A 5-day co-creation sprint with the German Red Cross that became realtalk.help — anonymous peer support as the low-threshold first step toward school social work, rolled out nationwide.
School social work helps — but it doesn't reach many young people. Shame, high thresholds and a lack of anonymity hold back exactly those who need support most. How do you make help radically easy to reach — anonymous, low-threshold and trustworthy?
… make school social work radically easy to reach — without compromising the Red Cross's duty of care?
In a five-day sprint with students, social workers and experts, we mapped the real barriers and built “real talk”: anonymous peer support, backed behind the scenes by professional Red Cross staff — in the language of young people.
Guiding principle: anonymity as a design principle. A guided flow that earns the next small “yes” at every step.
Understand, ideate and decide together — students, social workers and experts in one room.
Build a realistic prototype of the chosen solution.
Test with young people — real feedback before production.
We clustered the raw voices from the sprint into themes, then let both groups dot-vote what mattered most — every participant with the same number of dots. A second round followed, three more votes each, to settle the final priority. The counts below combine both rounds, which is why the two groups don’t land on the same total. Where young adults and DRK social workers disagreed, the gap itself became a design signal.
A point of view is a clear, concise problem statement. It connects the user, their concrete need and a surprising insight from the research — and it keeps the whole design process focused on solving the right problem.
Three problem statements — prioritised
… let young people reach out completely anonymously, so shame never blocks the first step?
… lower the threshold to that first contact, so asking for help feels effortless?
… let students support students — peer to peer, in their own language?
Ideas mapped to every contact point of the health journey — open fullscreen for the detail.
The 10-day sprint became a service used nationwide: anonymously reachable, backed by real professionals and in the language of young people. A prototype became a real place to turn to.
realtalk.help was created for and with the German Red Cross. Focused on anonymity, peer trust and a flow that earns every next step.
“One decision per screen changed everything. The moment we stopped asking for everything at once, young people started to talk — anonymously, but for real.”