Finding Our Voice - A Journey Into Yellow Card’s Values

Our voice is human

Seems obvious, right? But the process of discovery is just as important as the choice to make our voice human. We speak with a positive, informed voice, providing neighbourly advice and support.

Our voice is constant, but you wouldn’t use the same tone of voice with someone who’s scared as someone who’s laughing. Tonality is a spectrum and here’s how we flex it.

Playful & Respectful

We echo the community's playfulness while respecting the fact that we deal with real people's money.

Accessible & Insightful

We speak simply so we’re accessible to everyone, providing insightful crypto tips.

Bold & Reassuring

We’re bold innovators, but drop our egos to reassure even beginner traders.

Empathetic Factual

We empathise with customers, and let the facts drive our decisions.

Global & Local

We speak with global insights but localise it whenever possible.

So how did we get here?

I joined Yellow Card in November 2021 as a User Experience Writer. To write from our brand voice I tried to uncover our vision and mission. Surprisingly, our internal wiki, our brand guidelines, and our press releases, all expressed our mission in different ways. This indicated a greater disconnect: 15 writers across various teams all creating content without a unified brand voice.

Our task was clear, “Let’s find our brand voice!”

Listening in - executive calls

I created an open forum for our writers to consolidate the good work we already had, starting with our vision and mission:

Our vision

Financial Inclusion for All.

Our mission

We’re enabling you to take back control of your money! We work every day to ensure global financial freedom across Africa, with easy access to cryptocurrency. We always put YOU first, and we believe strongly in providing equality of opportunity for anyone, anywhere.

So that’s what we’re aiming for. But how do we get there? Creating a set of core values would help us to achieve our goals faster by creating a consistent culture of working.

To do this I surveyed our executive team, and the wider company, hoping to get a glimpse into the perceptions around what makes us unique. Some trends came up in both sets, so we used the overlap of responses to shape the 6 core values underlying our culture.

• Value 1 🌍  We're world-class and Africa-first
  Crypto is an international phenomenon, but we’re proud of the fact that we are African, prioritising this tech to uplift Africa.
• Value 2 ✊ We craft for our customers
  As we carefully design, engineer, and recreate the financial landscape, we always consider our customers’ experience in what we do.
• Value 3 ‍🏫  We make bold, data-driven decisions
  We’re not afraid of taking chances and moving fast. But we interrogate the data so that we can move fast, and in the right direction. 
• Value 4 🌈 Our differences give us our integrity
  Our customers have different backgrounds and we hire with this diversity in mind. In knowing how to be sensitive to each other, we can approach our customers with the same integrity.
• Value 5 🤗  We're open and approachable
  We’re simplifying crypto, explaining it at a level that’s accessible and trustworthy. Complete transparency is essential to building trust. We share openly with each other and our customers, because we have nothing to hide.
• Value 6 🏅  We play like a boss coz we work like a boss
  Ownership is important. We don’t wait for managers to tell us what to do. We forge our own paths and build this business from the ground up, like we own this.

Listening up - a conversation with customers

A brand story is not a monologue. A key stakeholder was missing from the conversation. So we looked at our customer data and examined a cross section of our current content to observe how you, our customers - young, urban Africans - reacted to it.

This validated what we already knew: 

• Articles with the most engagement were about enabling Africa. 
• The most-viewed articles were about how to get started in crypto. 
• And the content that was jargon-heavy or took a negative angle on current challenges were not well received.

Simply put, our customers want us to shine a positive light on how crypto can uplift Africa, and to simplify this complex landscape. 

We were starting to scratch the surface of our brand.

The hero: choosing a brand archetype

There’s something about certain brands that we connect with. Whether you’re an Apple fan or believe in Disney magic, branding is the mark we leave on our customers’ hearts. But when you lose control of your brand, that mark can leave a nasty scar.

As the heroes of our brand stories, archetypes help us master the emotional connection with our customers. So we held a workshop with various writing, design and product marketing stakeholders to vote on the hero that we felt best aligned with our story.

The archetype that got the most votes was the Citizen: relatable, likeable, and approachable! With a down-to-earth, straightforward strategy, the Citizen brand gives you a place to belong, by building a connection that helps you feel included, valued, and seen. 

It’s that human touch. And that brought us to our voice and tonality.

More importantly, we were able to turn a big weakness into a strength. We took 15 disparate writers, all creating content within their own style, and produced 15 brand advocates, using these guidelines as a starting point to speak with a clear, unified, human voice.

Ryan Jales

Senior UX Writer