UNHCR: Step with Refugees Campaign

Going the extra mile for an important charity campaign.

The client

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is a Nobel Peace Prize winning charity, founded to help protect and assist refugees across the world. It’s work is carried out in 138 countries, and has helped over 50 million refugees start their lives again after being displaced.

Just After Midnight was asked to help UNHCR with its Step with Refugees campaign. This is a call to action for people around the world to challenge themselves by participating in a two billion kilometre walk over 12 months, just as refugees worldwide do each year to reach points of safety. Steps can be recorded via fitness apps or added directly onto the website. Fundraising can also be organised via the website. Through the collective effort, UNHCR hopes the participants will demonstrate solidarity with refugees, and raise essential funds to help rebuild their lives.

The challenge

The main challenge presented to Just After Midnight was to ensure that 20+ individual market sites, as well as the global pool site could be reached. All market sites needed to be available at all times, and across all time zones, so that every step could be recorded, and added into a global total.

An additional risk of the sites being unavailable was that essential public revenue for the UNHCR campaign would be lost. Donation and sponsorship transactions are organised on the campaign sites, a key functionality for JAM to protect. This was also a key priority for the organisers, as state donors are reducing their charity spend.

The solution

Just After Midnight was brought on to manage the 25 regional campaign URLs hosted on the Azure platform

  • Just After Midnight supported the regional URLs as they were launched one by one
  • Any infrastructure or application issues reported by the market were investigated in a matter of minutes by our L1 and L2 teams
  • The L2 team set up multiple monitors in 8 countries to ensure that any irregularities on the sites were picked up and reported immediately

Results

Since Just After Midnight began the project, there has been 100% uptime on all of the campaign sites

  • Very few end user issues reported; these were smoothed out within a matter of hours by our team
  • Donations and sponsorship have been protected as all sites have remained consistently function
  • 355,262 steps have been recorded so far

 

100%
uptime
27 countries
taking part
$15 million
goal for donations
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