?)
• How you like to present any numbers and captions of images and tables
• Other rules for the treatment of table elements, such as column headers, notes and lists of abbreviations
• Your capitalization style for headings and sub-headings
• How to capitalize and punctuate lists of full sentences
• How to capitalize and punctuate lists of sentence fragments
• Any specifics around personal names (e.g. titles, initials and honorifics)
• Your preferences around the use of words or figures for numbers
• Whether you like number ranges to be given in full (e.g. 240–246) or abbreviated (e.g. 240–46 or 240–6)
• Rules for the use of ellipses (if you need to use ellipses to edit quotations, I have more guidance here)
• Whether brackets within brackets should be curved (like this (and this)), square (like this [and this]) or another style
• Where quote marks should be placed relative to other punctuation (US style generally always puts full stops and commas before quote marks, but in nonfiction UK style only does this at the end of a full sentence)
• How to treat URLs (particularly, whether to always include ‘http://’ or ‘https://’ or only include them if the URL doesn’t contain ‘www’)
• Your rules for the treatment of footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations, bibliographies and other reference-type content (if referencing is a feature of your publications, this section might be substantial)

Once you’ve specified these points, you’re unlikely to want to change them. You might encounter a few new edge cases to add over time – for example, you might encounter a new reference type or decide a new report series needs its own capitalization style for headings. However, generally speaking, once this section of your style guide is done, it’s done.

In contrast, an area of your style guide that is likely to expand over time is your word list. Let’s look at this next.

Starting your word list

A word list lets your style guide users know your preferences for certain words. Here’s an example of what a word list for a charity or nonprofit might contain:

• ad hoc <no italic>
• among <not amongst>
• cash flow but cash-flow forecasting
• Charities Act 2011 <year comes after act name>
• decision-making <always hyphenate>
• government <never capitalize>
• homeless person <avoid: instead use person experiencing homelessness>
• nonprofit <not non-profit>
• while <not whilst>

(Note: the items in the above list are just indications of what you might find in a word list – for example, ‘non-profit’ is just as valid as ‘nonprofit’. A word list is simply a matter of picking your preferred approach and sticking to it.)

A word list is useful because it gives you freedom to specify any and all terms that are specific to your charity or nonprofit. You can make your explanations as detailed as you require to ensure that your preferred styles will be understood and followed. For example:

• NatureLife <this programme ended in 2022; for 2023 onwards, check whether you mean its successor, NatureLifePlus>

Over time, your word list will become a unique reflection of the content that your organization produces. Some of my clients’ word lists are a few lines long whereas some run to pages and pages. Make yours as detailed as it needs to be to ensure writers, editors and proofreaders can accurately represent your organization.

Making sure your editorial style guide is used

Now that you’ve created your editorial style guide, don’t leave it twiddling its thumbs in a forgotten folder! Remember reason 5 above to create an editorial style guide for your charity or nonprofit: it acts as a central repository that you can easily update and maintain.

Always send your style guide to everyone who writes, edits or proofreads for your organization. Designers may also find it useful (e.g. to confirm the capitalization of headings).

Also make sure your style guide is actually being followed as intended. Writers may need support to understand how and why to use it, and even the best editors and proofreaders may miss a small detail in a complex style guide. Part of having an effective style guide is nominating someone within your organization to understand it and advocate for it.

Updating your editorial style guide

No style guide is ever static – there’s a reason The Chicago Manual of Style is currently in its 18th edition. Names change, new projects and concepts emerge, technologies rise and fall, and language evolves. There will always be new editorial dilemmas where you need to decide on an approach.

It’s therefore a good idea to set up a system for updating and re-sharing your style guide. You might do this in an ad hoc fashion or you might follow a schedule. Regardless, make sure all the relevant people know:

• When and how to send suggested updates
• How to confirm they’re always using the latest version

It’s also wise to nominate a single person to be in charge of making the updates. This might be an internal person (maybe the same person who advocates for your style guide – see the previous section) or you might ask a trusted editorial freelancer to manage the process for you. I oversee several of my clients’ style guides, which means reviewing suggested updates, checking all of them are warranted and not just bloat, ensuring there are no conflicts with existing styles, and then distributing the new version of the style guide to the relevant people.

My course Handling Large Editorial Projects goes into detail about how to manage style guide updates.

Moving forward with your editorial style guide

It’s worthwhile taking the time to create an editorial style guide for your charity or nonprofit.

All those scattered notes on programme names and preferred spellings? Centralized.

All those tricky back-and-forths where nobody quite agrees on the tone of your publications? Avoided.

All those repetitive conversations you have with new writers and freelancers who join your team? Unnecessary.

Get in touch if you’d like support establishing or developing an editorial style guide.

Find out more: what’s the difference between an editorial style guide and a style sheet?

You might be wondering about the difference between an editorial style guide and an editorial style sheet. The line can be blurred, but as a professional editor I distinguish them as follows:

• A style guide is a prescriptive document that tells writers, editors and proofreaders what they should do across all of the style guide owner’s projects
• A style sheet is a descriptive document that records the actual editorial decisions made for a specific project

Smaller, straightforward projects often only need a style guide. But you might find a style sheet helpful if one of your projects is on the larger side or is unusual among your publications.

For example, let’s say you normally publish reports about your charity’s art therapy activities but you enter into an agreement with another charity to co-publish a book that talks about outdoor activities as well as art therapy. The book will be more complex than the reports and will contain terminology that’s not relevant to your usual publications. In this case, a style sheet is the place to record the technical decisions made and the subject-specific terminology. It will act as a project-specific appendix to your style guide.

Professional freelance copyeditors and proofreaders will usually construct a style sheet for you as part of their work. When you next update your style guide, you might choose to incorporate some of the points in the style sheet, if you feel they will be relevant to your other projects going forward.

If you’re a professional editor looking for a quick way to create fully customized style sheets, check out my QuickStyle tool. It comes with almost 150 prepopulated combo boxes and comprehensive instructions to help you tailor the template to different clients and projects.