How to make creative AI work for you

Imagine this: You ask AI to design a campaign about fostering. You type in some basic keywords – "children", "care", "love" – and boom, out pops a visual of a smiling family holding hands in a park, golden sunlight streaming down. It’s nice, but it’s also generic, almost to the point of being sterile. AI’s problem is it lacks both lived experience and emotional intelligence. It doesn’t understand the deep, emotional layers behind the stories we need to tell. Where's the understanding of the complexity? The nuance of what it means to give a child stability and hope in a system that's stretched thin?

This is where the human touch comes in. AI can generate concepts, but it can’t replace the insight and empathy that we as humans bring. For fostering campaigns, for example, we know that fostering isn’t just about love and care – it’s about navigating trauma, offering stability, and bridging gaps in social services. AI doesn’t know how to tap into the lived experience of foster carers, or how to sensitively navigate the challenges the children face. It can’t feel, and in our line of work, that’s crucial.

It was precisely this approach that led to our AI-generated creative for Now Foster’s weekend foster carers recruitment campaign.

Recognising that a new approach was needed to foster carer recruitment to meet the rising demand, Now Foster devised an initiative allowing individuals and couples to foster a child or young person for just one weekend a month. This flexible model opens doors for those who can’t commit to full-time fostering but still want to make a significant impact.

To help Now Foster recruit new weekend foster carers, we needed to challenge the existing preconceptions of fostering to allow new (and younger) audiences to engage with this compelling proposition. We knew that traditional fostering campaign imagery wouldn’t work – stock photos we know, from experience, often feel overly staged, and we couldn’t use real images of children in foster care due to privacy concerns. So, we used AI to generate photorealistic images for our ads – maintaining authenticity without breaching privacy or resorting to cliched representations.

Initially, Now Foster had some reservations about using creative AI. It was uncharted territory for them, and they were concerned that the images wouldn't come out as polished as they'd hoped. That’s where our creative expertise came in. Even with clear guidance, the tool can churn out some strange results (like an extra hand or an eye facing in the wrong direction). So with creative retouching from our studio, we were able to create original imagery that captured what it truly means to be a weekend foster carer.

Before	After

The campaign exceeded all expectations, attracting 400 sign-ups in the first month - proving that AI, paired with creative know-how, was absolutely the right approach. It not only delivered engaging content but also brought Now Foster’s vision to life in a way they hadn’t imagined.

Without intelligent prompting, AI will give you (at best) run-of-the-mill, beige results. And at its worst, you’ll get something that’s either irrelevant or entirely wrong/unusable altogether (cue the photos of people with six fingers). These unpredictable results simply don’t cut it when you're trying to inspire people to take action, whether that’s encouraging them to donate to your cause or raise awareness for mental health services.

Good AI prompting is about being clear and intentional with what you ask. Want AI to generate campaign ideas? Great – but it’s not enough to just say “Create some campaign ideas.” Instead, prompt it with the deep, emotional insights you’ve gathered: “Generate some creative concept ideas for X not-for-profit campaign, that speaks to Y audience to help deliver Z outcome(s).” Now we’re talking. You have to guide AI, coaxing it in the right direction and pushing it to dig deeper. It’s like working with a talented intern – full of potential but in need of good direction.

While AI can crunch numbers and spot patterns, it doesn’t yet understand the human behaviours that drive the people your campaign needs to engage. AI doesn’t understand the delicate balance of messaging that speaks to both head and heart – a skill particularly important in the public and third sectors.

Take a health awareness campaign, for example. If we let AI run that solo, it might prioritise efficiency over effectiveness. The message could end up being robotic, like a very matter-of-fact public service announcement: “Get a flu jab. It’s free. It’s effective.” Technically correct, but not exactly inspiring. A human, on the other hand, knows that to get people to act, you need to connect with their lived reality – perhaps by talking about the joy of staying healthy enough to attend family gatherings or protect a loved one.

Let’s be clear – AI can spark ideas, but impact? That’s where the human brain wins every time. A well-designed campaign isn’t just about producing endless iterations of content. It’s about crafting something that sticks, that changes minds and inspires action. We’re not in the business of churning out content for content’s sake. We create with purpose, driven by strategy, and that’s something only a human can steer.

Our Whole Picture Thinking™ framework digs deeper than AI ever could. We get into the minds of real people, ask the hard questions, and look at problems from every angle – cultural, social, economic – to create campaigns that truly resonate. That’s what makes a campaign effective, and AI just isn’t built to handle that multiplicity of perspectives. So while it’s great at supporting us with production, human creativity still leads the way when it comes to insight.

AI is powerful, but it’s not enough on its own. Think of it as an assistant, not a replacement. It can help us scale up creativity, make processes quicker, and even inject some fresh ideas when we’re running low. But, it can’t craft narratives with heart. It can’t navigate complex human emotions and it can’t produce the kind of work that genuinely moves people to act – that’s where we come in.

For anyone working in the public or third sector, where every campaign has real-world implications, AI is a tool that needs to be guided, steered, and (importantly) humanised. We need to be at the wheel, blending the best of what AI can offer with the deep insight and creativity only humans bring.

If you found this blog interesting, register for our upcoming webinar on 12^th December on Why creative AI needs a human touch.