The archive · Public & Social · Product decision · 2013–2018
Crisis Text Line meets people where they actually are: the text message
After a teenager texted DoSomething.org about abuse at home, Nancy Lublin built Crisis Text Line — free 24/7 crisis counseling by SMS that launched in 2013.
Crisis Text Line
What it had to solve
In August 2011 DoSomething.org, the youth volunteer network Nancy Lublin ran, received text messages from a teenager describing abuse at home. Lublin's team tested the existing social services the way a teen would and never heard back — a sign that the phone-based crisis system was failing the people who needed it most.
How it works
Crisis Text Line began with a text. In 2011 a teenager messaged DoSomething.org describing abuse at home, and the organisation found that the formal help system it tested did not respond the way a teenager would need. Chief executive Nancy Lublin concluded that crisis support was built around phone calls, while young people in crisis communicate by text.
The service that resulted launched in August 2013 in Chicago and El Paso: free, confidential, 24/7 crisis counseling over SMS, where trained volunteer counselors have real-time conversations with texters. The shortcode 741741 spread without advertising, and within four months the service was receiving texts from all 295 US area codes.
From the start Crisis Text Line was engineered around data. Its first two employees were a chief data scientist and a chief technology officer; volunteers complete roughly 36 hours of remote training; and triage algorithms read a texter's first messages to identify those at imminent risk and move them to the front of the queue, the way an emergency room treats the most urgent patient first.
The design produced unusual growth for a nonprofit. The first million conversations took three and a half years and the second about ten months; by early 2018 the service had exchanged more than 55 million messages, 86% of texters said the conversation helped, and the platform was in use in every US state — all without a marketing budget.
Why it lands
- Texting is how young people already say the hardest things, so the help arrives in a medium that lowers the first barrier.
- A text is discreet: someone can reach out from the same room as an abuser without being overheard.
- Data-first triage treats crisis support like an emergency room, putting the most at-risk texters first instead of serving them in arrival order.
- Volunteer counselors trained remotely let the service scale nationwide without a chain of physical call centres.
What it did
The channel matched real demand: the first million conversations took 3.5 years, the second about ten months, and by early 2018 the service had exchanged more than 55 million messages. Crisis Text Line says 86% of texters found the conversation helpful, it spread to every US state without spending on marketing, and its open data influenced researchers and other services.
What you can take
Design the help channel around the person asking, not the institution answering: a text is discreet, familiar and always on, which is exactly why the people who would never call will reach out.
Since then
Crisis Text Line grew from a two-city pilot into a national and then global service: its current impact page counts more than 11 million US conversations and over 350 million messages handled since 2013, still powered largely by volunteer crisis counselors. Its open data programme shaped research on crisis language, and the insight that crisis support must meet people on the channels they use helped push the wider mental-health system toward text and chat options. The original 741741 shortcode remains free and available 24/7 in the United States.
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