COLOSL & SANE Win Gold

A Prestigious Recognition

The Australian Good Design Awards are among the most respected design recognition programs globally, celebrating excellence in design and innovation across multiple categories. Winning a Gold Award in the Digital Design category is a testament to the quality, impact, and innovation demonstrated by the SANE Recovery Community platform.

As noted in the official Good Design Awards project, the award recognizes our work in transforming SANE's forums to "create a community to support Australians living with complex mental health needs" and facilitate "the next phase of growth" for this vital mental health resource.

The Project That Won Gold

The SANE Recovery Community project represents a comprehensive digital transformation that addressed critical challenges in mental health peer support. When we partnered with SANE Australia in 2024, their original forum platform had served over 40,000 members with more than a million posts since its launch in 2014. However, the platform was showing its age and struggling to meet the evolving needs of its growing community.

Key Challenges Addressed

The Good Design Awards jury recognized how we addressed significant challenges in the mental health support space:

• Accessibility Gap: Around 5 million Australians live with complex mental health needs, with 500,000 missing out on critical psychosocial support
• Platform Limitations: The existing forum struggled to cater to new users, who would often choose alternative platforms like Reddit for searches
• Response Delays: Users could wait hours for replies while stuck in states of distress
• Resource Discovery: Users were largely unaware of available SANE resources, even though they found expert-endorsed content helpful

Our Award-Winning Solution

The Good Design Awards recognized our user-centered approach, which started by asking the experts—the community members themselves. Through surveys, interviews, and co-design sessions, we identified user needs and ideated on how Not For Profits could provide enhanced support to community members.

Innovative Features Recognized

The award-winning platform includes several innovative features that address the unique needs of mental health peer support:

• Spaces: Subcommunities that allow users to focus on topics they're interested in while avoiding potentially distressing content
• Contextual Resources: Partner-endorsed content that helps users on their recovery journey
• Enhanced Search: Intuitive search functionality embedded across the entire experience, designed to help new users find help easily
• Spotlighted Content: Features to highlight important content such as events and notifications

Impact and Recognition

The Good Design Awards jury noted the significant impact achieved by the redesign, particularly in "opening the forums up to a wider audience and aiding them in finding additional help." This recognition validates our approach of balancing the needs of existing community members (who were resistant to change) with the requirements of new users seeking modern, accessible support.

Measurable Outcomes

The platform transformation delivered impressive results that contributed to the award recognition:

• 12% increase in average session time and pages viewed
• 18% improvement in mobile user engagement
• 25% increase in new user registrations
• 40% reduction in support tickets related to platform usability

Design Excellence in Mental Health

What makes this award particularly meaningful is the recognition of design excellence in the mental health space. Mental health platforms require special consideration for accessibility, safety, and user comfort—factors that go beyond typical web design requirements.

The Good Design Awards recognized our approach to creating a platform that:

• Maintains the established culture of the existing community
• Provides nuanced content filtering to protect users from distressing material
• Enables partners to engage with the community while maintaining safety standards
• Offers enhanced search capabilities that empower users to find and offer support

Collaboration and Partnership

This award celebrates not just our technical and design capabilities, but the power of collaborative partnership. Working closely with SANE Australia's team and community members was essential to creating a solution that truly serves the mental health community's needs.

The recognition highlights how effective partnerships between design agencies and not-for-profit organizations can create meaningful social impact through thoughtful digital solutions.

Looking Forward

Winning the Gold Good Design Award for the SANE Recovery Community project reinforces our commitment to creating digital solutions that make a real difference in people's lives. This recognition motivates us to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible in digital design, particularly in spaces where accessibility, safety, and social impact are paramount.

We're proud to have contributed to SANE's mission of supporting mental health recovery across Australia, and this award validates the importance of user-centered design in creating platforms that truly serve their communities.

Learn More

To explore the full details of our SANE Recovery Community project, including our design process, technical implementation, and outcomes, visit our detailed case study.

You can also view the official award recognition on the Good Design Awards website, where the project is featured as a Gold Award winner in the Digital Design category.