It took the 2019 Black Summer bushfires for Tegan Lerm to reckon with where to put her life’s energy.
Tegan was living in Sydney but the regional NSW town she’d grown up in was among those completely ravaged by the fires. Then COVID hit, and it forced the pause she hadn’t expected. She went back to university to study sustainability.
“It was genuinely life-changing,” she says. “It changed my entire worldview.”
Tegan joins the latest episode of There Will Be Dancing, a podcast produced by Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA) in partnership with Women’s Agenda, to talk about building technology people trust, why she and her co-founder are rejecting the algorithm-chasing content that built their audience, and fighting for democracy at a moment when trust is constantly being eroded.
Buzzed on her newfound sustainability expertise, and with a marketing degree already in her back pocket, Tegan started posting about climate on social media.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance called Lizzie, an elite athlete sidelined by injury, was fielding a flood of questions from people who wanted to vote for climate but didn’t know how to navigate Australia’s electoral system. Ahead of the 2022 election, Lizzie built a tool to help: unlike the generic how-to-vote cards handed out by other organisations, hers matched voters to candidates in their specific electorate based on climate policy, a level of detail that simply didn’t exist elsewhere at the time. A mutual friend connected the two women and Project Planet, and later Build a Ballot, grew out of that conversation. The pair have now collaborated for nearly five years.
Build a Ballot works in three steps: a political compass test to place voters on the spectrum, a set of policy questions matched against parties and candidates in the user’s own electorate, and a personalised voting plan they can screenshot or email to themselves for polling day. Building the policy engine behind it meant countless cold calls to experts. Tegan describes ringing a well-known economist she’d never met. “He was like, who are you?” she laughs. “But people are genuinely so helpful; you just have to ask nicely.”
None of it came with a massive marketing budget or investment backing. Neither Tegan nor Lizzie took a wage for a long time; both funded the early work from their own savings. They relied on relationships and word of mouth. A partnership with the beer brand Heaps Normal turned into one of the most-viewed pieces of content on the brand’s social channels. “Brands are often wary of politics because they don’t want to alienate an audience,” says Tegan. “But a tool like Build a Ballot sidesteps that.”
“You’re not telling people who to vote for, you’re telling them how to vote.”
Build a Ballot is transparent about being created by a climate organisation
Climate questions are always part of the mix. But so are policies from across the political spectrum, chosen through ongoing conversations with experts about what actually delivers outcomes for voters. Without that range, Tegan says, Build a Ballot couldn’t do its job.
They expected the user to skew young. Instead, Build a Ballot reached every electorate in the country.
Its biggest audience is among 18- to 40-year-olds, but plenty of older voters engaged with the platform as well. Including a grandmother who had voted the same way her entire life. Her highest match came back as the Greens. According to Tegan, Grandma was shocked. And while she eventually settled on backing her usual party, joking that her late partner would turn in his grave otherwise, for Tegan, the moment captured something bigger than one vote. It was proof that even the most rusted-on voter can be prompted to question assumptions they’ve carried for decades, once politics is stripped of the party label attached to it.
Build a Ballot is now expanding into state elections, partly to keep refining its methodology and partly to build a better back-end for the data it collects; data Tegan hopes will eventually feed a public feedback loop between what voters say they want and what their local MP is doing about it.
She understands the same technology that makes Build a Ballot possible is also being used to erode the trust it depends on: AI-generated bot comments designed to shift sentiment, deepfaked videos of politicians and recommendation feeds that can pull a teenager into extreme content within a single scroll. It’s part of why she and Lizzie are shifting away from the fast-turnaround, algorithm-chasing content that built their early audience, and towards longer-form work, such as a newsletter and a podcast, built for the audiences in search of nuance rather than hot takes.
And yes, there’s dancing. Tegan dances in the kitchen with her partner every time they cook dinner, and counts a mud-soaked night at Splendour in the Grass among her favourite memories. “There’s no time I feel more joyful than dancing to live music,” she says.
Listen to the full conversation with Tegan Lerm on There Will Be Dancing, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major platforms.