Creative professionals across the Midlands and beyond are rallying together to use their free time and creative skills to help charitable and essential service organisations tackle the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.
The new initiative is called Sometime and was created by Birmingham-based branding agency Notepad to help mobilise the creative community.
As a result of the Covid-19 crisis, hundreds of essential service organisations, not-for-profits and charities are finding themselves under immense pressure when it comes to communicating with their audiences and raising funds. And as more creative employees find themselves furloughed or without work, Sometime was set up to help connect under-utilised creative skills with organisations that most need support, said Notepad’s Managing Director, Naeem Alvi.
“We put a shout out on social media last week to see if any of our creative friends would be up for volunteering some of their time to help tackle Covid-19 related problems. Within 24 hours, we’d had more than 100 creatives from across the UK volunteer their time and skills to help. It was an incredible response and very humbling.”
As a not-for-profit, Sometime is voluntarily run and funded by the team at Notepad. Over the past week the team has worked around the clock to launch the new platform online.
Creative professionals across the country have offered up their time to support organisations across a broad range of skill sets, including: Social media, brand/graphic/print/advertising design, PR and media communications, photography, videography, animation, editing, live streaming, advertising and brand strategy, copywriting, digital marketing, website design and printing. This support is now available for those organisations who need it.
The Sometime team have already had requests from a number of NHS hospitals and charities that need creative support.
“At a time when the world needs creativity more than ever, creatives are being put on hold. Our goal is to make this a global initiative that helps to alleviate the pressure of this current crisis and puts creative skills to good use. Now more than ever we need to work together to use creativity to bring the world out of isolation,” Naeem said.
In the coming days, more creative briefs will be added to the Sometime website. If you’re an organisation in need of creative support or a creative professional that wants to help, please visit www.wearesometime.org
