Movember modernizes search using Amazon OpenSearch Service

Movember advances men's health by funding research and supporting community initiatives worldwide. As its programs expanded, Movember developed specialized health and fundraising resources on separate websites. Each site ran its own search engine, creating a fragmented experience for users who had to navigate across platforms to access the full range of information.

In addition, the Foundation's multiple search systems increased cost and operational complexity for its five-person fundraising development team. As a charity organization focused on maximizing impact, it identified an opportunity to consolidate search, reduce technical debt, and reinvest time into creating better experiences for its community. This also creates a more resilient digital foundation for future growth. The Foundation turned to Amazon OpenSearch Service to address these needs and lay out the groundwork for modernization.

The Foundation worked with AWS on the first Australian trial of Guild for Good initiative, a hands-on hackathon designed to address real and meaningful challenges. This collaboration produced a working design for a unified search system, centered on Amazon OpenSearch Service, a managed search and analytics engine.

The move also reduced operational complexity and freed the Foundation's development team to focus on new features and supporter engagement. Furthermore, health information, fundraising tools, and community resources are now indexed in one place, improving findability while giving users a consistent search experience that is available 99.9% of the time.

To keep operations lean, the Foundation adopted AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, and Amazon API Gateway, which manages and secures Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) at scale. With these services, the Foundation can automatically scale when engagement spikes, and scale back to control cost outside of peak periods. Movember also replaced its third-party security tool with AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF), which inspects incoming traffic to block common web exploits. The move strengthened application protection while lowering security costs.

Additionally, the Foundation used Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for building and scaling generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications, to update older applications. By applying AI to modernize its code, the team reduced development time and delivered new features significantly faster.

"Unifying search through Amazon OpenSearch Service cut our overhead and made it easier for users to find men's health resources. It also gave us a solid base to keep innovating," said Graham Link, Chief Technology Officer, Movember.

Looking ahead, the Foundation plans to expand its use of AWS analytics services to gain deeper insights into user engagement patterns and measure the impact of its health resources. The Foundation also aims to use Amazon Bedrock to apply AI in modernizing older applications and accelerating delivery of new features and digital services.