CASE STUDY 3 - PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN IRELAND: BACK TO THE BARN

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN IRELAND (PCI)

BRAND VOICE / WEB COPY & TRAINING

One organisation. Dozens of voices. One framework to gather them.

A national church organisation had just redesigned their website. The visual identity was strong. But the writing, contributed by dozens of departments, teams and individuals across the organisation, pulled in dozens of different directions. Some formal. Some conversational. Some confident. Some with religious jargon.

The Presbyterian Church in Ireland needed their words to sound like one organisation: clear, warm, rooted in their own history and values. The challenge wasn’t finding a voice. It was finding it in a way that every writer across the organisation could understand, remember and apply.

The brief

Update the existing website content to ensure a cohesive tone of voice, develop a bespoke brand voice framework, and deliver in-house training that would embed it across the organisation.

The approach

Using an audit previously provided to PCI, a tone of voice framework was created to ensure that all areas of the organisation’s voice was applicable to their audience.

From that foundation, I developed a brand voice framework rooted in PCI’s own history, theology and character, not imported from outside, but drawn from within. The framework needed a centre: a single idea that every writer could hold in mind.

That idea became Back to the Barn, a concept drawn from PCI’s own heritage, giving every writer a memorable, meaningful anchor for how the organisation communicates.

Not a set of rules. A shared instinct.

The framework was delivered through a half-day in-house training programme, with practical exercises built around real content from the organisation’s own platforms. Writers left not just with guidance, but with the confidence to apply it themselves.

The result

1 shared creative framework embedded across a national organisation

Half-day in-house training programme delivered to writers across departments

A fragmented, multi-contributor website became a coherent editorial whole. And the writers themselves, rather than the words alone, became the long-term guardians of the voice.

The difference between copywriting and creative strategy is that one changes the words. The other changes how an organisation thinks about them.