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The UCL brand personality is woven into every aspect of every touchpoint. Our tone and voice is about how UCL says things, not just what we say.
Our personality
Disrupting the status quo, yes, intimidating or stuffy, never. Behaving like a modern global power brand means not always being so ‘academic’ in how we communicate UCL to the world.
More 2024, less 1826 with:
- The confidence of 9th in the world (QS World University Rankings 2024)
- The relevance of a brand that share the same values as our students and community
- The empathy of understanding needs
- The impact of a provocative question
- The action of real-world examples
- The brevity of precise and concise language.
As a university that’s been diverse and inclusive since our founding, we speak with an open and welcoming voice. Our tone should reflect the vibrancy and cosmopolitan energy of London in 2024 and beyond.
Our tone
We pursue excellence, break boundaries, and make an impact on real-world problems. So, when we communicate, what we write should describe such innovative work in a confident and engaging way.
Every UCL communication must reflect our brand with:
- Action
- Accessibility
- Bravery
- Confidence
- Relevance
- Strategic intent
- Empathy
- Consistency
- Impact
By using a consistent tone and voice, we can build (or reinforce) a sense of trust and authority in the readers. We express to new and existing audiences who we are and what we do, while embodying our brand pillars and our values.
In the following sections, you will find more detail on how to write in a way that reflects our personality and tone.
- 1. Address your audience
Our audience is:
- Bold
- Audacious
- Diverse
- Idealistic
- Creative
- Independent
- Adventurous
- Unafraid
- Altruistic
- Academically accomplished
- Intellectually curious
- Ambitious
- Purpose-driven
- Mature
We communicate with a variety of people. From internal audiences such as professors, students; public engagement professionals and lab technicians. To external audiences such as prospective students, prospective staff, corporate partners.
As you write always think, ‘What does my audience need to know? Why should they care?’ When you put your audience at the heart of your copy, you engage with them and your messaging is likely to be more effective.
Remember, you are talking to real people with needs, wishes and aspirations.
- 2. Choose the right tone for your audience
Formality has a place, but in more informal contexts, such as student communications, address your audience using the second person (“you”) and talk about UCL in the first person (“we”).
By doing this, you immediately establish a sense of a conversation on equal terms between you and the intended audience.
Formal example:
The Institute of Making is a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup to diamonds, socks to cities. Annual membership of the institute is available to all UCL staff and students.
Informal example (from the UCL Facebook page):
UCL, 20 March
Today, we’re going to try something a little bit different. We’ve opened an interactive map to which the UCL community (that’s you!) can add their favourite places to eat at around campus.Adjust your tone on social media
Twitter and other social media enable us to create a different, more interactive relationship with our audience in comparison with traditional web content and print media. So it is fine to be more conversational and relaxed on your social channels.
Find out more in our Social Media Toolkit.
- 3. Write clearly and concisely
Be brief, simple and direct.
- This is not dumbing down. People are busy and want to find the information that they are looking for as quickly as possible.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
Research from Nielsen Norman Group shows that people scan webpages in an F-shaped pattern rather than word-by-word, so it is crucial that your first two paragraphs contain the most important information.
Examples
Write
We want to work with businesses that share our values. Improving the health and wellbeing of people in the developing world is one of our key priorities and we are looking for partners who want to help us achieve that goal.
Rather than:
We will apprise potential commercial partners of our institutions’ commitment to contribute to the health and wellbeing of populations throughout the developing world and to cultivate productive relationships with companies that share our values and are able and willing to advance our global health mission.
It can be useful to test out your copy using online tools such as Hemingway App.
- 4. Avoid old language
Our tone of voice is clear and contemporary, so we should avoid dry, stuffy or old-fashioned language.
In practice, this means that it is fine to reflect current English usage in what we write. So, it is perfectly acceptable to use who rather than “whom”, while rather than “whilst” and among rather than “amongst”.
Similarly, it is also acceptable to start a sentence with and, but, because, so or however.
Further reading
Both are available as downloads from www.plainenglish.co.uk
- 5. Show, don’t tell
Rather than making vague, unsubstantiated claims, make statements that are backed up with evidence. Our audiences, particularly prospective students, face a barrage of competing assertions from universities about the facilities that they offer or graduate starting salaries. Not surprisingly, the students are left unsure whether such information can be trusted.
So, any statements that we make should be supported by statistics and, when published online, include relevant, descriptive weblinks.
Examples
Write
The average starting salary for UCL graduates in the UK and EU was £27,975 in 2011–12 – a full 30% higher than the national average (£21,443). (HESA 2013) UCL is one of the top five universities in the UK for graduate employability, and one of the top 20 worldwide. New York Times 2012
Rather than:
There is informal evidence of an ever-growing commercial demand for machine learning graduates. Machine learning can be used in any domain where fast, consistent and reliable decisions have to be made given uncertainty and a huge amount of data.
- 6. Focus on people and stories
Authenticity is another key part of our tone of voice and a powerful way to achieve this is to use voices from the UCL community.
People engage with written or multimedia case studies because they put a human face on what can sometimes seem like an otherwise monolithic institution.
Once people have someone to empathise or identify with, they are more likely to listen to the messages that we are trying to communicate, especially if they are being told a strong story in the process.
Examples
On the UCL YouTube channel:
On the UCL Soundcloud channel:
