Twilio Powers 24/7 SMS for Crisis Text Line

Twilio, the cloud communications platform for developers, today announced that Crisis Text Line, the nation's first and only national, 24/7 crisis-intervention service, is using Twilio SMS to power its service. Crisis Text Line conducts its conversations exclusively by text messages, enabling people in crisis situations to text a phone number and immediately connect with a counselor who is trained to help. The nonprofit, which exchanges over 1.5 million messages per month, now leverages Twilio Programmable SMS to power these conversations. The partnership was announced on stage today at SIGNAL, the developer conference for communications in San Francisco. To learn more, visit www.twilio.org and www.crisistextline.org.

Since its launch in 2013, Crisis Text Line has exchanged more than 17.5 million text messages with people in crisis. The privacy of text messaging has helped the service address those struggling with addiction, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, sexual abuse and other crises. Their data website, Crisistrends.org, is the nation's largest catalog of crisis data. This anonymized dataset has been made available for journalists, researchers, and citizens so that they can understand the crises Americans face and can work together to prevent future crises from happening.

"There is a sense of urgency that comes with every crisis," said Nancy Lublin, CEO and Founder of Crisis Text Line. "When time is limited and emotions are high, text messaging provides those in crisis a safe and private medium to reach out for help. With Twilio, we can easily extend our services, grow our platform and continue to provide hope to even more people."

Twilio.org offers qualified nonprofits $500 in kickstart credits and a 25% lifetime discount on Twilio's communication platform. Twilio.org was started in 2013 to equip nonprofits with communications to advance their missions, and currently partners with over 700 nonprofits including the American Red Cross, the Polaris Project and Doctors without Borders. In 2015, Twilio committed 1% of the company's equity to fund Twilio.org over the next decade.

"At Twilio.org, we believe communication empowers people," said Erin Reilly, Executive Director of Twilio.org. "Crisis Text Line is creating conversations that give people hope, and I'm pleased that Twilio can help extend its reach and provide reliability when it matters most."