With trust at an all-time low, saturated media channels and dwindling attention spans, engaging with your target audience requires some outside-of-the-box thinking. Matt Eamer, founder and creative director of me&you, argues that, today, creativity must be applied to delivery as well as to content.

From Instagram reels to community intranets, online newsrooms to viral campaigns. The variety of ways to get your message in front of your audience has never been greater, nor more sophisticated. However, I believe the greatest challenge in communications isn’t simply getting your message ‘seen’, but rather getting your audience to ‘act’; to cut through the noise and motivate change, to encourage your audience to engage with you and take the next step. That’s where true, meaningful digital impact happens but, sadly, it’s never been harder to achieve. Trust is at an all-time low, media channels are saturated and your audience’s attention span is growing ever shorter…

So, how do we fix this? My agency works exclusively with clients who do good for people and the planet. So, we’ve witnessed first-hand the pressures of delivering vital care and support to an audience in need, during a tough few years. Yet this has also brought with it opportunities and an openness to work in a different, more creative way.

It’s here that I believe the solution lies: creativity is the key to delivering digital impact. I don’t mean a narrow understanding of ‘creativity’, I’m focused on a broad application of the term applied to all aspects of a project. This can mean being creative with how a project is delivered; moving from a traditional waterfall approach to a truly agile way of working, being more distinct and emotive in your communications and using creative story-telling techniques to draw people in. Looking at alternative methods to stand out - whilst others zig, be creative and zag. Therefore (whisper it) we’ll start seeing a rise in smart, non-digital communications - the return of a printed brochure or targeted, personalised printed piece - could help your message, digital project and brand stand out.

Whether applied to print or digital, creativity is vital to delivering impact. You don’t have to look far to see evidence of this. All the award winners at the recent Digital Impact Awards won because they rose to the challenges their customers set them. They provided a creative solution to address that challenge; a distinctive, emotive and engaging solution. And that’s the key to creating long-term, meaningful, positive impact.

By applying creative thinking to our recent work with Look Good Feel Better we’ve helped thousands of cancer patients receive support and delivered tangible cost savings for the charity. Volunteers and hospitals can now log into a secure portal and see what patients are attending a LGFB workshop. Cancer patients can find workshops near them and book online. All of this is connected live with our clients' Salesforce system. Automating a traditionally manual process has reduced the charity’s overheads by more than 50% and freed up staff to more proactively grow the charity. During the project we also identified another creative way to save the charity money. As LGFB’s service became more popular, the more their costs for postcode look-ups increased; by thinking creatively, we developed a solution that replaced the reliance on this look-up. This meant no ongoing costs and no increase in fees as more and more patients book.

So, I believe creativity is the key to delivering impact, digital and otherwise. Open your mind, view problems from all angles and solve them with innovative solutions. Without creativity you’ll deliver a numb, dull and closed solution. With it, all our perspectives are broadened, and we can move from just being ‘seen’ to actually engaging with and motivating our audience.