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Content Strategy and Style Guide
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:
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 [email protected]. In any instance where the Editorial Guidelines differ from AP Style, adhere to the Editorial Guidelines.
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.
The YMYG materials were designed to empower both the people teaching the materials and the people they serve, so there are two audiences to consider when writing the content.
- Those teaching the material -This includes people at social services agencies, legal aid and pro bono organizations, and community volunteers.
- Social Servants - This includes social services agencies, legal aid, pro bono organizations, and community volunteers. Many of these individuals will be learning about these financial topics for the first time themselves, so it’s important to keep everything simple and clear.
- The General Public - This includes people who are vulnerable or struggling financially. For the benefit of these individuals, we must both positively acknowledge the difficulty of their situation while refraining from offering false hope regarding their financial obstacles.
Addressing the user as “you” and other first-person pronouns wherever possible to foster a direct line of communication. Avoid words like "clients" and "Consumers" which creating distance between yourself and your readers. And avoid using “Americans,” as it excludes non-citizens.
- 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.
Use the active voice when possible. Active voice is often clearer and easier to understand than the passive voice because it helps the reader easily identify the subject in each sentence.
In a sentence written in the active voice, the subject of the sentence is doing the action. In a sentence written in the passive voice, the subject receives the action.
This tool utilizes only two forms of capitalization, title case and sentence case, both of which adhere to the Associated Press Style guide.
To adhere to APA title case capitalize the first word in the title and all words of three or more letters. Do not capitalize conjunctions (words like and, or, nor, and but), articles (words like a, an, and the), and prepositions (words like as, at, by, for, in, of, on, per, and to) unless they are the first word in the title. Utilize APA Tile case for the following:
- Primary navigation
- Megamenu navigation
- Secondary navigation
To adhere to sentence case only capitalize the first letter of the first work in a sentence, and every proper noun. Utilize APA sentence case for the following:
- Headings
- Subheadings
- Calls to action (a link or button)
- Related links in sidebars
- Title of blogs
- Title of webpages
- 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.
- Include a summary of what's happened as well as instructions or messages about what to do next
- All messages have an action associated with it.
- 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.
Spell out a numeral at the beginning of a sentence. Spell out whole numbers below 10, use figures for 10 and above. Use figures when used with percent or with decimals–5 percent, 1.5 seconds. For ordinal numbers, spell out first through ninth and use figures for 10th and above. Spell out numbers when used in titles and headings.
Punctuation rules are further expounded upon in the CFPB's Bureau Editorial Guidelines.
Use serial commas (also known as Oxford or Harvard commas).
The first word after a colon isn’t capitalized unless it’s a proper noun or the start of a complete sentence. There should be a single space after the colon.
Use the Dash when connecting two thoughts or sentences together as well as referencing a time or date range. Use an em dash ( — ), not en dash ( – ) without a space on either side.
Exclamation points should be used very sparingly. To a reader, they can come across as disingenuous, condescending, or out of place, since they convey excitement over an event that we have no context for.
Use hyphens to join two or more words into a compound word that represents a single idea. When two or more words that express a single concept come before a noun, use hyphens to link the words that modify the noun. For example, “long-term goals,” “small-business owner,” “part-time job”, “well-known rule”.
With the exception of introducing an abbreviation, avoid using parentheses because they are jarring to the reader. Place a period outside closing parenthesis if the material inside is not a sentence. Do not use to denote political affiliation.
Use one space after a period or any other punctuation that concludes a sentence.
No quotes are necessary when describing an acronym. For example: annual percentage rate (APR). Use quotes sparingly when referring to unfamiliar terms. Quotations should not be italicized.
The period and the comma always go within the quotation marks.
The dash, the semicolon, the question mark, and the exclamation point go within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.
We use the semicolon to bond two thoughts together, either by combining or contrasting them. Use the semicolon only when connecting two independent clauses, meaning that the two parts could stand alone as complete sentences.
- Auto loan or auto title loan: never car loan
- Car: can use it to refer to a vehicle, but never an auto loan
- Con: position as “risk” rather than negative “con”
- Credit reporting companies: preferred terminology over CRAs, credit reporting agencies, or credit bureaus
- Debt trap: do not use
- Justice-involved: with hyphen
- Peer-to-peer transfer service: prefered terminology for services like PayPal or Venmo
- Pro: position as “benefit” rather than positive “pro”
- Saving: used as a verb “Begin saving now for retirement.”
- Savings: used as a noun “Meet your savings goals.”
A glossary of additional terms specific to this tool can be found in the Glossary at the end of CFPB's Bureau Editorial Guidelines.