About Us - The LOTE Agency

OUR STORY

From a shed in 1998 to Collingwood today.

The LOTE Agency has experienced remarkable growth and transformation over the past 30 years. What began in a small shed has evolved into a thriving business.

As our reputation grew, so did our ambitions. We then moved into our first dedicated office in Mitcham, marking an important milestone in our journey. This step allowed us to refine our services and better serve our clients.

Today, we are proud to call the trendy and creative suburb of Collingwood home. Surrounded by innovation, our current space reflects who we are as an agency. We work in a warehouse with a big open glasshouse to ideate by writing on walls and debate complex social issues and how to solve them.

While much has changed over the past three decades, our core principle remains the same: to grow with purpose, embrace new opportunities, and continue delivering outstanding results for our clients.

By numbers: For decades, LOTE has helped government and for-purpose organisations hit big goals for inclusion.

27

Years building inclusive services

150+

Languages we work across

2,500+

Organisations partnered with

10,000+

Community Pulse members across 34 language groups

PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST SINCE 1998

We started translating. We ended up redesigning how Australia communicates.

We started in 1998 translating documents. Twenty-eight years later, we are redesigning how Australia communicates with its most underserved communities. That journey was not planned, it was earned.

For our first decade, we built one of Australia’s most trusted multilingual communications practices. We translated and adapted campaigns across 150+ languages for government, health, utilities and the not-for-profit sector. However, we kept seeing the same problem: beautifully translated materials that nobody read, campaigns that were disseminated perfectly in English and fell flat in community. Translation alone was not changing outcomes.

We went into communities to understand why messages were not landing, what barriers existed beyond language, and what would actually shift behaviour. Communities did not trust researchers, they had been consulted too many times with nothing to show for it. They had shared their stories and watched those stories disappear into reports that sat on government shelves.

We realised that if we wanted genuine insight, we needed genuine relationships. So we built them over years, not months. We developed Australia’s first in-language community research panel, Community Pulse, now 10,000+ members strong across 34 language groups. We built relationships with over 2,500 organisations nationally. We established a dedicated Community Testing Panel of 350+ bilingual cultural advisors who review everything we produce before it reaches the public.

With assistance from our Director of Community and Partnerships, Bwe Thay, we continue to grow these networks every day, community by community, relationship by relationship.

INTRODUCING: HUMAN. OUR PROPRIETARY METHODOLOGY.

We have now fully transformed into a human-centred design agency focusing on designing campaigns, services, policy and processes that are good for business, and good for all humans.

In 2019, our CEO, Ash Chand, entered the business and introduced human-centred design into our practice, and over the past six years we have combined our three decades of community experience with design thinking, behavioural science and equity-centred principles to develop our own proprietary framework: the HUMAN methodology (Hear, Uncover, Map, Activate, Nurture).

HUMAN is endorsed by Monash University’s BehaviourWorks and is currently going through the trademarking process. It is built on the principle that communities are not research subjects or target audiences. They are co-creators.

HUMAN is The LOTE Agency’s proprietary methodology for designing services, communications, and experiences that work for culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Developed over 26 years of practice across government, corporate, and community sectors, HUMAN codifies what we have learned about creating genuine human experience in multicultural Australia.

Too many frameworks treat diverse communities as an afterthought — a translation task at the end of a project, a compliance checkbox, or a focus group bolted onto an existing strategy. HUMAN reverses this. It starts with the organisation, grounds them in their own biases, then builds outward with community intelligence to create solutions that are culturally intelligent from the ground up.

Intelligence

The organisation understands the lived reality, needs, barriers, and aspirations of the communities it serves. Without intelligence, decisions are based on assumptions.

Trust / Readiness

Both the organisation and the community are prepared for change. The organisation has confronted its biases and is genuinely ready to act on what it learns. The community trusts that engagement is authentic, not performative.

Capability

The organisation has the tools, systems, training, and resources to deliver culturally intelligent services sustainably. Without capability, good intentions remain intentions.

These three conditions are multiplicative, not additive. If any one is zero, the human experience outcome is zero. An organisation with deep community intelligence but no capability to act on it delivers nothing. An organisation with strong capability but built on assumptions creates harm. HUMAN ensures all three conditions are built systematically across every engagement.

Today, in partnership with Portable, Australia’s leading purpose-driven human-centred design agency and certified B-Corp, we operate at the intersection of community trust, design rigour and behavioural insight. We went from translating campaigns to using a systems lens to redesign how those campaigns are conceived, created and delivered. We don’t just adapt messages for multicultural communities, we build the conditions for those communities to author the messages themselves.