What are the first steps to set up a new WASH monitoring programme?
Set up the account and organization, design one survey, register the sites you will monitor, deploy to a small team, and check the results on a dashboard before scaling. Getting one district working end to end teaches you more than planning the whole country on paper.
Programmes usually fail at the seams rather than at any single step: the form is fine, the dashboard is fine, but nobody agreed who approves data or which facilities are in scope. Running a small slice of the real workflow surfaces those decisions in days instead of months, and it gives you something concrete to show the people whose buy-in you need.
How to do it
Create your account and set up an organization with the branches you expect to work through.
Design one survey covering the questions you genuinely need, not everything you might want.
Register or import the sites for one district so field teams have something to monitor.
Deploy the survey to a handful of enumerators and have them collect real data offline.
Review the responses, fix what the data shows is unclear in the form, and agree who approves.
Build one dashboard for the people who will act on the data, then repeat the pattern district by district.