Despite the fact that this style guide is targeting journalists and media, this document pretends to help people who report about volunteering in a wide sense: journalists, people working in organizations, bloggers or any person that writes about this topic. The objective of this style guide is to show us how to use the language in a way that it might convey the values linked to volunteering. Furthermore, we can also notice what the most common mistakes are when we are reporting about volunteering.

Layout of the style guide to communicate about volunteering

The style guide, with a comfortable and pragmatic layout, is divided in different chapters:

• Who?, it expains the image that media often depicts about volunteering and social exclusion.
• What?, it briefs the words and expressions used, how to be more accurate when reporting about volunteering and how to prevent the use of sexist vocabulary on the news.
• Why?, it points out the reasons of using an accurated vocabulary.
• How?, how to improve the language of audiovisual media, how the audience receives the inputs of audiovisual media and how to deal with the image of volunteering.
• In addition, it incorporates reports and an informative thermometer that gauges how the media is tackling volunteering and the way to change standards which are wrong.