World Economic Forum

A world-leading digital platform for the World Economic Forum

Our impact

600%

Increase in audience since 2016

1m

Page views per day

Services

Research & Strategy
Products & Services
Design Transformation

Research & Strategy
Products & Services
Design Transformation

Made by Many has worked continuously with the World Economic Forum for the past 9 years. Our work with the Forum started in 2015 when we helped the organisation replatform against a very tight deadline in time for the Annual Meeting in Davos.

Following that success, we have redesigned and re-developed every part of the organisation's extensive digital estate, and scaled the web platform into a world-leading digital platform of services and engine of soft power that deliver up to 1M pageviews daily and 1B+ social video views annually.

Today, we lead customer experience across the whole digital estate. A dedicated Made by Many team supports The Forum’s public websites, initiatives, editorial and partner tools, as well as member services and security across many global events including Davos. Made by Many also leads strategic design, including accessibility, user insight, design operations and the design system.

Committed to improving the state of the world

The World Economic Forum is a unique non-profit foundation that unites global leaders from politics, business, and culture to shape agendas and address issues like climate change, economic inequality, and innovation, aiming to promote sustainable and inclusive growth worldwide.

A simple foundations for significant growth

We began by reimagining, re-platforming, and unifying a disconnected digital ecosystem around a shared vision. This foundational approach—solving immediate needs while creating a scalable growth platform—reflects how we typically start with clients. It goes beyond a simple ‘redesign’, prioritising strategy, workflows, and operations to shape a success vision. For The Forum, this initial project provided a foundation that supported nine years of growth.

“Build us a traffic monster”

From 2016 to 2018, we collaborated with the Public Engagement team to enhance the front-end experience, editorial tools, workflows, and integrate with social media. Amid a shifting media landscape, we rose to the challenge of our brutally simple new brief: "Build us a traffic monster", by boosting audience reach by over 600% and building influence beyond traditional channels.

Global content strategy: multi-language, multi-format engagement

We enabled localisation across Chinese, English, French, Japanese, and Spanish, delivering tailored experiences for each culture. We developed a rich variety of content formats, including articles, reports, videos, podcasts, social media, and live event streaming. A key focus in the first phase was building user-friendly editorial tools, including a bespoke headless CMS, to empower efficient, audience-centric content creation and management.

Laser focus on technical resilience and security

The Forum’s infrastructure includes Rails applications, a headless CMS, a JSON API, and a ReactJS public site using GraphQL, all hosted on AWS. Integrations include Salesforce, Stripe, and Hootsuite. We provide 24/7 support, adhering to OWASP guidelines to ensure robust security and 99.9% uptime.

One Digital Forum: design operations and design system

Made by Many has introduced many new design practices into The Forum’s operations and embedded a product design culture across the organisation. In 2020, we created a design system to unify experiences, improve quality across the board, and strengthen design-technology collaboration.

A dedicated team, working as an extension of The Forum’s teams

Made by Many supports the Forum with a dedicated strategic design team, daily support for the website and event-focused teams, collaborating with stakeholders across the organisation—from the Managing Board to IT Security and on-site at Davos.

Continuously exploring & developing new opportunities

We scan the horizon to identify and leverage new opportunities and create new experiences and tools for The Forum’s audiences. Over the past few years we’ve helped The Forum optimise the registration experience, create an intelligent AI helper for constituents called the Forum Assistant, design and launch a new podcasting offering. And win awards for cultural initiatives—such as The Colour of Resilience.