The winners of Australia’s peak design industry awards – the highest honour for design innovation – were announced at the Sydney Opera House on 17 May at the 60th annual Good Design Awards Ceremony.
The awards attracted record entries of 536 innovative designs with 269 projects receiving the coveted Good Design Award. Of these, there were 30 Best in Class Award Winners, one of which was the Fund My Neighbourhood website developed by Katalyst Interactive for the South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet.
Fund My Neighbourhood was one of the biggest participatory budgeting projects ever run, empowering South Australians to decide how $20 million is spent. Locals nominated improvement projects that they would like to receive government funding in their local area. The community then voted on which projects the government should fund.
More than 2,500 applications were received, and more than 33,000 South Australians cast almost 122,000 votes. Around 130,000 people visited the website during the program’s voting period, suggesting an impressive 25% conversion rate from ‘visitor’ to ‘voter’. Notably, two-thirds of users who started the voting process finished, demonstrating the effectiveness of high-quality user design. 204 projects were funded, including improvements to parks, playgrounds, sporting facilities, environment and arts projects.
Since 2011, The Department of Premier and Cabinet have continued to choose Katalyst Interactive as their development vendor for community engagement software. Our relationship has spanned many years and fostered the evolution of the YourSay website. Since the release of the current YourSAy platform over 40 individual government agencies have created around 400 engagements as well as over 18 different types of initiatives based on the foundation of YourSAy, including award winning Fund My Neighbourhood and Fund My Community initiatives.
