Why We Invested: Crisis Text Line

In the popular TEDTalk that first introduced Crisis Text Line to the world, founder Nancy Lublin made the bold claim that the text-based crisis hotline might someday save more lives in our country than penicillin. If we consider that suicide has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years in the United States and that it is the third leading cause of death for young people between ages 12 and 19, Crisis Text Line may be on its way to doing just that.

The nonprofit has exchanged over 19 million text messages with struggling people of all ages in various stages of crisis since its founding in 2013 — while collecting anonymous, real time data that’s already helping mental health professionals create life-saving, data-driven responses and better policies to prevent and address abuse, mental illness, and other disorders.

Lublin developed the idea for a text-based crisis hotline while CEO of DoSomething.org, America’s largest social change organization focused on engaging teenagers to help address critical issues in their communities — and another Omidyar Network grantee. Recognizing teens’ obsession with texting, Lublin added text capabilities to DoSomething’s platform, and engagement rose significantly. Unanticipated text-responses from young people in crisis rose significantly, too.

Her answer? She built the first free, 24/7, text-based crisis hotline in the country. Almost three years after its launch, Crisis Text Line has 1,500 trained volunteer crisis counselors and texts with over 200,000 people per week — of which 80 percent report to be 25 years of age and under. The rate of organic growth experienced by Crisis Text Line is a bleak indication of how many people struggle with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, bullying, and suicidal thoughts in our country.

Its potential for impact triggered our first funding commitment of $2.5 million through our Consumer Internet & Mobile initiative last fall. But the high demand for the service and the need to expand the organization’s technology platform has caught the attention of other impact investors — including Reid Hoffman, Melinda Gates, and The Ballmer Group — who have joined in a new round of funding totaling $23.8 million.

Last week, as part of this round, we made a new commitment to Crisis Text Line, providing an unrestricted grant in the amount of $5 million.

With these funds, Crisis Text Line will be able to take crucial steps to scale, such as recruiting and training more volunteer crisis counselors, and bringing in more engineers and data scientists. Equally important, the organization will be able to take its technology to new channels, through partnerships with YouTube and message apps such as Kik and Facebook Messenger; and refine a white label offering that will place its innovative texting platform at the service of other organizations focused on empowering people to overcome all kinds of issues — without the need of developing their own separate platforms. Initial launches with the City of Newark and the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) have turned positive results.

Besides the vital work of using texting to save lives, from the start Lublin has designed the organization to be a rich source of data. Leveraging powerful analytics algorithms and machine learning, data is transformed into insights that help triage conversations based on severity, rather than chronological order, and help make their trained crisis counselors more effective through pattern recognition.

Crisis Text Line hits all the marks of a technology-enabled innovation that is creating transformative impact. Lublin and team have created a platform that combines best in class technology, product, data, and human capital to efficiently and effectively help people at the times they need it the most. In addition, aggregate data is being offered for free to policymakers and academic researchers, in the hopes of sparking systems change when it comes to treatment and prevention of mental illness, disorders, and abuse.

Using text messages to save lives while at the same time promoting systematic change is a bold goal, but maybe boldness is what it takes to overcome the afflictions of our times.