Doctors Without Borders — Transforming Humanitarian Storytelling And Engagement Through Digital And Data Integration

MSF’s existing digital presence struggled to keep up with its scale of operations and storytelling ambitions.

• Fragmented web ecosystem: Dozens of regional websites operated on disparate platforms with inconsistent design and content standards.

• Disconnected data: Supporter and donor information was siloed across systems, preventing personalized communication or unified reporting.

• Manual content workflows: Non-technical staff found it difficult to update or localize critical field stories in real time.

• Limited personalization: Campaigns relied on one-size-fits-all messaging, reducing emotional resonance and conversion potential.

• Performance gaps: Sites struggled with accessibility, load times, and mobile responsiveness — especially in bandwidth-limited regions.

The objective was to create a digital and data-driven foundation that unified storytelling, improved operational agility, and enabled personalized engagement at scale.

Axelerant led the global digital transformation initiative for MSF — bringing together journey mapping, design strategy, content rearchitecture, web and mobile engineering, and CDP implementation into a single orchestrated solution.

The transformation was driven by one guiding idea:

Humanitarian storytelling should feel as immediate and personal as the work itself.

User Journey Mapping — From Awareness to Action

Our process began with understanding the diverse journeys within MSF’s audience landscape: individual donors, corporate partners, volunteers, field professionals, journalists, and advocates.

Workshops and stakeholder sessions revealed critical emotional and functional pathways:

• Donors: Needed clarity on how their contribution creates impact, and reassurance through transparent storytelling.

• Volunteers and Field Staff: Needed quick access to opportunities, application workflows, and internal updates.

• Supporters and Advocates: Wanted immersive stories, updates, and direct ways to take part in global campaigns.

• Press and Partners: Required structured access to verified assets and crisis updates.

These journeys helped define the content architecture, navigation flow, and activation triggers for engagement and personalization — establishing clear transitions from awareness to empathy, and empathy to action.

Design Strategy — Empathy by Design

The visual and experiential direction focused on Humanitarian Clarity — a digital expression of MSF’s values: transparency, urgency, and compassion.

• Emotion through simplicity: Stripped-back layouts placed authentic photography and field reporting at the forefront.

• Calm interaction design: Subtle, fast transitions — ensuring continuity even in high-traffic or emergency updates.

• Accessibility as a design core: Interfaces built to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance with optimal readability, contrast, and adaptive behaviors.

• Mobile-first focus: Every component designed to function across low-bandwidth conditions, reflecting the realities of MSF’s global footprint.

• Unified global design system: Tokenized components allowed regional flexibility while preserving MSF’s brand discipline.

The design system turned the platform into a living narrative — one that could respond in real time to global events and tell stories that moved people to act.

Content Strategy — Building a System for Real-Time Storytelling

MSF’s greatest asset is its voice from the field. We redefined the content strategy to connect that voice with the world — faster, clearer, and with greater impact.

• Modular storytelling: Created flexible content templates for field updates, crisis reports, and personal stories that could be assembled quickly without design intervention.

• Global taxonomy and metadata: Unified how stories, regions, and emergencies were tagged, enabling cross-region discoverability and campaign clustering.

• Localized publishing workflows: Empowered regional teams to publish in local languages while maintaining brand and message integrity.

• Embedded calls-to-action: Donation prompts and subscription entry points were integrated contextually within stories, rather than as interruptions.

• SEO and visibility optimization: Structured metadata and schema markup boosted organic visibility by more than 40% post-launch.

The new content model turned every article, campaign, and update into an activation opportunity — a living entry point to participation.

Web and Mobile Platform Build — Designed for Global Agility

Axelerant engineered a Drupal-based multi-site architecture that brought all global and regional MSF entities under a shared technical and design framework.

Key capabilities included:

• Unified infrastructure: One core platform with decentralized permissions for regional content teams.

• Component library: Atomic design principles applied for reusability and speed in launching new campaign sites.

• Performance optimization: Adaptive image delivery, caching, and CDN integration reduced global load times to under 2.5 seconds.

• Scalability and resilience: Cloud-native hosting architecture ensured 99.9% uptime even during high-traffic emergencies.

• Mobile app enablement: APIs prepared for integration with the MSF mobile ecosystem — enabling push updates and offline accessibility for field workers and volunteers.

• Governance and security: Role-based access, automated updates, and audit logs met MSF’s stringent data privacy and compliance needs.
  
  

The result was a global platform engineered for speed, reliability, and emotional precision — equally effective for a donor in London or a field volunteer in Sudan.

CDP Implementation — Turning Data into Empathy

Alongside the experience transformation, Axelerant implemented a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to unify supporter data across all digital touchpoints — website, email, donations, and campaigns — creating a single source of truth for personalization and activation.

CDP Strategy and Execution:

• Unified Data Model: Merged data streams from donation systems, marketing automation tools, CRM, and analytics into a centralized CDP.

• Real-Time Segmentation: Enabled segmentation based on donor behavior, giving patterns, engagement recency, and preferred causes.

• Personalized Campaign Activation: Integrated the CDP with marketing platforms to deliver targeted campaigns — e.g., resurfacing field updates from regions donors had supported before.

• Journey Orchestration: Defined behavioral triggers that moved users seamlessly from awareness (reading a story) to action (donating or subscribing).

• Analytics and Reporting: Built dashboards to track donor lifetime value, engagement trends, and conversion performance by region.
  
  

This transformed how MSF connected with supporters — shifting from one-way communication to real-time, data-informed empathy. Each engagement — whether an email, social ad, or in-site message — now reflected individual interest, history, and impact.

The digital and data transformation fundamentally reshaped how Doctors Without Borders communicates, inspires, and activates support globally.

Key impacts:

• Significant increase in donor conversions driven by integrated storytelling and data-personalized campaigns.

• Faster publishing workflows across global and regional teams.

• Improvemed site performance and accessibility metrics.

• Unified global brand presence across 70+ country sites.

• Deeper audience insight through centralized data — enabling continuous optimization and more relevant supporter journeys.
  
  

Beyond metrics, the new platform allowed MSF to speak with one authentic, compassionate voice — agile in emergencies, unified in purpose, and deeply human in tone.