Style guidelines promote consistency

Nonprofits need style guidelines. They don’t need to create them from scratch.

The best practices I’ve seen involve first identifying style or punctuation rules specific to an organization – it might be an acronym, an industry term or capitalization of a word that is normally lower case – while relegating the bulk of the determinations to a popular communications stylebook such as the Associated Press Stylebook used for journalism, PR and marketing.

The downside is your staff may not be familiar with AP Style -- or they may just not like it.

For example, AP tells you not to use the Oxford comma, which is placed before the conjunction in a list of three or more items in a simple series. This typically causes more friction than the office thermostat setting. There’s also the dicey matter of capitalizing titles: In AP Style, you capitalize a title before a name but put it in lower case after the name. So it is Director of Finance Chester Moneybags but Chester Moneybags, director of finance.

(AP generally wages a good fight against overcapitalization, which I applaud.)

There is a good argument to be made for style consistency, particularly in external communications. Your messaging will be more effective when folks see it delivered in the same way. Combining a few local rules with those of a widely used stylebook will create a blueprint.  The learning curve may be steep, but the climb is worth it.

Does your organization have style standards?