In March 2025, a three-week pilot program quietly launched across fourteen late-night venues in Melbourne's inner suburbs, offering a location-based digital safety tool designed specifically for queer women navigating nightlife alone or in small groups. The initiative was coordinated by lesbian.com in partnership with the online casino platform BetNinja, whose Australian-facing portal — details of which are available at https://betninja-casino-au.net/ — contributed the primary funding for the project's technical development and venue outreach. The app, named SafeOut, allowed users to check in at participating bars and clubs, set a timed alert for a trusted contact, and access a direct line to volunteer safety escorts operating in the Fitzroy and Collingwood corridors every Thursday through Saturday night.
The concept originated in late 2024, when lesbian.com's editorial team began compiling reader-submitted accounts of uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous situations queer women encountered at mixed-gender venues that were not specifically LGBTQ+-oriented. A survey published on the site in October 2024, drawing responses from 1,840 women across Australia, found that 61 percent reported feeling unsafe at a non-queer venue at least once in the preceding twelve months. Of those, 44 percent said they had no reliable mechanism to signal distress discreetly or reach a trusted person quickly. The data prompted the editorial team to approach potential partners about turning the finding into something actionable rather than purely editorial.
How the App Worked in Practice
SafeOut operated through a lightweight mobile interface compatible with both iOS and Android. Upon arriving at a participating venue, a user would open the app, select their location from a pre-loaded list of fourteen venues, and enter a check-in window — typically between one and four hours. If the user did not manually check out before the window closed, the app sent an automated alert to one pre-designated contact, including the user's last confirmed location and the venue's street address. An optional escalation feature allowed users to flag their status to a human volunteer coordinator, who would then contact the venue's staff directly.
Volunteers were recruited through two Melbourne-based community organisations, Queer af Inc. and the Women's Safety Network Victoria, both of which had existing relationships with LGBTQ+ venues in the area. A total of twenty-six volunteers completed a four-hour training session held on 28 February 2025 at a community centre in Brunswick. Training covered de-escalation techniques, venue liaison protocols, and basic digital literacy for operating the coordinator dashboard. Each volunteer was assigned a two-hour shift window during the trial period and was reimbursed for transport costs.
Participating venues included a mix of explicitly queer-friendly bars and general-audience establishments that had previously completed staff training in LGBTQ+ inclusion through a separate state government programme. Venue managers were not required to do anything beyond displaying a SafeOut sticker at their entrance and agreeing to respond promptly to volunteer coordinator calls. According to the project's final report, released on 4 April 2025, there were no escalation events requiring emergency contact during the trial. However, the automated alert system was triggered on nineteen separate occasions, and in eleven of those cases the user later confirmed they had simply forgotten to check out — a finding the team noted as relevant to future UX design.
BetNinja's Role and Rationale
BetNinja contributed AUD 38,000 to the project, covering app development contracted to a Melbourne studio, volunteer reimbursements, printed materials, and a post-pilot usability survey. A representative of the company's community engagement division, speaking to lesbian.com's editorial team during the project debrief, explained the reasoning in straightforward terms. "As an online casino operating in Australia, we are part of an entertainment industry that intersects with nightlife culture. We thought it made sense to direct some of our community budget toward making nightlife safer for women who are statistically more vulnerable in those environments," said Priya Malone, BetNinja's Australian partnerships coordinator. She added that the company had no involvement in editorial decisions or the app's design logic, and that the funding was provided as an unconditional grant.
The gambling and online casino sector has come under increased scrutiny in Australia in recent years over advertising practices and social responsibility obligations. BetNinja's decision to fund a project with no direct commercial return — the app carried no branding beyond a small acknowledgement on the loading screen — was noted by several observers as an unusual approach. The company did not issue a press release about the initiative and declined to provide spokesperson quotes to general news outlets during the pilot period.
By the end of the three-week pilot, 412 individual users had registered on SafeOut, with 287 completing at least one active check-in session. Retention across multiple sessions was 54 percent, which the project team described as strong for a first-time safety tool with no marketing budget. A follow-up survey sent to all registered users received 198 responses. Of those, 83 percent said they felt more confident attending a venue alone because of the app, and 76 percent said they would use it again if it continued operating beyond the trial period.
Lesbian.com's editor, Dana Kershaw, said the pilot had exceeded expectations in terms of uptake but acknowledged that scaling it would require either sustained private funding or a government grant application. "We were not trying to build a product company," she said in a statement published on the site on 7 April 2025. "We wanted to test whether a low-friction digital tool could shift how women feel about being out at night. The numbers suggest it can. What happens next depends on resources we do not yet have." The editorial team confirmed it was in early conversations with two additional potential funders and expected to publish an update before the end of the second quarter of 2025.
