HumanitarianResponse.info was one of the most-visited web platforms of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It gathered about 113,000 visitors a month.
Humanitarian partners on the ground could upload and moderate content to match the needs of the humanitarian or emergency response in the country.
Conceived as a collaborative site, for years it provided a core set of features for information collection, sharing, and visualization.
As the migration of HumanitarianResponse.info from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 was approaching, OCHA’s Digital Services team opted for a more radical upgrade.
They decided to create a faster, more user-friendly site that would easily connect to other platforms, including clusters and other OCHA services.
“A major consideration for us was capitalizing on what’s working well, and that is the ReliefWeb model,” Derrick Waithanje explains.
“The new site should be able to automate content publishing from ReliefWeb as much as possible, including relying on its 24/7 content management support model. This would ensure the accuracy of the information posted, given the level of scrutiny that already goes into all ReliefWeb sources.”
“This is why we decided to brand the new site ReliefWeb Response because de facto it is part of the ReliefWeb environment,” says Joanna Misiura. “As the name suggests, the platform will be strongly integrated with existing ReliefWeb services.”
“Reports, maps, and infographics will be handled by ReliefWeb and displayed in the new platform via feeds. Site managers will retain their ability to specify what content to display and can still create custom pages important to the local context.”
“ReliefWeb Response is our next-generation humanitarian coordination platform,” Marina Colozzi shares. “We relied on user research, usability testing, and website analytics to improve the platform.”
“This allowed us to include some major improvements such as multilingual support for English, French, and Spanish, and a table of contents option to enable in-page navigation.”
The new site is now live, and the next step will be migrating all former HumanitarianResponse.info crisis pages to the new platform. The work will be completed by May 2023.
Learn more on the ReliefWeb Response website.
