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‘Creatives For Bushfires’ initiative seeks to match agencies with businesses in need

Jane Metlikovec, founder and managing director of Melbourne-based creative agency Upstride, has started a Facebook page which will enable advertising agencies and communications professionals to offer up their services to help those affected by the bushfires.

The intention of Creatives for Bushfires is to collate pledges of support and match agencies with businesses and farmers that need help.

As an example, she said, an agency with a background in dairy campaigns could be best matched with a fire-affected farming community in future.

Metlikovec told Mumbrella her motivation for starting the Facebook page came from her experience working as a journalist during the Black Friday fires in Gippsland, where she is from.

“I’m from Gippsland. Not the current fire zone but the one impacted by Black Saturday (Latrobe Valley) in 2009. I worked on the Black Saturday Gippsland fires back when I was a Herald Sun journo and saw the huge and ongoing devastation faced by my own community back then,” Metlikovec said.

She said the effort required to tackle the current crisis was bigger than what her agency alone could provide, and she’d like to see some of Australia’s biggest agencies, and one-stop shops, get behind the cause.

“My agency, Upstride, is quite new and we are small, so I didn’t feel that our support alone could achieve too much. So my colleague Mel and I chatted [yesterday] morning about what we thought we could do that could create real help in future, and Creatives for Bushfires was what we came up with,” she explained.

“The rebuild effort takes such a long time, and business, industry and tourism can really do with the help of professional creatives and marketers down the track to help either bring visitors back to areas or to help businesses getting back on their feet.”

If you’d like to assist with bushfire recovery, relief and rescue efforts, please explore the options below: 

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