RAINN was one of the first victim-support organizations to launch an online hotline back in 2007. Since then, it has served almost 250,000 visitors and demand for the service grows every year. Two hundred volunteers and 45 paid staff members work around the clock—24 hours a day, every day of the year—to provide continuous support for the online hotline. Earlier this year, RAINN added a Spanish-language service, and between the two, RAINN conducts an average of 113 sessions a day.

RAINN also operates the Department of Defense Safe Helpline services through a contract with the agency’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO) and has partnered with the Peace Corps to provide chat-based support to its volunteers.

RAINN offers these chat services in addition to its telephone hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). Operating the online hotline requires a substantial amount of financial and human resources, and money for initiatives like this is in short supply. However, as with businesses across all sectors, nonprofits are not impervious to shifts in the way people communicate. In order to “stay relevant,” they have to modernize.

“We get people who are talking about what happened to them for the first time, and if it wasn't for an online service like this, they wouldn't have reached out in another way,” said Jennifer Marsh, RAINN’s vice president of victims services. “We are catching young survivors and people who say they could never talk about this out loud. Online communication gives them the space to control the conversation and put down their own narrative about what happened.”

Marsh said that a vast majority of the online hotline visitors are between 13 and 24 years old. More than half are talking about abuse or assault that took place five or more years ago. RAINN has also found that the chat system appeals to people who have been through particularly violent trauma or experienced a type of assault or abuse with a higher stigma, such as incest—40 percent discuss an attack that was perpetrated by a family member. (The RAINN chats that I have had reflect these findings as well.)

The interface of the chat system is stripped of “branding” and looks ambiguous, so it can be used in public spaces like school libraries, home computers, and mobile devices on a bus without screaming “crisis hotline.” RAINN does not ask for any personally identifiable information or track IP addresses. It records no transcripts of the session and all data are encrypted. There is nothing that could be subject to subpoena. From a volunteer’s perspective, all I see is that “anonymous” is typing.

According to Marsh, and in my own experience, most visitors don’t come with quick questions. They want to discuss layers of complex issues and the online chats are generally longer than the phone chats. “I was raped when I was 15. I was very young and scared, and worried that no one would believe me,” said Toby Wagner Klein, a member of RAINN’s Speakers Bureau who agreed to talk with me about her experience with the online hotline. “The idea of taking up a phone and speaking to a complete stranger about things I wasn’t even entirely sure of myself seemed daunting. The online chat helped me express what I wasn’t able to vocalize with my therapist or family and friends. I probably would not have gone to RAINN if it did not have an online chat.”