IE has been Movemberʼs Agency of Record for the past five years. In 2009 over 255,000 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas participated in seven countries including Australia, New Zealand, USA, England, Ireland and Canada amongst others, and raised funds for, and awareness of, menʼs health initiatives. Established in 2003, Movember has always used digital as its primary platform, so IE’s role has been to constantly improve and refine Movember’s digital assets while engaging with a range of key stakeholders around the world.

Movember is held in the month formally known as November, which introduces some particular challenges in relation to the project’s lifecycle and scalability. For nine months of the year the Movember website operates primarily as a user resource for the Movember Foundation and as a link to important men’s health information. For three months of the year, however, Movember.com truly comes alive, with hundreds of thousands of visitors organising their fundraising and using social networking, donating money and learning more about the cause and using the site to raise awareness. Therefore the site must be able to scale up and down to extreme degrees, and the impact of even a day of downtime during the campaign period could have significant consequences.

The Movember Application is a custom ERP that enables the global management of the entire campaign. Zend Corporation has acknowledged the scale and complexity of the Movember infrastructure as one the leading examples of Open Source application development.

The MoSpace asset is a custom-developed social media application that enables Mo Bros to share their story and connect with other Mo Bros from around the world. This custom-application was built from the ground up by IE. Also, each year Movember develops a campaign micro-site to capture the essence of the campaign theme.

Movember has two main priorities: raising awareness of the health issues men may face, and raising money to support organisations affecting positive change to men’s health. By any measure the success of Movember is extraordinary. Between the 2008 and 2009 Movember periods, global active participation increased by 67% to total more than a quarter of a million MoBros and MoSisters, while funds raised grew by 69% to top AUD$42million.