Content Strategy and Style Guide

Raft Content Guide Overview

Introduction

Your Money, Your Goals (YMYG) is a set of financial empowerment materials for organizations that help people meet their financial goals by increasing their knowledge, skills, and resources. This wiki was created as a summary amalgamation of Raft's Best Practices and three separate guides:

• CFPB Bureau Editorial Guidelines
• YMYG Editorial Style Guide
• The AP Stylebook Utilize these guides for further details on the concepts listed within this wiki. However, if you can’t find an answer in those sources, contact CFPB_Editorial@cfpb.gov. In any instance where the Editorial Guidelines differ from AP Style, adhere to the Editorial Guidelines.

Philosophy

The information we communicate to consumers should closely mirror the Bureau’s values and mission. Content should provide clear, direct, advice regardless of a user's economic background, level of education, or financial situation. To help support that goal, we keep the following principles in mind as we write consumer-facing content to make sure our writing mirrors our mission:

• Show Respect - When writing content, focus less on what people can get from the Bureau and more on what they can do with our assistance.
• Show Empathy - Empathy for people sets the Bureau apart from other institutions. But avoid overfamiliarity.
• Be Authoritative - Make the case that the Bureau is an authoritative source of impartial information.
• Incentivise Action - Make it easy to get started, offer multiple options, and break an action into steps where necessary.
• Empower - Expose consumers to content that might help them once they’ve resolved their issue, so that they know where to find it once they’re ready.

Voice

• Friendly and welcoming but not too casual
• Authoritative but not patronizing
• Helpful but not overbearing throughout each section.
• Precise (regarding language choices) but not overly academic

Style Guidelines

• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Active voice
• Capitalization
• Conscious guide
• Names
• Numbers
• Punctuation

Acronyms and abbreviations

• Spell out abbreviations on the first mention. Prepare a list of Acronyms
• If an abbreviation is used only once or twice on a page, or if what is abbreviated is very short, avoid using it.

Active Voice

Using active voice in your writing means that the subject of the sentence comes first and performs the action that the rest of the sentence describes. ... This makes your writing much easier to understand, which is why good writers prefer the active voice.

Capitalization

• Use sentence case for titles, headings, page titles, and so on. Sentence case is easier to scan than title case, which promotes a piece of content’s readability.
• Capitalize proper nouns, but do not capitalize personal titles unless they precede a name.

Conscious Guide

• Avoid using gendered pronouns (use they instead). Use the public, users, people, or folks instead of citizens (wherever possible); not all folks who use government services or engage with federal agencies are U.S. citizens, and it’s important to acknowledge this fact.
• Avoid age-related descriptions of folks unless they’re absolutely necessary to the content. And, in cases where age descriptors are necessary, using older person instead of elderly or senior.

Notifications

• Include summary of what's happened as well as instructions or messages about what to do next
• All messages have an action associated with it.

Names

• For the first reference, use the person's full name.
• On the second reference, just use the person's last name. Do not include titles like Mr., Mrs., Dr. or Ms.

Numbers

• Use numerals instead of spelling out numbers. Avoid putting a number at the beginning of a sentence or headline.
• The numbers in this app are large; avoid extra digits. Where possible, round dollar amounts to the nearest whole dollar. For summary information, k and M are useful abbreviations that protect visual simplicity.
• Use the % sign instead of spelling out percent.

Punctuation

• Use the oxford comma.
• Add a single space after each period.
• Avoid using ampersands except in Downloads & Documentation.