Every Kalda course goes through five stages, from the first conversation about what to make through to the moment it goes live in the app. This post walks through each stage, including the production day which is our personal favourite.
Stage 1: Research and content planning
Every course starts with research. Two sources, weighted equally:
Community input. We poll our community on what they need. The most-requested topics drive what we make next. We genuinely use this input; Kaldans have shaped most of the meaningful course decisions we’ve made.
Clinical research and UK charity work. Current evidence-based practice from clinical literature, plus the work of leading UK mental health charities (Mind, Stonewall, Switchboard, Rainbow Mind, FFLAG, Mermaids and others). Each provides a different angle on what queer people need from mental health support.
Together, these shape the content plan. Once we know what to make, the next stage begins.
Stage 2: Course design with our clinicians
We work with Jake Camp and our clinical team to design the actual content. The work involves:
- The therapeutic arc of the course (what skills, in what order, building toward what)
- The clinical frameworks (typically CBT, ACT, DBT, or a combination, see Why we built Kalda on CBT, ACT, and DBT)
- The bite-sized format (short modules of 5-15 minutes rather than 60-minute lectures)
- Worked examples and exercises that take queer life as the default context
- Crisis signposting where appropriate
The key principle: digestible and usable. Content you can fit into a real life, between work and dinner, on a tired evening, in five minutes during a lunch break. Mental health work compounds with consistency, and consistency comes from accessibility.
Drafts go through clinical review, queer-affirming review, and editorial review before they reach the next stage.
Stage 3: Production (our favourite stage)
Once a course is fully scripted, it goes to our studio for filming. This is our personal favourite time in the process.
The studio becomes the most joyous queer set: incredible guides from across the rainbow, an explicitly queer-affirming production team, and a creative day-of energy that is hard to replicate anywhere else. The hosts you see on each course are real people in our community, filmed in conditions that genuinely felt good to be in.
We deliberately film with hosts who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community and have depth in the course topic. Their names, pronouns, credentials, and bios are published on each course page so you can see who’s teaching you.
The production day is also where the content stops being a document and starts being a course. Tone, pacing, warmth, the small things that make a video lesson actually land, all of it is created here.
Stage 4: Post-production
After filming, the course goes through:
- Editing (cutting, pacing, transitions)
- Audio mixing and levelling
- Captioning (every video has captions; see Kalda’s commitment to accessibility)
- Accessibility review
- Final QA
When everything is signed off, the course goes live in the app and on the web library. The team usually celebrates a course going live with the same energy as it deserves: a meaningful piece of clinical work, made queer, ready to use.
Stage 5: Community feedback
A course going live isn’t the end of the process. We watch how Kaldans actually engage with it (which modules are completed, which aren’t), gather feedback, and iterate where needed. Material updates trigger re-recording; smaller updates can be made through supplementary content.
And this is where we want your input: we’re keen to hear from you about your needs. Email hello@kalda.co with what’s missing, what worked, what you’d love next. We love hearing from you, and the community shapes the library.
Why we make courses this way
A few principles underneath the whole process:
Research-led and community-led, both. Either alone produces content that misses something. Together they produce content that’s grounded and relevant.
Made by queer people, throughout. Clinical team, course authors, hosts, production team. Representation isn’t a checkbox; it’s structural to how the work happens.
Bite-sized because life is. Most Kaldans don’t have time for hour-long courses. Short modules respect that.
Iterated, not finished. Courses get updated as the clinical landscape shifts and as we learn what works. The library is alive.
Where to next
- Browse the course library to see what’s currently available
- Meet the Kalda clinical team for the people behind the work
- Why we built Kalda on CBT, ACT, and DBT for the framework rationale
- Read more from Inside Kalda for further behind-the-scenes content
Got a course you’d love us to make? Email us. The list of what’s next is genuinely shaped by what you tell us.