Making Global Information Flow Possible at United Nations OCHA
As one of the most well known humanitarian organizations in the world, a centralized brand asset platform is key in helping their 30 offices globally and 100+ partners, find the right information at the right time. With Frontify, OCHA team at the United Nations have found it.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA), manages information and situation awareness for all disaster response and humanitarian efforts – globally. For them, the challenge was never the creation of materials, but distributing corporate and crisis comms, presentation templates, designs, and official brand assets in a clear and efficient way.
We met with Javier Cueto, their Design & Multimedia Lead, to understand how Frontify helps them attain the centralized communications they needed to succeed.
We were using other systems that just weren’t user friendly or made to communicate organizational assets – and they just created more work for everyone. We needed a central, visual way to show everyone what’s available to them.
Javier told us that their office is actually famous for their extensive iconography – supplying over 350 icons for humanitarian efforts worldwide. These assets needed to be easily distributed internally and externally, with no confusion, no matter what country or humanitarian organization needs them.
Our team of comms and designers immediately increased the efficiency and access to our materials. We filled Frontify with everything we wanted to circulate, which feeds all of our remote teams. Our field/country teams now use it regularly for their reports, infographics, presentations...
Their previous solutions were unclear for their global partners, and ended up creating a lot more confusion and additional email requests from the global team. The processes had room for improvement and they needed a better way to communicate the critical materials their global partners needed on the front lines.
Javier and the team finally found Frontify – a modern brand management solution – and began implementing it in the beginning of 2020.
Now, in 2021, Frontify is available to the entire UNOCHA organization to gain access to the materials they need, and their 30 country offices all use it to get the latest assets, designs and marketing materials. Javier and his team can now be confident that the right information will be shared, to the right people, at the right time.
A big benefit, is the ability to provide our global team with all the assets and resources needed to develop humanitarian response plans and situational awareness products such as maps, reports and infographics. This leads to more effective and timely humanitarian assistance.
More than that, they can now efficiently distribute their organization’s materials without being inundated by emails coming in, asking where to actually find it. The answer is now clear. By using Frontify, the UN Humanitarian Office can comfortably allow their entire global organization to have access to everything they need – saving Javier and his team an immense amount of time and effort, while making sure the organization is always on brand, regardless which corner of the world they’re operating in.