For any church creating a website, it’s important to establish a voice and tone. Voice is a church’s unique personality whereas tone is how that personality is expressed. The two are connected and sometimes interchanged, but when developing content for your website, it’s important both be consistent and aligned with your church’s identity and values. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you get started on developing a voice and tone for your church.

Why Do Voice and Tone Matter?

Your voice and tone reflect who you are, which is why it’s necessary that there’s intention behind them to make sure the first impression you make on users coming across your church for the first time online is the impression you want those users to have. The language you choose is a large part of that first impression as it tells prospective church members who you are, both directly through how you describe your church and indirectly through how the overall language you use reflects your church’s values.

What Do You Want Your Church to Sound Like?

A helpful exercise you can do is write a list of every adjective that you think describes your church. Set a timer for three minutes and write as many words as you can. Which of these adjectives best reflects how you want your church to come across to prospective members? Highlight those words.

Oftentimes, developing a voice and tone is as simple as coming up with a list such as this with adjectives you’d like to keep in mind when developing content for your church website—guiding principles for all your church’s content. It doesn’t have to be a long list; five to seven words should be enough to guide you.

What Makes Your Church Unique?

While there are some consistencies across the voices and tones of different churches (churches should be welcoming and warm, etc.), part of developing a voice and tone is determining what makes your church unique and expressing that through the language you use across your website. You remember that list you made of adjectives that describe your church? Which of them do you feel are most unique to your congregation? Prioritize expressing those unique aspects of your church so that as faith-seekers online are searching for a new church home, they understand what sets you apart.

Who Are You Talking To?

Part of implementing your voice and tone across your website is considering who your audiences are. In the case of a church website, your high-level audiences are current and prospective members. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of prospective members and using your voice and tone to make a good first impression, but current members also want to see the church culture they know reflected on your website.

A solid voice and tone will feel accurate to people who know your church well. As you develop your site, keep in mind who each page is meant to be talking to and cater how your voice and tone come through to those audiences.

The United Church of Christ offers churches within the denomination state-of-the-art websites through the UCC Everywhere (UCCE) program. For a monthly or annual subscription fee, churches get their own site along with other digital marketing tools and support to make sure their message is reaching faith-seekers in their community via the appropriate virtual channels.

You can also pay an additional fee for content help. With this service, our professional copywriting and web strategy partners will help you develop and implement content on your new website. Participating churches will fill out a content intake form, which will then be edited, organized and turned into the site’s content by copywriting professionals who understand voice and tone.