Texting that saves lives - Nancy Lublin

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To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. I think it might be a Lifeline. I think, actually, it might be able to save more lives than penicillin. Texting, I know, I say texting, and a lot of you think texting. A lot of you think about the LWD photos that you see—hopefully not your kid sending to somebody else—or trying to translate the abbreviations: LOL, LMAO, HMU. I can help you with those later.

But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month; unless she's a girl, and then it's closer to 4,000. And the secret is, she opens every single one. Texting has a 100% open rate.

Now, the parents are really alarmed. It's a 100% open rate, even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. I promise she read that text. And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomena; texting actually overindexes for my minority and urban youth.

I know this because at do something.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email.

We've also found an unintended consequence. We've been getting text messages back like these: "I don't want to go to school today," "The boys call me," "I was cutting; my parents found out and so I stopped, but I just started again an hour ago," or "He won't stop raping me; he told me not to tell anyone; it's my dad. Are you there?" That last one's an actual text message that we received. And yeah, we're there.

I will not forget the day we got that text message. And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. Because this isn't what we do; we do social change. Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them, and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us.

So think about it: a text hotline. It's pretty powerful. It's fast; it's pretty private. No one hears you in a stall; you're just texting quietly. It's real-time. We could help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That's great! But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data.

Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals; I want to prevent this from happening. So think about a comp—there's something in New York City that the police did. It used to be just guesswork, police work, and then they started crime mapping.

So they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things—charting the future, essentially. And they found things like when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60%.

So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying, dating abuse, eating disorders, cutting, and rape—no census. Maybe there are some studies, some longitudinal studies that cost lots of money and took lots of time, or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence.

Imagine having real-time data on every one of those issues. You could inform legislation. You could inform school policy. You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at 3:00; what's going on in your school?" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result.

This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. Because while people are talking about data making it possible for Facebook to buy my friend from the third grade or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom, and absolutely to help that girl whose father is raping her.

Thank you.

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