Project Overview
The Greater Sydney Women’s Safety Charter aims to bring together businesses, government agencies, peak groups and not-for-profit organisations to take collective action that improves the safety of women and girls in Greater Sydney. Together we can build a safer city for women and girls, which means a safer city for everyone.
The Charter was inspired by listening to the Commission’s Youth Panel and building upon research by the Committee for Sydney and not-for-profit group Plan International Australia into the extent of young women feeling unsafe on the streets of Sydney at night and the economic impact this has. Women and girls who are harassed or frightened will often quit jobs, leave university courses, and often just stop going out at night. We want better for Greater Sydney.
The project involved a thorough community engagement phase, applying human-centred design principles to understand and address the core problem. Ideas were workshopped with over 80 organisations across Greater Sydney with the primary goal of establishing a Charter deemed fit for purpose by the real people who could be using it.
Organisation
Team
Greater Sydney Commission - project creator
The Committee for Sydney - founding partner
Transport for NSW digital accelerator - founding partner
Servian - digital design consultants
Project Brief
The project brief was to design a Charter to influence participating organisations’ policies and practices, services planning and delivery, in ways that enable women and girls to feel safer and more confident participating in the city’s social, economic and cultural life.
The creation was something the Greater Sydney Commission could not do alone. Establishing foundation partnerships with Transport for NSW and the Committee for Sydney allowed us to build upon existing work to make Greater Sydney a safer place for girls and women. Together we ran multiple engagement sessions across the city to develop Charter’s nine key principles.
Designing a Charter with a strong digital presence was paramount to ensuring the accessibility and visibility of the project. To help bring it to life, the Commission engaged design and analytics consultancy Servian to establish a digital experience for the Women’s Safety Charter. The specialists at Servian worked to create a design that would showcase the Charter, share useful research and encourage participant signups.
Project Need
Greater Sydney is one of the best cities in the world. To make it a smart, productive and equitable city we need to include the participation of half of half our population, our women. Our city can’t reach its full potential if women and girls avoid walking on streets or catching buses and trains out of fear for personal safety. That’s why the Greater Sydney Commission made the commitment to develop a Charter aimed at achieving gender equality, a key factor in making a good city great.
The Charter recognises the diverse experiences of women and aims to promote a safer city for women of all ages, abilities, identities, and social and cultural backgrounds.
The Women’s Safety Charter website was an essential piece in showcasing the principles in a way that was easy to share, communicate and agree to. The Charter was designed to be used by small and large businesses, government, peak bodies and not-for-profit organisations – all of whom play a part in making our city safer. That’s why creating a digital product with an engaging user experience was vital to its success.
User Experience
Right from the start our project development used an uncompromising human-centred design approach to create solutions for women’s safety problems. The foundation partners held user workshops to ensure the Charter was created collaboratively with the input of 80 organisations across Greater Sydney. The workshops focussed on problems women and girls face in our city, the needs, contexts, behaviours, and emotions of the people that it will serve. The workshops included card sorting, and group discussions to establish three foundation principles and nine key outcomes intended to influence policies, practices, and service planning and delivery by Charter participants.
With the Charter’s content established, Servian took research and created a user focussed wireframe, to engage viewers and encourage signups. To ensure the website was highly usable, it was essential we created an online presence that met WCAG 2.0 guidelines and was responsive across multiple devices.
Project Marketing
The driving force behind the Greater Sydney Women’s Safety Charter was to provide the principles to achieve gender equity in our city. Suitably, the project was launched on International Women’s Day in March 2020.
In the lead up to the launch, the Commission encouraged a range of organisations including local councils, state agencies, not-for-profit groups and businesses to sign on to the Charter. The launch event was publicised by several print and broadcast media outlets and accompanied a social media campaign aimed at encouraging participation.
The Charter recently had its 50th participant, from a wide range of businesses across Greater Sydney sign up to the principles of Charter.
Project Privacy
The Greater Sydney Women’s Safety Charter is housed on the Commission’s corporate website, accessible by anyone with an internet connection.
All participants of the Charter agree to the terms and conditions when signing up to the principles and agree to have their logo displayed.
The Commission does not collect any personal data through the Charter.
Digital - Government Services
The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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