While Nancy Lublin was CEO at DoSomething.org, a global non-profit driving positive change in young adults, the organization received a text message from a young woman in crisis that struck a cord for her. Lublin pulled together her founding team – Chris Johnson as chief technology officer (CTO) and Bob Filbin as chief data scientist to build what would ultimately become Crisis Text Line.  

Crisis Text Line was a technology company from the start. Lublin recognized right off the bat that technology needed to be core to the organization in order to disrupt the crisis intervention space. Johnson and Filbin were charged with building the first iteration of The Platform that would be the driving force behind Crisis Text Line.  One of the first priorities that Johnson and Filbin wanted to tackle was for a Crisis Counselor to  handle multiple conversations at one time.

At its essence, The Platform served as the intermediary between texters and Crisis Counselors, enabling a seamless experience.  A texter would send a message using their mobile device, an action that looked and felt as if they were texting a close friend. On the other side, a Crisis Counselor would log into The Platform from a computer and respond to the incoming texts.

I think - Wow -  we really started from scratch back in February of 2013. And launched six months later with a live platform helping people in crisis. It was a tight timeline, a lot of long days, but we pulled it together and launched. Basically, the core of the platform that we use now and the technology we use now was built back then in those six months.

- Bob Filbin, Chief Data Scientist

Look at the Platform interface from the viewpoint of a Crisis Counselor:

Nancy Lublin, Founder & CEO, Crisis Text Line

By 2017, the texts that included trigger words were moved quickly to the top of the queue, enabling quicker response and more lives saved.

For Crisis Text Line’s initial launch, they sent a text to active users of DoSomething.org in two locations - El Paso and Chicago. The demand side took minimal effort and grew immediately. As texter volume increased, the company began to learn more about the community they were serving.  Texters were young, under-represented in other mental health services (particularly those in Native American nations), and rural. Many of them texted at night.  

In the initial months, 11 existing crisis centers across the country were leveraged as Crisis Counselor supply, and Crisis Text Line instead focused on managing the texter demand. Each of the 11 crisis centers was managed differently – some centers were being paid, some were paying Crisis Text Line, and others were simply volunteering. There was no consistency, yet everyone had the same mission: to provide support and an intervention to those experiencing a crisis situation.

Unfortunately, there were some difficulties in managing these centers and quick iterations seemed impossible. First and foremost, each state and agency had different policies on laws and reporting, making it difficult to take a national approach to crisis intervention. Additionally, working through these 11 centers meant that Crisis Text Line did not have a direct line to its Crisis Counselors and updates could not be communicated easily. Filbin would be working tirelessly to improve the experience on The Platform, yet the time it took to communicate to Crisis Counselors hindered their ability to act fast. Each center had a different process for communication and Crisis Text Line had little to no control over the process. Similarly, the slow speed at which they received feedback from the Crisis Counselors further delayed the process improvements.

This inefficiency leaked into the service levels on The Platform and began to impact the texter experience. After each conversation, a texter and a Crisis Counselor had the option to leave experience feedback. The feedback varied widely across the centers, proving that this current strategy was inconsistent and a huge risk to Crisis Text Line. The strategy worked in the initial days to offer an immediate supply to The Platform, but it was not going to be sustainable in the long run. Crisis Text Line needed to pivot their business model to manage a sustainable supply of quality Crisis Counselors that could evolve with The Platform -  and they would need funding to accomplish this.