Settle Stories: How to market the art of storytelling?

Settle Stories, a charity based in Settle, North Yorkshire seeks to lift the spirit, engage the mind and stimulate the imagination through the presentation of all forms of storytelling. They believe 'people and their stories matter' and storytelling celebrates the gift of the human imagination through creativity.

Sita Brand, Director of Settle Stories explained, 'Storytelling is one of the few human traits that is universal across all cultures throughout history. Storytelling develops our speaking, listening and presentation skills, builds our knowledge and understanding of the world, offers us safe spaces to experience powerful emotions and gives us a sense of belonging to a group with a shared story and enables us to communicate more effectively.'

Settle Stories has been great at helping others tell their stories but they have not had the resources to tell their own story as well as they would like. The London design agency Ellipsis has helped them reverse this trend by redesigning their logo and providing them with design work for their letterhead, business cards and website. Ellipsis provided this work pro bono as part of their Brand-You initiative to provide one brand makeover to a new cause each month of 2013 - in collaboration with Pimp My Cause - to celebrate 21 years in business and the Year of Great Marketing Karma.

Ellipsis has helped Settle Stories get off to a great start, but they are now looking for strategic marketing and communications support to take things further. They would like help integrating the three aspects of their work: the annual storytelling festival, learning programmes and a digital archive of local stories.

• Do you have the branding and communications expertise to advise them on how to present the three aspects of their work in a collectively compelling and integrated way?
• Do you have the talent and insight to help them raise appreciation of the importance of storytelling across society or help them to identify ways to build deeper ongoing relationships with people who have participated in their events?
• Or do you have the expertise and vision to help them diversify their revenue and funding streams to further drive their mission?

Sita Brand said, 'In order for us to find the answers to the economic, global, environmental challenges we face we need to think and act creatively and imaginatively. It has never been more crucial that as a society we invest in developing creativity and the imagination. Marketers are natural storytellers and we welcome your support in finding creative ways to tell our own story and capture people's imagination with our work. We want to show that through the work of arts charities like Settle Stories we are giving people the skills to be brave in a new world. Creativity is about risk taking. We live in a risk-averse society which is constraining our abilities. Settle Stories wants to challenge this.'

If you would like to help tell the story of storytelling and support Settle Stories please get in touch with Anna Mullenneaux, Chief Match Maker at Pimp My Cause. Read more about The Marketing Society's Marketing for Good initiative.