Changes to the workfow

Shorter, more frequent content

Each article published on the Digital Situation Report appears as a stand-alone “module”. As a result, individual updates can be published as soon as information becomes available, rather than waiting to be included in longer PDF reports that cover multiple topics and tend to be published only once every four to eight weeks. A major advantage of the Digital Situation Report is that it allows offices to publish shorter individual pieces of content as they become ready. This means readers will receive more frequent updates from OCHA, meeting their need for faster updates that are closer to real-time.

Impact on workload

Switching to the Digital Situation Report and providing more frequent updates does not mean that the workload or overall amount of content needs to increase. Instead, the same amount of content can be broken up and distributed in “pieces” at more frequent intervals.

For example, an office that currently publishes a PDF Humanitarian Bulletin once a month with about six articles would instead publish one or two articles every week through the Digital Situation Report. This approach gets information to clients faster and more frequently without increasing the volume of work. It can also reduce bottlenecks in management clearance by providing smaller pieces for review as they are finalized, rather than bundling everything into a single report at the end of a given reporting period – at which point some content may already be out of date. In an acute emergency, the office can publish the latest updates through the Digital Situation Report as they become available, rather than creating separate PDF Situation Reports or Flash Updates. As the platform develops in the future, additional modules and content types can be designed to meet user and client needs.

Sharing and using content

Once published, content and accompanying visuals can be easily shared by email or social media and automatically posted to other platforms (ReliefWeb, ReliefWeb Response, etc.). Readers will be able to read updates on their desktop, tablet or mobile phone, and will also have the option of automatically generating PDF reports, as client research has shown that some segments of the OCHA audience may still prefer to engage with content this way.

One shortened URL is available to each country/regional office. This shorted URL will redirect to your DSR → but can only direct to one language. For example, reports.unocha.org/south-sudan will automatically redirect to https://reports.unocha.org/en/country/south-sudan/. The naming convention for the country/region name must follow that used on unocha.org.  Shortened URLs are tracked by the DSR team in a dedicated spreadsheet and separately added to the server.