Movember builds momentum for men’s health

Changing the face of men’s health and longevity

Movember is more than a hip hashtag inviting folks to share their fall mustaches. It’s a lasting movement born by a global charity focused on men’s health — in particular, mental health, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer. The namesake organization Movember raises awareness and funds, investing them back into biomedical research, community programs, and initiatives aimed at improving quality of life for men worldwide.

Like many innovative startups, Movember began in crunch mode, relying on ad hoc tools and an on-prem file storage system to share ideas and project files. But over the last two decades, as this organization became a reputable foundation funding over 1,250 projects globally, IT sought a unified, scalable, secure solution for file storage and sharing across an evolving global workforce — one that would enable them to take advantage of AI.

A secure content platform for healthcare innovation

Like every other leader, Ben Hoath, Global Director, Workplace, Security & Cloud at Movember, spends a lot of time thinking about AI. In large part, that means figuring out how to balance AI innovation with responsible data governance. He says, “Movember is embracing the emergence of AI tools in a diligent fashion to ensure that the integrity of our data remains intact. We’ve got a framework to underpin how we turn an AI idea into an operational reality, assessing risk and ensuring appropriate governance is in place.”

Box Hubs has given the team a perfect sandbox for experimenting with AI. Within a Hub, they can quickly spin up a home base for the team focused on, say, prostate cancer — giving all team members one source of truth for any file they need in their daily work.  Team members can then apply Box AI to conduct smarter searches, augment existing content, and evolve ideas and copy.

Hoath gives another example:, “Our frontline support team has centralized their support documentation into a Box Hub and encouraged  users to explore the Hub as a self-service model.” This way, support reps can troubleshoot tooling or systems issues themselves, using Box AI to query within a Hub, before they resort to creating a support ticket with the IT team. This effort has so far gotten positive feedback from users. 

Hoath says the team has been able to save two to three hours a week in time spent on support and operations requests, thanks to Box Hubs. His team is now experimenting with applying AI to fundraising and has a few trial projects underway. He says, “We’re very aware of the value of AI and the opportunities, but we’re taking a measured and structured approach to operationalizing it.”

All content in one place, without sacrificing flexibility

Movember now keeps 95% of its unstructured data files on Box — everything from digital marketing assets to meeting notes and contracts. Within senior management and across lines of business, including HR, finance, legal, technology, and income and impact teams, Movember has so far logged 82,000 links shared via Box.

This centralization of content allows the small team of five IT system administrators to manage and secure content, while enabling easy collaboration both internally and externally. The content and brand team, for instance, uses the Intelligent Content Cloud to collaborate on the development of digital assets and share them with partners. Teams that use Salesforce can access and serve training and adoption documentation right from Box. Various other teams at Movember that rely on apps (such as Microsoft 365, Slack, Atlassian, and Zoom) can use those tools seamlessly. According to Hoath, “The majority of our teams leverage the collaborative features Box offers.”

Box also enables a dispersed global team to work smoothly, in an asynchronous way, without version control hassles or other issues. Hoath says, “Box has enabled broader collaboration across our workforce and provided document versioning and backup capabilities that were previously not available to us.”

Native e-signature that saved over $50K

One of the biggest savings Intelligent Content Management has brought Movember is with e-signature. Prior to instituting Box Sign, Movember used a third party e-signature tool to support recruitment paperwork and contractual workflows, among other things. Now, the HR team can build e-signature right into those workflows within Box to make the signing experience easier for new recruits and employees alike.

Movember estimates it has saved over $50K annually by moving from its third party service to Box Sign, and the organization is expanding its use of the e-signature tool native to the Intelligent Content Cloud. Teams are currently exploring applying Box Sign to workflows that include consent forms for an initiative they are building out with a partner.

Secure collaboration and huge cost savings: $20K with Box Shield

The basic security features Box provides have also been invaluable to Movember. For instance, the versioning feature of Box Drive provides a level of self-service to users who make mistakes and also constitutes a built-in level of file protection. The implementation of the public link expiration feature of Box has also been a big win for Movember, whose teams often share content with external partners, but don’t want that content available forever.

Movember has also leaned into other security features of Box, including:

• Governance and retention policies on all legal, finance, and HR documents
• Data residency requirements for their employees and partners in Australia
• Adherence with important regulations like ISO, DLP, and GDPR

Movember uses Box Shield to automate classification, and labeling capability has been effective and simple to pair with other retention and sharing policies. Hoath says, “Automated classification and and labeling of files — and being able to put a policy overlay on that stuff — is huge. And then it’s compliant in different regions globally. Everything’s covered.”

By leveraging Box Shield, Movember has been able to get rid of other third party governance tools and save around $20K to date. 

An intelligent content partner

Because of the capabilities granted by the Intelligent Content Cloud, Movember has been able to create thoughtful security best practices around storing and accessing sensitive information. But beyond this capability, Box is an intelligent content partner for the lifecycle of content and the business.

The top three things Movember loves about Box, according to Hoath:

1. Ease of collaboration for end users and teams
2. Security that scales and keeps data and assets safe
3. Automated classification for simpler content lifecycle management

 

The number-one selling point of Box is the ease of collaboration across different operating systems and the security and compliance controls. That’s my nerdy, boring answer, but it’s the truth.

— Ben Hoath, Global Director, Workplace, Security & Cloud, Movember