Overview
We led an independent engagement to deliver a global, privacy-conscious platform for a humanitarian NGO. The system translates physical activity into a visible proxy for refugee journeys, enabling supporters to participate at scale and with tangible impact.
The design emphasised data residency, security and performance, ensuring trusted participation from millions of logs while maintaining a clear auditable trail.
Problem
The organisation sought to raise awareness of the immense distances refugees travel to reach safety and to engage the public in a meaningful, measurable way. It required a platform capable of handling high volumes of data from fitness apps, while presenting progress in a way that resonates with a broad audience.
Regional data residency constraints necessitated local deployments; and the solution needed a single auditable store for global aggregation, without compromising privacy or security.
Solution
We built a digital platform where participants log activity via fitness apps, contributing to a target mirroring refugee journeys.
- Built event-driven architecture with C# and Azure Functions
- Integrated APIs from multiple fitness apps including Apple Health and Strava
- Implemented NoSQL database for user tracking and global totals
- Designed secure endpoints with queue-based processing for scale
- Deployed regional instances (China, Germany) using ARM templates to meet data residency requirements
Our approach combined cloud-native engineering with strict governance to guarantee data integrity, traceability and resilience across a distributed network of regional deployments.
Impact
The platform enabled a global campaign with widespread public participation and raised awareness of refugee journeys and resilience. It generated solidarity and inspired donations, while delivering scalable, secure infrastructure for millions of activity logs.
Post implementation, participation remained open across multiple regions, with measurable engagement metrics and a demonstrable uplift in supporter sentiment and contributions to the organisation's cause.
Highlights
- Event-driven, cloud-native architecture supporting scale
- APIs integrated from fitness apps including Apple Health and Strava
- NoSQL data store powering global totals with auditable logs
- Regional deployments to satisfy data residency requirements using ARM templates
Stack & Approach
The solution leveraged C# and Azure Functions for event-driven processing, a NoSQL store for user and global totals, Azure Queues for decoupled ingestion, and ARM templates for regional deployments. DevOps practices underpinned secure, auditable releases and governance across the campaign.
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