In order to ensure financial sustainability for the Forum Moderation, SKAT foundation collects donations from SuSanA Partners and Members via the donation button. The donations collected via this donation-button are exclusively foreseen to finance the moderation of the SuSanA Forum. Incoming donations are only reaching SKAT Foundation and not GIZ or any other SuSanA-Partner or Member. The fund-raising platform "Raise-Now" as an external service-provider receives and administer incoming donations on behalf of the SKAT Foundation.

Your donation will be used directly to support the SuSanA Forum moderation, i.e. to fund the working hours of the Forum moderators. See the other FAQs to find out who the Forum moderators are and what their work entails.

Individuals and organisations who make donations can choose to remain anonymous if they wish by indicating so in the comments section of the donation form, as per our privacy policy (see below); otherwise, their name will be listed on our statistics page.

Your donation will be reported on through our Forum statistics page. Donations are paid to Skat Foundation who will have contracts with the Forum moderators to carry out the work. Skat Foundation is a legally independent not-for-profit organisation supervised by the Swiss Federal Supervisory Board for Foundations, which has supported the SuSanA Forum since 2020.

Your data is handled with utmost care by the SuSanA Secretariat. The handling of your data is governed by the SuSanA data policy which conforms to EU GDPR. For more information on SuSanA’s privacy policy, please see here. For any questions related to your contribution, please contact info@skat-foundation.ch. 

When you subscribe for a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or yearly donation, you will get a link to cancel the subscription automatically per email. In case of questions or issues, please contact info@skat-foundation.ch.

The current Forum moderation activities cost around 1500 Euros per month. With this crowdfunding campaign, our goal is to raise at least 1000 Euros per month to cover at least the minimum Forum moderation functions. The donations would pay for the time of the forum moderators (see "Question 9. Who are the Forum moderators that I would support with my donation?"). 

The Forum moderation work has so far been funded by GIZ, BMGF and WSSCC. GIZ has stepped in with another short-term contract to support Forum moderation but only until October 2021.

 In the short-term, it means there would be no (paid) Forum moderators (unless some organisational funding is secured instead); in the long-term, this could lead to the consequences explained in "Question 10. Can the Forum function without moderators?". 

The current Forum moderators are Elisabeth von Muench, Australia; Paresh Chhajed-Picha, India; and Chaiwe Mushauko-Sanderse, Zambia. Any changes to moderators in the future will be communicated through the SuSanA Forum. 

From our experience, active Forum moderation is crucial for a successful discussion Forum. We have seen it time and time again: once moderators are taken off the job to save money, the online space quickly deteriorates as activity levels drop, people no longer receive answers to their questions, and users take their knowledge elsewhere. Instead, disruptive people or spammers may take over in that case. 

SuSanA moderators facilitate access to information about sanitation topics and interact 24/7 with SuSanA Forum members to ensure a good quality of the Forum's content. In particular, they encourage activity on the Forum and create a positive experience for all users, ensuring everyone adheres to the Forum rules and no spam or plain advertising is posted (see also Forum rules). 

Forum moderators may do the following on a daily basis: Move posts or threads into the right sub-categories; delete spam posts; translate posts that are not in English; contact members about their posts or help them with technical issues. Forum moderators may also contribute to content creation by making meaningful contributions and raising attention to posts without answers; providing links to related previous discussion threads; and emailing users to encourage new contributions. More details about the moderators’ work is available in this report. 

In 2022, the Forum will work under the theme “decolonizing WASH sector knowledge”. We are also looking at collaborating more closely with like-minded WASH networks such as RWSN.