Sita is Settle Stories

As the guiding light behind Settle Stories (a charity rooted in the power of human connection and the stories that bind communities together) Sita brings boundless energy, a deeply creative mind, and a spiritual depth that shapes everything she touches.

She is, in every sense, the living embodiment of her organisation’s values.

And yet, somewhere along the way, the words hadn’t kept up.

Settle Stories had grown. A rebrand was underway. Emails, sales pages, website copy, well, all the words really, needed attention. The words they were using sounded distant and corporate. The kind of language that organisations fall into when they think they have to sound a certain way to be taken seriously.

For a charity whose entire mission rests on warmth, belonging, and the irreplaceable power of story, that disconnect was a values problem.

Sita knew it. And when Sita knows something needs to change, she takes action.

The early days of any new working relationship can feel a little like walking on eggshells.

I could see clearly what needed to happen with Settle Stories’ words. The misalignment was obvious to me. But knowing what needs to change and knowing whether someone is ready and open to change? These are two very different things.

Like a good brand witch, I waited for my invitation.

It came during a brand working group session. I was talking about accessibility and inclusion — keeping the brand open and welcoming to neurodivergent audiences through layout, colour, and language choices. Sita didn’t hesitate. She didn’t file it away for later consideration. She championed it immediately, advocating for that segment of their audience as though it had always been part of the plan.

I knew, in that moment Sita was prepared to embrace a different language direction without ego or resistance. 

From there, the relationship deepened quickly and organically. Our calls were working calls (and yes, the work got done) but the conversation became values-led almost immediately. The spiritual dimension of how we communicate wasn’t something we planned or constructed. It simply emerged, as the truest things tend to do.

I’d been observing Sita, her team, and their writing for a while. The patterns were clear.

Their flagship product (Stories for Schools, a digital library and resources helping primary school teachers bring PHSE and values to life in the classroom) became the template for a new way of speaking.

Using S4S as our anchor, we built:

Word frameworks rooted in their values. When you’re a storytelling charity, the story has to sit at the centre of everything you write.

Deep client avatars to speak to head teachers, teachers, parents, students. Real, specific, breathing people. Speaking everytime 1:1. This was a shift for the team, and it stuck. By the time we gathered for the website workshop, they’d not only kept the original avatars, they’d created a whole family of their own.

AI prompts with guardrails which are practical, usable, and always with a clear instruction: A human edits before anyone presses send.

Hands-on feedback so their team could see, in real time, what good looked like. The results were a living, breathing, effective language eco-system.

Everyone had told me about Settle. The place, the feeling, the sense of belonging it carries.

And yet, I still didn’t expect the feeling when I walked into their office for the first time.

I felt it immediately welcomed and held. Like a homecoming.

It’s Yorkshire, so we started with a cup of tea.

What followed was 1½ days of genuine, productive, joyful work. A draft website up on the big screen became a masterclass. Asking what was landing, what wasn’t, what each page was actually for and finding solutions. By the end of day one, a crucial clarity had emerged: Every webpage has a job. Information or sales? Know which one. Write accordingly. Write to one person.

That evening, takeaway in tow, the conversation went deeper. This is when Sita and I talked about the next brave step; integrating her personal brand voice into the organisational one. She is so much the energy and face of Settle Stories that separating the two had started to feel like a compromise. Scary to propose. Scarier to agree to. She agreed.

The next morning, we picked up where we left off. The team, who had been drowning in words and will (so close to the project they couldn’t see the wood for the trees) suddenly had vision, clarity and momentum. I knew when I left that they were going to run with it and had everything they needed to get the job done… and done well.

Sometimes all a project needs is a fresh pair of eyes and an injection of positivity. We left already planning the next chapter. Story at the heart, of course.

The website didn’t need a rebuild. It needed a rethink.

What shifted was strategic clarity: A much cleaner understanding of how to present Settle Stories’ many offerings while genuinely respecting the different audiences navigating the site.

That meant:

A big edit. A lot of the existing copy was trying too hard. It was informative and well-intentioned but ultimately exclusionary. A confused reader will always close the tab.

Clearer UX thinking. Different audiences need different journeys. Head teachers arrive with different questions than parents, teachers, artists or grant-providers. The site needed to honour that.

CTAs with purpose. Every page now has a clear next step and a journey. No dead ends. No guesswork. The result was a website that finally lived up to Settle Stories’ values; warm, clear, purposeful, and built for the people it exists to serve.