If you've searched for help with "brand voice guidelines," "tone of voice document," "editorial standards," or "communications playbook," you're closer to the right answer than you might think. These all describe roughly the same thing, and the differences between them matter less than you'd expect.
Here's a plain definition of each term, so you can stop wondering if you're searching for the wrong thing.
Style guide
A style guide is the umbrella term, and usually the most complete one. It covers voice and tone, grammar and punctuation conventions, organization-specific terminology, formatting standards, and often channel-specific notes. If a document does all of this in one place, "style guide" is almost always the right name for it—regardless of what it's actually called internally.
Brand voice guidelines
Usually a narrower slice—just the voice and tone section of a full style guide, sometimes with visual brand elements (logo, color) mixed in. If your document mostly answers "how should we sound?" without touching grammar or terminology, "brand voice guidelines" is probably the more accurate name for what you have. It's not wrong to want just this piece—plenty of organizations start here.
Tone of voice document
Nearly identical to brand voice guidelines, just a more common term in marketing and advertising circles than in nonprofit or sport-sector communications. Same underlying idea: how the organization sounds, described so a writer who's never worked there can imitate it.
Editorial guidelines
Common in publishing and media, but increasingly used by any organization with regular published content—newsletters, blog posts, reports. Tends to emphasize grammar, formatting, and fact-checking conventions more than voice and tone. A full style guide usually includes editorial guidelines as one section among several.
Communications playbook
The broadest and vaguest of the bunch—sometimes it means a style guide, sometimes it means a full communications strategy with channels, audiences, and campaign planning included. If someone hands you a "playbook," check what's actually inside before assuming it does what a style guide does.
Writing standards / content standards
Functionally close to a style guide, though the phrase shows up more often in government, higher education, and corporate contexts than in nonprofit or sport organizations. Same core purpose: a shared reference so multiple writers produce consistent output.
Why the terminology confusion happens
None of these terms are standardized. There's no governing body deciding that "style guide" means one specific thing and "brand voice guidelines" means another. Different industries, different organization sizes, and different individual writers all settled on different words for describing the same underlying need: a shared, written reference for how an organization communicates, so it doesn't depend on any one person's memory.
That's the thing to search for, whatever you end up calling it.
Which one do you actually need?
In practice, most organizations that go looking for "brand voice guidelines" or a "tone of voice document" end up needing the fuller version once they start building it—because voice questions and grammar questions and terminology questions all come up in the same conversations, usually within the first few weeks of actually using the thing. Starting narrow isn't wrong. It's just worth knowing that the narrow version tends to grow into the full one.
If you're not sure which you need yet, the Style Guide Starter Template covers the core of all of the above in one place—a reasonable starting point regardless of which term brought you here.
For more on what actually belongs in a complete one, see What Actually Goes Into a Style Guide (Beyond Grammar).
Housestyle Co. builds and maintains custom writing style guides—call it what you want—for growing organizations. Get in touch to talk through what yours would need to cover.