People’s health and wellbeing is always our top priority – right now we’re thinking about all of you and hoping you, your families and colleagues are keeping safe, taking care of yourselves and finding ways to adapt to lockdown or isolation.

The same goes for our Difference Collective members. So far, most of us are in good health. We’re working as normally as we can, whilst embracing the needs of our families and communities. We’re supporting each other by staying in touch and collaborating on projects while sharing tips and motivation wherever we can.

We’ve also been considering how we can adapt to help our clients differently in these new circumstances. Many of you are trying to maintain business as usual, with major disruption from all kinds of COVID-19 impacts. We understand that, in unprecedented times, the need for extra support and resources may be more necessary than ever. Our team of senior healthcare freelancers have the resources and skills you can call on to help.

If you’re short-handed … because of temporarily absent team members or reduced productivity, we have sector specialists who know your market and stakeholders. They can add capacity to your team or fill a temporary gap.

If you’ve got extra comms needs … because you need to keep employees, customers and partners informed about the changing situation, we can help with external or internal communications strategy, planning and messaging, rapidly creating content for all channels as needed, or editing and proofing your drafts.

If something unexpected happens … and you need people to deliver reactive campaigns and responses quickly, we can mobilise a team or provide an expert right away. We can help modify and review campaigns and plans in progress or identify those to put on hold.

If you’re planning ahead … you may be looking at strategy, priorities, messaging and content creation that will meet stakeholder needs in the medium or longer term. We can help resource or manage these projects, provide creative and strategic input or skills to produce, review or refine new content and campaigns so they’re ready for future distribution. This crisis will come to an end and being prepared will keep you on the front foot.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to use our resources when they’re most needed. We’ve suspended our normal minimum half day engagement period: if you just need an hour or two of support for something right now, we’re ready and willing to jump in.

As a virtual team of over 95 consultants who work remotely all the time (and we’re always happy to share tips about that from our experience, if it’s useful) we’re lucky to be well set up to keep working in these challenging times. We’re used to hitting the ground running to provide an extra pair of hands for all kinds of campaigns and tasks.

We are healthcare comms specialists, medical writers, journalists, social media and digital specialists, creative strategists, internal communicators, charity specialists and designers. We’re all ready and willing to help with anything you need – even if it’s completely different from your usual comms projects.

We’re also very mindful of the particular difficulties that health-related charities are facing right now. If you need to encourage supporter donations, communicate with your beneficiaries or donors or radically adapt your campaigns and activities, we would love to help with creative fundraising and PR ideas, brainstorms or messaging, delivery and content creation.

We’re sending you our very best wishes … most importantly, for good health and wellbeing, but also for continuity at work, whatever your organisation’s priorities are at this time.

From Angie and everyone at The Difference Collective.