September 03, 2014

018: How Crisis Text Line is saving lives with text messages and data

CrisisTextLine.org is a text message hotline that connects teens with counselors at any time of the day. They are now opening up their data to help professionals and politicians understand more about teen crisis. To date they have handled over 3 million texts and are now opening up this information for people to explore. We talk with Bob Filbin, the chief data scientist at CTL about how their system works and why it matters to open up their data.

Resources

Find CTL and Bob on twitter

Crisis Text Line Trends on teen crisis

Volunteer with CTL as an online counselor

Google AdWords grant

More research on teens and texting

Example of Crisis Data

Musical Thanks

Caroline Reese & the Drifting Fifth are a Pennsylvania-based alt-country/Americana band. They’ve performed throughout the East Coast, appeared on Gene Shay’s famous WXPN Folk Show, and recently opened for Ben Folds.

Transcription

Episode 18

Speaker 1: This is Using The Whole Whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This George Weiner, your host, and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us. Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to make a personal call, but you were maybe in a meeting or around people you didn’t feel comfortable talking in front of? This was an issue that crisis text line identified as something that was stopping teens from reaching out to hotlines about the crises that they were dealing with. Welcome to episode 18, where we’re gonna be talking with Bob Filbin, the chief data scientist at Crisis Text Line, about how they’re trying to leverage the call data, the text messaging data that’s been coming in for Crisis Text Line and what they hope to do with it, to improve the lives of hundreds of teens in the united states.

Speaker 1: So I’m here in the Crisis Text Line offices, with none other but Bob. So, who are you Bob? What do you do here?{1;31}

Speaker 2: So my name’s Bob Filbin. I’m the Chief Data Scientist at Crisis Text Line.

Speaker 1: How long have you been with Crisis Text Line?{1:38}

Speaker 2: So I started actually before the system even launched, last August. I started with one other guy, the head of engineering, Chris Johnson, last February. And our goal was to build an app, a web-based app that counselors could log into and use that to text with teens in crisis.

Speaker 1: The concept sounds good, but tell me a little bit about some of your early impact and stats behind your year data analysis. You probably can’t wait. I’ll stop interrupting, you can tell me right now.{2:15}

Speaker 2: So we’ve already, in our first year, exchanged 3 million messages with teens in crisis.

Speaker 1: Geez.

Speaker 2: Yeah, which is amazing. The demand actually exceeds our supply in some ways, the number of counselors we have. So our big challenge right now is not getting the word out to teens in crisis. They’re using the service. It’s can we get enough counselors to respond to that demand.

Speaker 1: Interesting. So how are you findin

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