Digital Health Promotion Advisor

About MSF:

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is a global network of principled professionals who specialise in medical humanitarian work driven by our common humanity and guided by medical ethics. We work together in teams, small and large, to respond to the medical needs of people affected by conflict, disasters, epidemics, and those excluded from healthcare.

Within MSF Operational Centre Brussels (OCB), the Medical Department provides strategic direction and technical leadership, committing to keeping up to date on innovations in health care. We share the responsibility of the operational choices and the responsiveness, and we are involved in the support of our project teams co-developing context-adapted medical-operational strategies and defining levels of care. The department also does normative work (e.g., developing guidelines, tools) and enables operational research and innovative ideas. Composed of multiple specialists based across a network of units across the world (including Cape Town), the Medical Department works in close collaboration with operations, other OCB departments, other operational centres, and the MSF movement.

Health promotion and education are fundamental components for outbreak control. In MSF settings, those are traditionally implemented through analogue media (posters, flyers, etc.) or personal contact (community meetings, discussions, storytelling, theatre, etc.). However, following outbreak of COVID-19, many of those interventions became harder or impossible to implement. Additionally, in places / communities where connectivity makes it feasible, digital platforms and methodologies - digital health promotion (DHP) – are starting to play a crucial role for facilitating MSF’s health promotion activities. This further encourages the need to expand the capacity for digital HP interventions in MSF missions.

Job Purpose:

Provide senior technical leadership for Digital Health Promotion across OCB projects, planning and delivering context appropriate digital health promotion campaigns and community engagement, building field capacity, and linking digital activity to medical and operational outcomes. The Advisor defines the digital health promotion approach per context, leads the learning agenda and quality standards, co-manages campaign budget lines within approved envelopes, and acts as the day-to-day functional lead for the Digital Advertising Specialist and the Graphic Designer on campaign delivery. The Advisor is the primary focal point for project teams, coordinating between them, the Digital Advertising Specialist and the Graphic Designer, and ensuring that digital campaigns remain health promotion driven and integrated with face to face, print and radio activities. The role reports to the Digital Health Promotion Coordinator and has no direct line management.

Reporting Structure:

Reports to: Digital Health Promotion Coordinator, line and functional. No direct line reports. Provides functional leadership and day-to-day direction to the Digital Advertising Specialist and the Graphic Designer on campaign delivery. Provides technical supervision and mentoring to project based Digital HP Officers and moderates cross functional work when designated.

Accountabilities:

Strategy, planning and organizing:

• Translate mission health promotion strategies into fit for context digital plans with clear objectives, channels, audiences and KPIs aligned to medical and operational needs across multiple countries.
• Define campaign guardrails, for example ethical use, data protection, inclusion, misinformation risk and accessibility, and ensure alignment with MSF policies and HP guidelines.
• Lead initial assessments and feasibility checks, for example digital penetration, audience insights, risks and constraints, integration with offline HP activities, before launch.

Campaign design and implementation:

• Lead end to end design and implementation of digital health promotion campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other relevant platforms, ensuring alignment with HP strategies and integration with face to face, print and radio.
• Set learning agendas and provide training related to digital HP campaigns and community engagement, test plans and success criteria, ensure patient centered content, safe user journeys and accessible creative.
• Ensure pre-launch readiness checks are completed, including tracking readiness, taxonomy and naming standards, safeguarding compliance and operational handshakes with field teams.

Community engagement and moderation oversight:

• Conduct training and ongoing support of field responders in digital HP campaigns, equipping them with guidelines and best practices for community engagement and moderation, including strategies to create safe online spaces and inclusive, welcoming digital dialogue through public comments and private messages.
• Oversee quality of comment and message monitoring and response workflows with project health promotion teams and moderators, including clear escalation paths for sensitive or clinical matters.
• Ensure medical accuracy, respectful tone, inclusive language and safe escalation pathways for sensitive cases.
• Maintain a risk register for online engagement, define thresholds and pause or escalation rules and conduct after action reviews for incidents.

Capacity building and technical support:

• Coordinate and deliver training and ongoing support for health promotion teams in collaboration with the Digital Advertising Specialist, including campaign basics, content, moderation and safeguarding and strategies to create safe online spaces and inclusive, welcoming digital dialogue through public comments and private messages.
• Provide structured mentoring for Digital HP Officers toward independent planning, implementation and evaluation at project level, with weekly or agreed cadence of technical supervision.
• Produce and maintain SOPs, toolkits and checklists for digital health promotion, including platform usage, moderation, risk mitigation and reporting.

Measurement, learning and operational research:

• Define KPIs and qualitative outcome measures, for example reach quality, conversations per click, clinic visits, testing uptake, blood donation, and ensure high-quality monitoring and timely analysis.
• Lead interpretation of results, link campaign outputs to real world medical and operational outcomes and produce actionable recommendations for project teams.
• Prepare and lead operational research in collaboration with OR focal points, document and share best practice and learning across missions and sections.

Budget and resource management:

• Co-manage digital health promotion budget lines within approved envelopes and propose reallocations between health topics or audiences to maximize impact and cost efficiency.
• Coordinate resource planning and workflow with the Digital Advertising Specialist and Graphic Designer according to campaign needs and priorities.

Coordination and representation:

• Serve as main focal point for project teams on digital health promotion, coordinating objectives, briefs, content and timelines between projects, the Digital Advertising Specialist and the Graphic Designer.
• Engage with health promotion colleagues across MSF to exchange practices and align approaches, represent digital health promotion in relevant internal forums and trainings, and support other MSF sections when requested.

Governance, risk and compliance:

• Ensure compliance with data protection and privacy, for example POPIA or GDPR, and MSF ethical communication policies, including consent, retention and safeguards in tracking and messaging.
• Co-define and maintain standards for account structures, naming taxonomies, tracking and reporting, and define a change control process for updates.
• Define escalation and incident response prot