Case Study: Handshake achieves a consistent, scalable voice across students, education partners, and employers with Writer

How Maria Romanovsky of Handshake gets college students, education partners, and employers on the same page

Handshake, a three-sided marketplace connecting students, education partners, and employers, faced the challenge of maintaining a single, calibrated voice across audiences (students, EDU, employers) while a lot of non-writers produced content. Their existing Google Doc styleguide was a 100‑page, hard-to-use source of truth that few people knew how to use. To solve this, Handshake turned to Writer, adopting Writer’s Styleguide, Terms and Snippets features plus the Writer plugin to bring content governance into authors’ workflows.

Using Writer, Handshake migrated its unwieldy guide to handshake.styleguide.com, applied templates and standardized terms, and rolled out the Writer plugin so every writer has a real‑time “managing editor.” The result: easier sharing and navigation, faster adoption across teams, and a big drop in manual editorial back-and-forth—leadership even called the new guide “fire.” Writer’s solution scaled Handshake’s content strategy across a network of 7M+ active students, 1,100+ colleges/universities and 550K+ employers, making consistent, audience‑calibrated content practical at scale.

Handshake