For the greater good

The mission of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is to improve the lives of vulnerable people through humanitarian means. To help its 181 national societies, 70 field delegations and Geneva secretariat in this endeavour – and to stop the propagation of several smaller, rather aimless extranets – the organisation launched FedNet,
a global extranet. Layisha Laypang reports.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation. It is essentially a membership organisation made up of 181 Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, such as the British Red Cross and the Bangladesh Red Crescent – which are regarded as clients, a secretariat in Geneva, and more than 70 field offices, referred to as delegations. The IFRC’s core programmes are disaster preparedness, disaster response, health and the promotion of humanitarian principles, all of which are handled through the delegations, but in collaboration with the national societies.

Against this backdrop the IFRC sought to create a global extranet that would provide a one-stop shop for information and offer the potential to build online communities. “We are an organisation with a tremendous amount of expertise,” says Carolyn Oxlee, FedNet’s project manager at IFRC. “We have specialists around the world managing all kinds of health and disaster-related programmes, yet we had no central location to share ideas, experiences or new, innovative ways of working.” Instead, information was shared through formal meetings, informal communications between the national societies, the secretariat in Geneva and the various delegations, e-mail, and publications focusing on technical issues about organisational development.

Fax was also a popular choice. The IFRC raises much of its funds through appeals. It launches an appeal every year for known, ongoing programmes, and then, should there be an emergency situation for example, the Iranian earthquake, a separate appeal is launched. Fax had been the official channel for the IFRC to distribute its appeals for funds and situation reports detailing how the money had been spent. They would go out almost daily to donors such as governments, delegations and national societies, until two years ago, when the IFRC made the conscious decision to go web-based with its official reporting to donors. So, rather than use fax, information was posted to the organisation’s public website, with mailing lists to support it.

“The response was phenomenal,” recalls Oxlee. “A lot of people took to it and were very pleased we weren’t blocking up their fax machines anymore.” Moreover, it has proved to be one of the most-visited sections of the organisation’s website because as well as providing a medium for official reporting, it offers real-time information that is very much in the public interest. There was, however, another problem that needed to be addressed, which was also one of the major drivers for the IFRC developing a global extranet.

The proliferation of smaller-scale extranets at the IFRC had begun to cause considerable concern. “We were setting up small extranet-type systems to give access to particular pieces of information or to provide gateways to systems that a wider set of people could access directly,” says Jeremy Mortimer, internet specialist at IFRC. For example, giving people involved in finance matters in the field access to those types of financial systems available at Geneva headquarters. Also, it had suddenly become very trendy to have a website. So people would ask for extranets for their own purposes, which resulted in an abundance of small sites with no real strategic development behind them. Each extranet had its own URL, people needed different passwords to access them, and different information was on different sites. “We wanted to bring everything together and build one platform with one URL and one password system, where people could find all the information they needed,” says Oxlee. “We wanted to integrate all the current extranets, create a lot more new content, and make the site very attractive. And that was the rationale behind FedNet.”

The development of FedNet, the IFRC’s global extranet, involved the organisation’s 220 staff in Geneva, its delegates, of which there are about 350 at any one time in the field offices, and the 181 national societies ranging from the American Red Cross, with 1,000 branches or ‘chapters’, to the small Pacific Island societies, where there might be just three or four people. Initially, a survey was sent to staff in Geneva and some delegations asking two key questions: What information would you like to share? And what information would you like to find? Later, the communications and information-systems departments – which were jointly responsible for the project – visited a few delegations and national societies to talk to them in more detail about their requirements. “Obviously, there were budget limitations, so we were restricted from visiting everyone,” says Oxlee. “Nevertheless, we were most adamant that FedNet should reflect what the organisation needed and not what we thought it needed.”

Key to the success of FedNet has been giving people a framework within which to manage their own information, says Oxlee. Within each department, people were trained as editors of FedNet, which included learning how to use the content-management software. Each department was then charged with managing its own section of the site. The communications and information-systems departments worked with them on their plans for the site – how they wanted it to look and behave – and the new site was created from scratch. In fact, very little content was migrated from the old smaller extranets to the new global site. “A lot of the existing material we wanted to deliver to new users was not on websites but in various types of databases,” explains Mortimer. “Our telephone list was managed in one system, our address and contacts list in another, and our events calendar in a different system altogether. Basically, we wanted to deliver all of these to the same front-end, with the same look. So that technical integration side of the project was very important and time-consuming.” However, one website – an extranet used to deliver disaster-management-related information – does contain content that will need to be migrated to the new site. “We haven’t migrated it yet because we’re concerned about maintaining the sense of community this system has built up,” says Mortimer. “It’s going to be a big project because functionality will need to be replicated within the new system. So the process of moving this content and its users will have to be managed over time, though we’re planning to do it some time this year.”

Content for the extranet is not differentiated according to country, although there are various ways in which the international aspect of the IFRC is reflected. For example, the site is in the organisation’s four official languages – English, French, Spanish and Arabic. By default, English has become the flagship language, as it has with the public website, although this site is in three different languages only. “We never did it in Arabic because we didn’t have the resources,” says Oxlee. “That has been another challenge for FedNet. The whole thing has been done on a very tight budget with a very small team.” Therefore, the emphasis has been on translating the basic introductory text for each section and some of the core information. Attached documents, of which there are many, are only uploaded to FedNet in the language they are written. “There are two ways of looking at it,” says Oxlee. “Either we translate absolutely everything, which would give us a huge translation and content-management issue, especially with our budget, or we simply post information as it becomes available in that language.” As Mortimer adds, it also has to do with immediacy of information because if the IFRC were to wait to get the material translated, it would lose some of its purpose.”

Other challenges include the issue of individual departments taking responsibility for their content which, in theory, has huge potential, but needs to be managed closely. At the moment, the IFRC has about 40 editors, although this is expected to increase to several hundred by the end of the year. Therefore, ensuring consistency across the various sections of the site will be a significant challenge and is something that will have to be built into the training programme. “As a team, we had decided to minimise pictures and graphics to reduce file size and download time,” says Oxlee, “but some people wanted to use them anyway. Also, certain departments wanted to put their headlines in red or orange, even though links are red and the FedNet standard style sheet states that text is black or grey.” Taking the site global is expected to complicate things further in terms of training and editing. Someone will need to be trained in every national society and delegation to edit content and, again, to ensure consistency of information. So, says Oxlee: “There’s a real risk that without a strong editorial team in Geneva – which we’re not sure we have the resources for – the site will spread uncontrollably. So that’s something we’ll have to look at very closely.”

Another major challenge concerned the ‘site tree’ or navigational structure. “We had a real headache with that because the IFRC is a large organisation that does so many different things,” says Oxlee. “To create a logical structure within which everyone could find what they were looking for meant pigeon-holing people into different groups.” In fact, a flexible user-management system was used to categorise users into access groups – depending on their role within the organisation and wider movement – and govern the types of content they were able to view.” Screen size was also an issue in that any more than seven or eight sections forced a horizontal scroll, which the organisation didn’t want.

Finally, perhaps one of the most significant challenges faced by the organisation was finding a content-management system suited to its needs. Despite the global reach of the IFRC and its huge employee base, the FedNet project was actually quite small. “We wanted an affordable system that would offer us a set of tools making delivery of information at the front-end, integration of the content-management section in the middle, and integration of other systems at the back-end all very easy. But we were surprised and disappointed not to find more offerings,” says Mortimer. “We even thought of implementing something ourselves, just on the standard Microsoft tools, but that would have involved a lot of development work.”

In the end, the organisation opted for an intuitive, easy-to-use system, which was important given that editors would have to be trained on it. Also, it had a strong suite of integration tools and was within budget. “We like the software very much,” says Mortimer. “It’s not perfect – there are a few things they haven’t done with it that I’m surprised they haven’t done with it. But, in general, we’re extremely pleased with it.”

FedNet is still very new, having been launched on 28 November 2003 at the IFRC’s General Assembly. While there has been a good response to the site, Oxlee says: “I wouldn’t claim everyone is raving about it. After all, it isn’t even 10-20 per cent of what it could be in a couple of years’ time. What we have is the essential structure of the site: core text, different sections and some uploaded documents, but the potential for ‘interactiveness’ is explosive.” There is also some way to go in terms of getting internal buy-in. While some people like their own ways of working, others are not so web savvy or pro-technology. Therefore, it is vital for the IFRC to get commitment at senior-management level and ensure that is pushed down to the various delegations.

The IFRC is not using specific performance metrics, although there are plans to do so. The initial measure of success was to replace the proliferating smaller extranets and this has been done. The communications and information-systems departments are now talking to other parts of the organisation about how they want to measure the success of the project. In the lead up to launch, a wider project team made up of people from Geneva headquarters and other departments was charged with exploring the issue. No conclusions have been reached yet, although the IFRC would like to establish how the extranet is performing by year-end. Mortimer has his own dream: “My vision of the extranet is essentially an online version of the IFRC. There’s a real sense of community within the federation and I’d like to see that reflected in the way our extranet develops – an online community that is part of, and contributes to, the functioning community of the federation as a whole.”

Jeremy Mortimer is internet specialist at IFRC and can be contacted at jeremy.mortimer@ifrc.org. Carolyn Oxlee is information officer at IFRC and can be contacted at carolyn.oxlee@ifrc.org.