This article provides guidance for the core communications team at EIT Food or any commissioned agencies or writers working directly for the core communications team.  

 

Other teams and partners are not permitted to write blogs directly for the main EIT Food website. Go to Can I submit a blog post to the EIT Food website? for more information.

  

If you’re in the core communications team, or commissioned by them, read on for tips and best practices. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Create an effective headline 

The headline is your big opportunity to grab the attention of your audience! You may have written the most interesting article in the world, but with a weak headline many people will never get to enjoy it.  

 

As well as evoking interest, a headline also needs to be clear and accurate as to what the blog covers. It should match the reader’s expectations at the outset. ‘Listicle’ titles are ever popular and rank well on search engines, for example ‘10 reasons why regenerative agriculture is the best type of farming’. Cryptic titles can work well within print publications, but they don’t perform so well for blogs, especially for EIT Food’s diverse international audience. 

 
Tips for writing an effective headline:  

  • Make it engaging
  • Set the right expectations – a blog title needs to be useful and descriptive 
  • Keep it short – no more than 10 words
  • Include keywords – more about this here: How do I optimise web content for EIT Food? 

  

Structure your blog 
Articles should be as long as they need to be: no longer, no shorter. Blogs on EIT Food’s core channel tend to cover complex issues from multiple perspectives, so their lengths tend to be 1,000+ words. 


Here’s a good way to structure it: 

  

Beginning   

  • Focus the reader by clearly stating the challenge or angle
  • Highlight the broader challenges around the subject 

  

Middle 

  • Address the different sides to the story – opinions, challenges and opportunities 
  • Outline the current and emerging solutions to these challenges 
  • Use supporting case studies and information from Changemakers and other reputable sources
  • Make sure to keep everything connected to the original challenge or angle. A focused story well told is better than a sprawling information dump that tries to cover everything 

End  

  • Demonstrate how EIT Food is driving the change, using partner and project cases where possible
  • End by looking to the future
  • Include clear references at the bottom. 

  

At EIT Food, we want to position ourselves as a credible authority in the food system, so our content should show all sides of an argument and encourage others to enter the discussion. What we write should serve the audience’s needs rather than ours.  

 

Work with Changemakers  

When using the term ‘Changemakers’, EIT Food is referring to relevant people, organisations and platforms with the influence and credibility to extend a message to a wider audience. This includes partners, students, entrepreneurs, policymakers and food experts. We should use their stories, messages and quotes in blogs. 


Visualise where possible 

  

Often, the best way to convey a complex idea is to create a visual to explain it to the reader. When writing your blog, consider whether your topic would be clearer to a reader if presented in diagram form, infographic or a flow chart. There may be an opportunity to commission one of our external agencies to produce these. 

  

Select the right images and videos 

Images and videos help to break up walls of text and bring stories to life. Visual assets containing people should reflect the full diversity of society, including ethnicity, gender, sexuality, body type and physical abilities. Where possible, use EIT Food images depicting real colleagues, partners and participants, though stock images are also an option. 

 

For more about images and video go to: guidelines on video and image use. 

  

Use credible references 

All statistics, statements and claims in blogs should be backed up by credible science or data. 

Reputable sources to reference: 

  

How to format references: 

  • Use endnotes
  • Use in-text numbers in brackets (1), not Roman numerals or superscript 
  • List the source then the title of the article hyperlinked to the website  

  

 

  

 

Quality assurance checklist 

Accuracy and attention to detail are essential. Here are tips to ensure everything you submit is of the highest quality: 

  • Read through your blog twice, sense-checking sentence structure and meaning. 
  • Read your copy out loud to pick up errors and get a feel for the rhythm. 
  • Run a spell check and a grammar check. 
  • Check every hyperlink to make sure it is not broken and that it links to the correct page. 
  • Have someone else also complete the above steps before submitting your blog. 

  

Submit your blog 

  

Once all of the above has been done, your blog is ready to be published! To understand these final steps read: ‘How do I submit a blog post to the EIT Food website?’ 

This article was last reviewed in January 2024 and will be reviewed again in January 2025.

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