What is a ‘perspective’?

A perspective is a blog post that provides a first-person account of someone’s personal experience.  

This can include; 

  • someone who is affected by human rights violations  
  • someone who is investigating or fighting against human rights violations 
  • Amnesty staff 
  • volunteer members or activists 
  • someone from a partner organization 

These pages are designed to be shared, not only on our global social channels but also by individual accounts. They are an opportunity for staff to use their own profiles to promote their colleague’s work and show the human side to Amnesty’s campaigning work. They are about people, not policy, and are a way to engage our audiences with human rights by appealing to our common humanity. Ideally, these posts should end in a clear call to action such as a petition or a fundraising ask.  

The text can either be drafted by the featured person themselves, or drafted by an Amnesty comms colleague after interviewing the featured person. Translation resource can be provided so that posts can be authored in the language the writer is most comfortable using.  

These writing guidelines outline key areas of best practice to make sure the posts follow a consistent format, are accessible, and align with our editorial strategy.  

Requirements

Perspective posts should always close with a call to action that the reader can engage with. 

  • Do include links to petitions, donation pages, membership signups, online courses or other ways of getting involved or supporting Amnesty’s work.  
  • The person being featured must consent to their story being used to promote the call to action, especially if they do not work for Amnesty.  
  • Do use the Call-to-Action block in WordPress. 

Perspective posts should follow a consistent style and post layout  

  • Open with 1-3 sentences providing context about the person being featured. This part of the page should be stylised in a grey box at the top of the post.  
  • Add the author’s name to the byline in the post settings. If the post uses the essay style, then the byline will be the featured person’s name.   

Perspective posts can follow one of two formats, interview or essay.  

If you are using an interview format… 

  • Do use a page name that follows the ‘[5 word max summary]: An Interview with [Person’s Name]’ format.  
  • Do provide a short overview to set the scene. This should include introducing the interviewer and the interviewee. This should be 2 paragraphs maximum.  
  • Do format the interviewer’s questions to divide your post into sections. If these questions are short, use structured headings. If the interviewer provides more commentary, these should be in bold format.  
  • Do not write more than 3 paragraphs per subheading. 
  • Do not write more than 3 sentences per paragraph.    
  • Do not exceed 1500 words. If the interview is based on a recording, you might want to edit some questions out or edit the interviewees responses.  

If you are using an essay format… 

  • Do use a page name that follows the [Person’s Name]: [Essay Title]. The page title should not exceed 79 characters. 
  • Do provide a short overview to set the scene.  
  • Do use structured headings to break the page into sections. This will make it easier for readers to skim the page.  
  • Do not write more than 3 paragraphs per subheading. 
  • Do not write more than 3 sentences per paragraph.    
  • Do not exceed 1000 words. If the interview is based on a recording, you might want to edit some questions out or edit the interviewees responses. 
  • Do use the author information fields in the Post settings to create a byline for the author.  

Write with a conversational tone that can be easily understood by people reading about this topic for the first time 

  • Do start your post with a summary of the topic that is maximum one paragraph, 3 sentences long.  
  • Do refer to the reader as ‘you’. If the speaker is an Amnesty member or staff member, they should refer to Amnesty as ‘we’. 
  • Do not use passive voice. For example, ‘Authorities detained thousands of protesters’ not ‘Thousands of protesters were detained by authorities’ 
  • Do use present tense instead of imperfect tense when possible. For example, ‘Amnesty campaigns for human rights’ not ‘Amnesty has campaigned for human rights’  
  • Do not use jargon, acronyms or other complicated language. If we need to reference a specific government body, be prepared to explain what that body does and why it is relevant to the topic. 
  • Do add in-line links to reference existing materials so that people can explore those resources in a new tab. This can make it easier for you to focus on the main points in the blog post without overwhelming people with too much information.  
  • Do not use footnotes to cite your sources.  

All content should meet our minimum web content accessibility standards 

  • Do not use photos with text edited onto them. This includes infographics being added as image. If you want to add an infographic, use a data visualization tool like Infogram or Flourish.  
  • Add alt text for all images. Alt text should be short and descriptive. It should not include text like ‘photo of’ or ‘image of’ since this can get repetitive for screen-readers 
  • Add subtitles to your video if it has voiceover or otherwise relies on sound to communicate. This includes adding subtitles in other languages if the page is being translated into other languages.  
  • Use structured text to break up your writing into manageable chunks.  

Adhere to our audiovisual publishing guidelines 

  • Do not add distressing images or video, for example of death or physical effects of human rights abuses, unless it is for a good reason. If your page contains distressing imagery, the content should be hidden until the user clicks to reveal after reading a content warning. 
  • For work related to the death penalty, do not use images of methods used to execute people such as nooses, electric chairs, needles.  
  • Do look after your own well-being when working with disturbing content.  

Use appropriate language 

Recommendations

Make your text easier to read or skim  

  • Do use bold formatting to highlight the most important parts of your text.  
  • Do use bullet points instead of listing out items in a sentence with commas.  
  • Do move important points onto their own line to give them gravity.  

Use high-quality images and video that don’t weigh down your page 

  • Do include an image of the person being featured. This can be a headshot or a picture of them ‘in action’ (this could be them at a protest or them interviewing someone for research)  
  • Do not use screenshots of photographs or videos, unless we do not have access to the originals.  
  • Compress your images so they are less than 2MB. You should be able to do this without impacting the image quality if you are using an original image file. 
  • Crop images so they complement your page layout.  
  • If you are adding video, make sure it is not longer than 2 minutes. The video should be about the same story or content discussed in the post.  
  • Add subtitles to video so that it is accessible.  
  • Contact the Creative Hub team before finalising any video.