Movember.com – 2012 Campaign all set to mo..

We went live with the new Movember.com website last week, after a heroic few months development and UAT.

Since I started at IE I’ve been constantly amazed at just what a big site and operation Movember is. The campaign doubles in size each year with 2012 fully operational in about 20 countries and set to be massive back home in the UK – and despite a presidential election should break all records in the States too. Around the world hundreds of thousands are expected to take part, generating several million individual donations: simply massive.

And the whole operation hinges around the website, it manages the donations made by everyone taking part and cleverly aggregates this into leaderboard data and in so doing turns Movember into a month-long worldwide money raising game. Via the site you can track individuals, teams or even multi-country networks of members’ donations. Movember.com is also a fully-fledged social network. Every member has their ‘Mo Space’ that they can use to track their progress, blog and share with others – it’s an idea that has evolved over the years and fits perfectly with the fun irreverent nature of the event – if a thousand young men in your area growing moustaches wasn’t viral enough the website is more than happy to remind you just what a social phenomena this is.

Each year Melbourne design agency Urchin provide the campaign design and I love what they have produced for this year. The theme ‘Movember & Sons’: men passing knowledge down generation to generation, father to son. It works brilliantly and In design terms ditches last year’s muted (almost fallout inspired) tones to go brightly coloured and very high concept (although never quite losing a certain trademark Melbourne retro grunginess).

We’ve tweaked and changed just about every feature of the site, built a brand new mobile website with Sencha Architect, and developed a new API and service layer to deliver it all and, by volume, has been the biggest project I’ve managed for many years. It’s been a lot of fun.. and I’m told we’re not even into the crazy bit yet. There’s lots about the site I’d like to change, we’ll see what opportunity there is over the coming months there will be to influence the design of next year’s site (which I’ve already started planning for). Right now though all eyes are Mo season 2012: Movember – taking donations on http://mobro.co/luchouselander