As of July 2023[update], it hosts more than one million humanitarian situation reports, press releases, evaluations, guidelines, assessments, maps and infographics.

The project began under the US Department of State, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which had noticed during the Rwanda crisis how poorly critical operational information was shared between NGOs, UN Agencies and Governments.

[3] ReliefWeb maintains offices in three different time zones to update the website around the clock: Bangkok (Thailand), Nairobi (Kenya) and New York City (United States).

[10] In November 2012, ReliefWeb revamped the home page, the "About Us" section and the Blog and introduced "Labs",[11] a place to explore new and emerging opportunities and tools to improve information delivery to humanitarian workers.

In addition, ReliefWeb has a subscription service that reached more than 168,500 subscribers in 2010, allowing those who have low bandwidth Internet connections to receive information reliably.

[7] The job and training sources include Academic and Research Institutions, NGOs, International Organizations, Governments, Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement and the Media.