Movember 2012

Movember has a great concept, branding and execution and is fast become the global poster boy for the way modern charities must work if they want to attract huge, engaged audiences.

Moving to Melbourne I was struck by how much the local fashion is reflected back in this Aussie icon, which seems to embody the quintessential Melbourne dandy like no other. I’m not even close to being hip enough to consider myself amongst these ranks, however when the opportunity to work on developing their website came along there was no way I could let it pass.

Movember.com is the global hub for all Movember activities, and it’s just one site operated from Melbourne in 26 countries. It’s the scale of this operation which is breathtaking and is best conveyed in numbers – the 2012 website, which I helped produce, had the following crazy stats:

[put in numbers, total donations,  total registrations,  total mo bros, mo sistas total concurrents, max donations in an hour..etc]

I project managed the site build and liaised with the client to help define requirements and solutions.  I managed a team of 10, including software engineers, developers, test analyists and specialist consultants. It was fascinating to work on something that needs to operate on such a scale – learning about the engineering and tools that this requires was incredibly valuable and interesting.

Alongside a number of upgrades to the website and complete re-skin in 2012 we also developed a new mobile website (using the Sencha framework) and public API (used primarily by Movember’s native iOS and Android apps).

Managing a project of this size was not easy as there were multiple stakeholders at the charity and hundreds of development tasks to deliver. However we were still able to introduce some Agile practices into the production process, ones we would extend further with Movember 2013.  The site and campaign in 2012 was widely regarded to be a success, with no down time during the campaign whilst seeing Movember’s biggest ever numbers to date.

I also grew a very silly mo.