Sammaan Communications Overview
The purpose of Project Sammaan, as specified in the grant proposal, is: “To develop an innovative, sustainable, scalable urban community sanitation model which will: (1) reduce the incidence of open defecation and improve health among the urban poor, and (2) lead to the creation of a ‘toolkit’ for successful sanitation interventions (in terms of both the design of community toilet infrastructure and an associated management system) that can be replicated in low-income, high-density urban areas throughout South Asia.”
It is this second point that makes the documentation and information-sharing activities amongst partners so vitally important. The intention is for partners to keep a record of their activities throughout the course of the project in order to make this toolkit as informative and viable as possible. The focus should be on the challenges faced as these will help frame the project while also providing insights to other practitioners that may be facing similar issues in their own sanitation projects.
In order to ensure that this toolkit is a work-in-progress, “living” document that is constantly updated throughout the course of the project, several communications activities have been planned and implemented to facilitate the information-gathering activities. The primary platform for project communications has been the website/blog, though additional online (and offline) activities have complemented this web presence, namely social media accounts, print collateral, and in-person outreach efforts.
Outreach
The Project Sammaan website/blog was launched in April 2012 and has served as a repository for project updates since. The platform was designed to feature multiple authors in order to provide equal access to all stakeholders for sharing their work. The value of this interface lies in its real-time sharing of pertinent insights with the general public as well as project partners, since many are located in different cities, if not different countries. Additionally, this capturing of information as developments occur should help to ensure the efficacy of the toolkit as it allows the team to share insights as they happen and not in an ex post facto review of activities upon the project’s completion. For this reason, it is absolutely key to the project’s success that partners actively and consistently provide updates by way of blog posts.
Beyond the website, Project Sammaan has a presence on the social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and videos from the initiative are hosted on the Quicksand Vimeo page. These sites are used primarily as promotional vehicles, with new blog posts publicized on the social media feeds. However, they are also used to establish Project Sammaan as an information source for the global sanitation crisis, with pertinent sanitation-related articles shared. This establishes the project, and its stakeholders, as resources that can be relied upon for interesting and informative news pieces while also simply driving awareness of the initiative. The project is also featured on SuSanA, the world’s largest sustainable sanitation forum, further contextualizing the project and its importance.
The monthly newsletter is the most consistent and regular piece of print collateral that the project produces, but one-off items such as workbooks and pamphlets have also been produced. A press release is updated and kept on the project’s Dropbox account for all stakeholders to reference if and when they speak to the media. All of these help to ensure that the information that is shared with the public is accurate, engaging, and interesting.
The Project Sammaan “626 Summit” has been the only initiative-driven conference undertaken by the stakeholders to this point, though additional dissemination events will take place as the project progresses. This particular summit gathered practitioners and like-minded organizations and individuals to present their work while also discussing the future of sanitation. Project Sammaan was also featured at the “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at their Seattle headquarters. This fair was chiefly a competition for those working on technological innovations to address global sanitation issues. Beyond these, other grantees, including Sammaan, were invited to share their projects and help frame the sanitation problem for other practitioners and the general public.
Toolkit
The Technical & Design Guidelines document is the first iteration of the project’s toolkit. It is a tome of a document that features a detailed breakdown of activities conducted by each workstream required to complete the project. Beyond the what, where, when, and how, this document attempts to capture the why. This is driven not by the notion that the project stakeholders know all that there is to know about sanitation but rather by the shared ethos that only through collaboration can real change be effected.
A great deal of time and energy has gone into Project Sammaan to this point. It is imperative that the insights learned along the way are made available to other interested parties in the sanitation field to help provide guidance and, by extension, support. The hope is that this will assist in streamlining activities while helping others avoid potential pitfalls that can create delays in providing a life-changing, and even life-saving, resource. Unlike other products and services, everyone has a vested interest in improving access to sustainable sanitation making this kind of openness in information-sharing the rule and not the exception.
Conclusion
Partner participation in information-gathering and sharing is an absolute must if Project Sammaan is to be the effective initiative it is intended to be. Each stakeholder plays a pivotal role in the project’s development and only those conducting the work can share what the experience is like. Though it can be challenging at times, a concerted effort in capturing learnings along the way will make the toolkit impactful. This can mean the difference between effective change and maintaining a status quo that puts millions of lives at risk every day.