“I see a lockdown. I see the IGNIFI team working from home from March – for the remainder of 2020, and maybe beyond. Same for your clients too. Challenges lie ahead – and opportunity too.
If I’d received this prediction from the local fortune teller in late 2019, I would have asked for my money back. Business always has an unpredictable component, but this would have seemed more than a little fanciful. But now? Well it actually underplays the events that overtook our business and the rest of the world in 2020. Talk about a game changer.
By the time March rolled around, we knew something heavy was about to bear down on us all. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few sleepless nights while we got to grips with how this was going to impact IGNIFI’s team. How we would work and what exactly we’d be working on; in a world that appeared to be heading into a state of limbo.
That changed rapidly for IGNIFI sometime towards the end of spring as our clients’ plans began to evolve to meet a new situation in healthcare communications where physical contact was off the cards for the foreseeable future. For us, digital engagement was already a key ingredient in the marketing mix, but now it became the ingredient that mattered most. Trusted by our clients to help them meet the new challenges and opportunities they faced, IGNIFI popped the brave pill, sucked in its collective breath, then knuckled down. We’d always been proud of our gritty approach and we were going to need it now more than ever before.
And so it has proved over the intervening nine months. We’ve learned massively – improving, adapting and overcoming multiple challenges across the team – adding skills, people and services that may not have seen the light of day for at least a year or two. All the time working together, but apart, from colleagues, clients and partners in a huge, and hugely satisfying, collaborative effort. At our core remain the creative, strategic, design and customer service strengths that enable us to support our clients so well, but we’ve added an enhanced digital appreciation and capability that gives us greater flexibility and the ability to lean into the challenges ahead.
2020 saw our team making the most of working from home, even on Christmas jumper day.
So here we are, coming up to Christmas and some things haven’t changed – still locked down, team working from home, clients too. But there’s light on the world’s horizon in the form of effective vaccines. It’ll take time and we’ll not be returning to many of the old norms for sure in our social or work lives. What we can hope for is that the future, eventually, is actually a better place than it might have been had our scientists and healthcare workers not proven so adept and steadfast in their work.
Personally, I’m grateful to each and every one of the IGNIFI team and our super-loyal clients that I can write such a positive piece at the end of the year. Fortune favours the gritty. So, for IGNIFI in 2021, my New Year’s resolution will be that the grit, ingenuity and learning that helped us steer successfully through 2020’s adversity, helps guide us to a robust and hardy future that is open for business, but above all, open for a healthy, well-balanced life.
Posted by Dave Watson
Managing Director
