Purpose: To keep a consistent tone of voice and look and feel across Compassion’s different social media accounts.

Brief overview

• Tone: aim to make people feel part of Team Compassion – a team that is inclusive, warm and friendly, fact-based and gets things done. Language should be supporter centric: “Together we can end factory farming” not “Compassion can end factory farming”.
• Our content is informed by science, but posts should avoid jargon and have a conversational feel. Contractions, emojis, and humour can all be used.
• We use the green heart emoji 💚 to represent Compassion, both the organisation and the adjective.
• Hashtags should be placed at the end of tweets and Instagram posts unless they fit naturally within a sentence. Avoid hashtags on Facebook.
• For profile pictures use the cropped logo (green on white). Cover photos can be changed to signpost key campaigns which may vary between offices.
• For visual assets display the logo (cropped) in the top or bottom right corner, use the fonts Oswald (for headings) and Montserrat (for copy), avoid borders and text boxes. The colour pallet is Compassion green, dark grey, white, dark green and orange.
• Unless there is a very specific reason to, we do not use overly graphic or upsetting imagery.

Account naming conventions

For future accounts, names should be as follows. Please discuss this with The Global Head of Media if it proves problematic.

Facebook pages should have the name: Compassion in World Farming [office] and the username @CIWF.[office]

Twitter and Instagram accounts should have the name CIWF [office] OR Compassion [office]

Twitter handles should be either @ciwf[office] OR @Compassion[office].

Instagram usernames are all lowercase and either @ciwf[office] OR @compassion[office].

Note: on both Twitter and Instagram these combinations shouldn’t be mixed and matched. If CIWF is used instead of Compassion for the name, it should also be used for the username.

Twitter accounts for staff members should use the person’s full name for the name, and @[firstname]_ciwf for the handle.

YouTube accounts should have the name CIWF [office] OR Compassion [office]

A list of all active Compassion social media accounts:

Tone

Compassion is made up of passionate pragmatists that look to convert rather than coerce. We celebrate companies who are making real progress for animal welfare and expose the hidden cruelty and suffering caused by factory farming. Our campaigns are backed up by scientific research. While sticking to all of this, we can adapt the organisational voice on social media to show Compassion’s fun side too.

Supporters come first: if we’re celebrating important milestones or looking at what still needs to be done, supporters must be the focus of our messaging, e.g. “Together we can end factory farming” and not “Compassion can end factory farming”. Supporters need to know that they are helping to bring change, and by being part of Compassion they are part of the solution. Compassion helps to bring people together and coordinates it all.

• Use inclusive language: we, you, us

Factual but avoiding jargon: all posts should be able to be supported with scientific facts if challenged (even if the sources are not included in the post themselves). It’s important to get our point across simply and clearly. While some of our followers have a high level of animal welfare knowledge this doesn’t apply to everyone and we want to make our posts accessible to people who are new to farm animal welfare.

• “Animals can feel pain and joy” could be used instead of “Animals are sentient”
• Don’t inflate issues: factory farming is awful without being exaggerated, and exaggerations can bring about a lack of trust. As a general rule, unless there is a very specific reason to, we do not often use overly graphic or upsetting imagery.
• When it comes to tone, think conversational rather than a scientific report. Our job is to take science and make it easy to digest.

Humour: one of the reasons people use social media is to be entertained, so light-hearted witty posts, puns and wordplay are fitting for our brand and can fit within Compassion’s tone of voice. We can use humour providing that it has a factual basis, doesn’t trivialise animal suffering, and doesn’t name and shame individual farmers, businesses or key figures (unless this is part of a campaign and has been signed off by GLT). Humour is positive for social media but it’s not our dominant tone and doesn’t need to be included in every social media post.

Warm and friendly: social media should be social – it’s primarily an engagement tool. We’re campaigning for compassion and want to extend this to humans too. We want people to feel part of a community, and comfortable engaging and commenting on our posts. We should welcome their views, and they should feel like their opinions are listened to and appreciated. We also need to remember that we can often be talking to people who have strong feelings that might be different from Compassion’s, so we need to be tactful when engaging with these individuals or groups.

• Talk like a human and not a machine.
• Be expressive when appropriate “Amazing news!”, “Horrific cruelty”
• Be empathetic, to people and animals. This includes avoiding comparisons to human tragedies – we shouldn’t compare intensive farming to genocide or the holocaust.

Pigs not pork: when talking about the animal don’t use the term for meat. The meat or product should only be used when referring to the food, labelling systems, or the environmental impact of meat and animal products. There are also specific occasions where the ‘meat’ term needs to be used ie when talking about ‘spaghetti meat’. Be mindful that there is also a time and place for using industry language i.e. ‘broilers’ as opposed to chickens.

Grammar and terminology

Use the third person: speak as Compassion (not as an individual who works for Compassion). This also applies when responding to public comments on social media. The only exception is when we are replying to private messages via social media, then sign off with your first name to make it more personal.

Ampersand: & can be used instead of “and” in tweets and Instagram stories if we are running out of characters or space. Don’t use “+”. In all other posts, we should stick to “and”.

Contractions: these should be embraced on social media to save on space and to make posts seem more conversational. It’s better to write “We’re” instead of “We are”, and we can use colloquial expressions like “y’all”.

Abbreviations: Don’t abbreviate beyond standard abbreviations. If you need to save space common abbreviations like “info” for “information” is fine but the post or tweet must be easy to read. We don’t want lots of text speech like “B4 u go, plz sign”.

Social media terms: use the right term for the platform, for example on Twitter we will ask people to “retweet” rather than “share”.

Quotes: when posting quotes use “__”, not ‘__‘. When you want to attribute the quote to a person follow the quote with a dash and then either write their name or tag their social media account.

Campaign names: should always be written with the first letter of each word capitalised (except for “the”) e.g. “End the Cage Age”. The one exception to this is hashtags, where each letter should be capitalised to make the hashtag easy to read, e.g. “#EndTheCageAge”.

Job titles/Compassion teams: “Patron”, staff job titles like “Campaigns Manager”, and Compassion teams such as “Food Business Team” should be capitalised.

Dates: spell out months and days of the year instead of using numbers, e.g. “Tuesday 21 September 2019”. On Twitter and Instagram stories they can be abbreviated to save on space: “Tues 21 Sep 2019”.

Times: When posting times use the 24-hour clock and do not use am or pm. Use a dash (without spaces), to indicate a time span, e.g. “11:30-13:00”. This does not apply to the US team, who will continue to use AM and PM.

Formatting

Keep text succinct: avoid long rambling sentences. In-depth info should be in the article or webpage that we’re linking to or explained visually in the asset being shared.

Emojis: we don’t want to spam our posts with them, but a few relevant emojis in a social media post can help increase engagement, and they are good at breaking up long Instagram captions too. Unless an emoji is being used instead of bullet points or to signpost, e.g. “Click here to sign 👉 [link]” they should be placed at the end of a sentence. They shouldn’t be used instead of punctuation; a sentence should end with a full stop and then be followed by an emoji.

We have co-opted the [Compassion] green heart 💚 as the emoji to represent Compassion. It’s a good emoji to use when stating that animals need to be treated with compassion and respect, and it can be used to thank people on social media too and show our gratitude. Sometimes people will sign off their messages with lots of kisses, and while it is not very professional to reciprocate this, we can match their tone by using the green heart.

Any person emojis used should be the new, gender-neutral option with default yellow skin tone to stay inclusive. 💁

Sharing URLs: for Facebook posts, the link should be copied into the post, and then deleted after the link preview has been generated. The link preview will still be there when it gets posted, and the post will look clean. The exception is if a call to action link is being shared with a photo or video, in these cases a short URL should be generated using bitly.

For tweets, if the link is the main part of the post then copy the full link at the end of the post. When this gets posted a link preview should display instead of the link. If the link is being shared with a photo or video generate a short URL using bitly.

Using uppercase: writing full sentences in uppercase looks like you’re shouting, and we don’t want to do this – it doesn’t come across as warm and friendly! But we can sometimes use uppercase to make a word stand out or to grab people’s attention at the start of the post. When used sparingly uppercase can be effective.

• “Over 1.5 MILLION signatures to End the Cage Age”
• “We want to say a massive THANK YOU to everyone who spoke up for farm animals”
• “BREAKING: End the Cage Age petition to be debated in Parliament”

Hashtag guidelines

Hashtags are used on Twitter and Instagram, but we do not use routinely them in Facebook posts. The only exceptions on Facebook are if they are part of a visual that’s being shared, part of a video title, or form an instruction e.g. “post on social media using #BakeWithCompassion to share your photos”.

Placement

Unless hashtags fit naturally within a sentence e.g. “Sign this petition to #EndTheCageAge”, they should be displayed at the end of a tweet, at the bottom of an Instagram caption after 5-6 line breaks with a full stop or multiple spaces (see examples below). Hashtags can also be placed within the first comment on Instagram (this is ideal to keep the caption clean). Many social media management tools will allow you to schedule Instagram posts with the first caption for hashtags, if this is not available in the tool you use, use the line breaks.

To add a space between the Instagram caption and hashtags copy this character: [⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀] - but without the brackets, and then press enter (repeat six times to insert six lines before the hashtags).

Format

Capitalise the first letter of each word to make the hashtag clear and easy to read (including ‘the’) e.g. #EndTheCageAge. The only exception is hashtags that are placed at the end of Instagram captions, these can be all lowercase.

Quantity

For tweets, we should aim to use no more than two hashtags per tweet. This is to stop the tweet from looking messy and spammy. One expectation to this might be if lots of relevant hashtags are trending, if this is the case insert a one-line break, and then put all of the hashtags in one block at the end of the tweet, like this. This should only be used for relevant trending hashtags that are likely to help increase our reach, it is not general practice.

For Instagram feed posts we can use multiple hashtags providing they are placed at the bottom of the caption. We should aim to stick to ten as this is the optimal number for increasing reach, but Instagram allows up to 30, and as they can be bunched together in the first comment or at the bottom of the post we can use more than ten if relevant. A list of possible hashtags that can be used on Instagram to help increase post reach can be found in the social media calendar.

For Instagram stories, we should only use one visible hashtag. For consistency use the text tool rather than the hashtag sticker. To increase the reach of Instagram stories we can use more relevant hashtags, but they should be hidden, either by shrinking them and placing them behind a sticker or making the font the same colour as the story background.

Compassion hashtags

This is a list of current global Compassion hashtags:

Profile images and cover photos

Profile pictures

For profile pictures, a cropped version of the Compassion logo (green on white) showing just the lamb should be used.

For the best results use the following dimensions:

Facebook: 320x320 pixels

Twitter: 400X400 pixels

Instagram: 180x180 pixels.

As a general rule, the logo should not be modified in any way, but if there have been discussions with the Communications and Brand Steering Group it may be appropriate to make small adjustments for limited time frames as long as the logo remains visible. The approval process for this can be found here. 

Facebook and Twitter cover photos

Cover photos can be changed regularly and are a good way to signpost a key message or campaign when someone visits the social media profile. For these reasons different offices should be free to use different cover photos based on their campaign and communication priorities but they should all follow the following visual guidelines to ensure a consistent look and feel.

For the best results use the following dimensions:

• Facebook cover photo: 1640x720 pixels. Use this template to make sure the layout is optimised for mobile and desktop.
• Facebook cover video: 820x462 pixels (and between 20-90 seconds).
• Facebook event page cover photo: 1920x1080 pixels (16:19 ratio).
• Twitter: 1500x500 pixels. Use this template to make sure nothing important will be covered by the profile picture.
• YouTube: 2560x1440 pixels.

Using the Compassion logo

If the logo is being used it needs to be visible. It can be as big as you like, but please don’t make it any smaller than 151 pixels wide (or 112 pixels for the CIWF version).

For full guidance on how to use our logos, please see our brand toolkit.

Colour combinations and fonts

Primary colour combinations: Compassion green, dark grey and white.

Secondary colour combinations: dark green, orange and light grey.

Fonts

All visual assets should use Oswald (for headings) and Montserrat (for copy). A combination of bold, italics etc can be used. All fonts can be found here.

Specific campaigns

The following Compassion campaigns have their own brand guidelines which include additional fonts and colour palettes. These should be followed for social media assets relating to these campaigns, instead of the general social media primary and secondary colour schemes and fonts. These campaigns also have their own logos.

End the Cage Age

• Logos - for the ECI only use black and white (do not use the brown coloured logos)
• Font - use Open Sans
• For the ECI you can also use this photoshop brush to reproduce the vignetting effect seen on some of the assets
• Colours - red and black

Rethink Fish

• Read full brand guidelines can be found and a folder with international logos and fonts
• The full-colour pallet is below, the two darkest shades of blue, grey, and black can be used for text (#1f2e55, #373c8f, #9c9b9b, and #000000). Black and grey should only be used for text

Stop Live Transport / Ban Live Exports

• Logos and font (4990810) can be downloaded here.
• Colours - red and black.

Images

Borders: share images without solid borders, like our logo our images should be free-range and not boxed in.

Logo: if the Compassion logo is applied to an image (please do add it to all images where possible – it’s essential in ensuring our content looks branded) that’s being shared on social media the above guidelines need to be followed. Please add the logo in the top right-hand corner or bottom right-hand corner (depending on the image.)

Font: if the text is added to images only use the font options above.

Text boxes: avoid text boxes where possible to prevent text from being boxed in. If they need to be added to ensure text will show over the image, they should be put at the top or bottom on a solid background like these two examples:

Accessibility: on Twitter, it’s best practice to add ALT text descriptions for all images, even ones that do not contain useful information.

Optimisation: for the best results use the following dimensions:

• For Facebook, the maximum image size is 500x750 pixels (3:2 ratio), or 500x500 pixels for square images.
• Twitter timeline for people using the Twitter app images are no longer cropped, but on the web browser images still, show at 1024x512 pixels.  
• Instagram feed images should be 1080x1080 pixels.
• Instagram stories images should be 1080x1920 pixels.

Videos and gifs

Videos and gifs should also follow the brand guidelines above for border and logo, but these visual aspects will also be important.

Format: for Facebook and Twitter (and for videos under 1 min on Instagram) videos should be square if possible as this format will show up larger on mobile screens.

For IGTV, video can be either square or landscape overlaid onto the full 1920 x 1080 dimensions OR simply landscape. When overlaid, the background should be a blurred out and darkened version of the video. A thin white border should separate the video from the blurred background. (Example)

Captions: all speech and voice over in a video should be captioned to make our videos as accessible as possible. The only exception is live videos, where this may not always be possible, but apps like Cliptomatic can be used when filming shot pieces to camera on mobiles. IGTV and Instagram stories also now have automatic captions. Text should be white on a black background if possible.

Use capital letters at the start of new sentences but avoid using full stops in videos unless there are multiple sentences in one video frame (it is best practice to limit the amount of text on each frame).

Other text: use Oswald (for headings) and Montserrat (for copy). The above guidelines for capital letters and full stops also apply here.

End screen: videos should have an end screen that includes the Compassion logo (or campaign logo if relevant), and any relevant URLs or hashtags.

The video should transition to this end screen with a simple left swipe to the logo. The default background colour should be white. You can find an example here.

In the UK, Compassion’s full name and charity number also needs to be included but can be in very small font: “Compassion in World Farming International Registered charity (England and Wales) No. 1095050”.

Instagram stories

Font and text

• For font stick to white and back where possible. Can use green, but be conscious it can be harder to read when on white. 
• Use capital letters at the start of new sentences but avoid using full stops unless there are multiple sentences in one story. It is best practice to limit the amount of text on each story.
• Only have one visible hashtag. For consistency use the text tool rather than the hashtag sticker, this also applies to @ mentions.
• When using the location sticker, use the purple font on white option.
• Don’t place text right up to the edges of the story as this may get cropped when people view it on different devices.

Drawing tool

Use the drawing tool to draw arrows, highlight words, or annotate stories, aim to use white, green, or black.

Some Instagram story examples:

Supporting social justice causes on social media

This could include the following:

• Changing our social media profile picture to include the LGBTQ+ flag during Pride month and backing this up by demonstrating our support and appreciation for staff and supporters from the LGBTQ+ community. An example from WWF, see also here, and Compassion’s Pride logo. (NOTE: if you want to use the Pride logo you will need to request approval from the Communications and Brand Steering Group every year. The process for doing this can be found here.)
• Having a presence at events organised by different communities to talk about Compassion’s work and diversify our supporter base. We could then post about this on social media and express our solidarity with their cause – such as Pride marches (see the second link from WWF above).
• Celebrating staff and supporters on set days – for instance, we have thanked female High Profile Supporters on International Women’s Day. We could do the same for other groups and communities. Not only does this help to give Compassion a human face but can be used to highlight diversity.
• Participating in mass social media events such as #BlackOutTuesday which asked brands, organisations, and high profile individuals that were not involved in campaigning for racial equality to pause business as usual for one day on social media, to allow the voices of BIPOC to come to the forefront.
• Or #ClapForCarers, a weekly event that took place during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, where people came together to show their support for the NHS and key workers. Philip Lymbery took part in this on his Compassion Twitter account.
• Another step that can be taken to encourage diversity on Compassion’s social media includes looking for articles and resources about factory farming by animal welfare activists from diverse backgrounds. We should be aiming to give a platform to a diverse range of voices within the movement.

Specific guidance for country office/non-HQ channels:

Should you wish to support or post about a social injustice you should feel confident to do so. As a general rule, you do not need specific HQ approval to post this content. Please consider the applicability to your market, the volume of these posts in comparison to posts on our core issues (which must always be the bulk of our communications), preparing for comments and reactions in advance.

When to seek HQ approval/support:

If the cause you are supporting has a presence outside of your market, please check in with the Global Head of Comms to ensure we are coordinated across our channels. This is particularly important where we are making an organisational commitment that should be reflected on all channels.

Should you wish to take part in something such as #BlackoutTuesday that includes ‘going dark’ on social channels for 12-24 hours, or another ‘event’ that disrupts planned communications this requires the approval of the Director of Campaigns.

If the issue you want to support is controversial beyond the normal sphere of progressive causes, for example, if it involves religion, please seek guidance from HQ before going ahead.

NB. as a charity, we must always ensure our communications are not partisan to a particular political party or candidate.

Logo changes 

As a rule, Compassion’s logo, in any forum, should not be modified in any way. Our logo is a key element of our global brand and is legally trademarked, and as such, should only be adapted in very special circumstances and very rarely, with formal approval for each change, even if previously approved.

Any modification must go through an approval process:

1. A lead-time of 4-6 weeks may be necessary to get approval for a logo change and make changes to the design of a logo.
2. Discuss proposal to make a change to the logo (including why, in which channels/audiences, timeline, etc) with your line manager and Head of Department, and complete this form. 
3. Contact the Global Head of Media and the Production & International Visual Brand Manager to request time-limited logo modification, including the above details/completed form. If they are broadly supportive, they will then share the request by email with the Global Director of Fundraising and the Global Director of Campaigns (ideally 4 weeks before the start of the requested change).
4. Any modifications to Compassion’s brand, in any forum, will then be submitted to the Communications and Brand Steering Group for discussion.
5. The Global Director of Fundraising (GDF) has overall responsibility for our global brand and must give approval.