How Médecins Sans Frontières gave a temporary exhibition a permanent home online.
An expensive, content-heavy exhibition given a permanent home online, without the busy team having to learn a new tool.
THE CHALLENGE
Should the content be lost when a campaign ends?
MSF's Operational Centre Amsterdam had built a large exhibition, heavy with graphics and video, and expensive to produce. Its audiences are donors, supporters, the public, media, and journalists. All of them were going to encounter it inside a short window.
The concern was what happened afterwards. Once the social campaign finished and the physical show came down, the work would effectively disappear: content that had cost a great deal to make, with no route to anyone who had missed it. What the team wanted was a long-term repository, reaching a wider audience than the exhibition ever could.
The obvious answer was a website, and the team had reasons to distrust it. A bespoke site risked being hard to navigate and would realistically carry only a portion of the content — the material was too dense for a page. Budget was limited, and the timeline was short.
THE SOLUTION
Spend the budget on the build, not the tool
The decision was made easier by a colleague: MSF's Operational Centre Paris had already used the platform. That removed the risk that usually stalls a decision in a large organisation: someone trusted had gone first.
What made it fit the budget was where the money went. The space itself was inexpensive, so the spend went into setup: the Metasteps team uploaded everything to MSF's own brand guidelines, so the MSF team never had to learn the platform. For a communications team with a short timeline and no capacity to absorb a new tool, that was the selling point.
The build was content-heavy as it included a great many illustrations and captions. The MSF team felt supported through it's creation by the Metasteps team, which was patient with managing the massive volume.
THE RESULT
A repository instead of an expired campaign
The exhibition now exists past its initial run. The content that was built for a fixed window sits in a space that stays open, reachable by donors and supporters who missed the show and by journalists looking for the material after the news cycle moved on.
It also holds the exhibition whole and as it was supposed to be experienced. The objection to a bespoke website was that it would carry a fraction of the content and bury it; the exhibition format keeps the graphics, the video and the captions together in the order they were designed to be encountered.
The internal cost stayed within MSF's strict budget. A short timeline was met without diverting the communications team into becoming platform experts, and the agility of a done-for-you build was immensely valued by the team.
Médecins Sans Frontières' Space
Visit the space for yourself and see what Metasteps' platform is capable of.
Visit the spaceGive your exhibition somewhere to live, forever.
Book a demo and see a class built on your syllabus, or start a trial and set up the first space.