The Effectiveness of Volunteering for Crisis Support Hotlines

For some people, volunteering with a crisis support hotline may be a particularly effective way to make a positive difference. 

After a few weeks of training, volunteers provide one-off crisis support over the phone to people in distress. Volunteers may be required to make a modest financial contribution towards the cost of the training.

Some crisis support services do not have enough volunteers to answer all calls, meaning that new volunteers would not just be answering calls which would have been answered anyway, but will be helping the organization to answer more calls.  

Typically, crisis support services will require a minimum time commitment from their volunteers, for example a few hours per fortnight or 100 hours per year, which can be proportionately reduced during any period in which the volunteer cannot do shifts because of their personal circumstances. 

During those 100 hours, a volunteer may answer calls from 100 – 200 people, allowing time for breaks between calls where needed. The problems which prompt callers to seek help from the hotline will depend on the exact type of service the hotline provides. If it is a general-purpose crisis support hotline, the demographic of callers will be experiencing a wide range of problems and issues. 

Assisting distressed callers is worthwhile even if their difficulties are not life-threatening.  A small percentage of callers may be suicidal and a smaller still percentage imminently suicidal. 

A volunteer might answer calls from, say, three imminently suicidal callers in a year. Being imminently suicidal does not necessarily signify a certainty of attempting suicide in the absence of effective intervention, but rather that there is an imminent risk of an attempt, such as a risk of an attempt within the next few hours. 

Out of those three callers, it may be that one is at high risk of completing suicide within a few hours without effective intervention. 

If the volunteer continues their efforts for ten years, they may therefore save, perhaps, 10 lives. Probably, they will never know with certainty whether their efforts are successful in an individual case, although it is likely that some callers will express profound gratitude to them. 

If the volunteer is highly skilled in demonstrating empathy, instilling hope or helping callers identify reasons to live or sources of support, it might be that suicidal callers they speak to, or at least some of them, may never again be at imminent risk of suicide, or live for many more years before being at imminent risk again.     

Losing a family member or friend is a risk factor for suicide, so if a volunteer prevents 10 suicides, they may also prevent other suicides, as well as preventing all the other adverse ripple effects which result from suicide.   

A volunteer who maintains their efforts for 10 years will also reduce the distress, at least temporarily, of over 1,000 other people. They may have a significant ongoing positive impact in dozens or possibly hundreds of lives, either because of a direct practical impact – perhaps a timely referral to an effective source of support – or because the caller remembers that their call was answered by a volunteer who cared.  

In addition, by volunteering with the hotline a person could gain skills and knowledge which will be useful to them in their paid work, or which will help them to obtain more highly paid work to enable them to give more to charities, or work which has a greater positive impact. 

Volunteers may also learn things which will enable them to help their friends, family, or work colleagues to deal with distress, or to help themselves. 

100 hours of volunteer work per year is a significant commitment, particularly when it consists of answering calls from distressed people.  On top of that, volunteers may need to do a few hours of training each year to maintain their skills or accreditation. Volunteers should practice self-care to reduce to the risk of burnout. 

Some employers provide their workers with a small amount of paid leave to engage in volunteering, so it is possible that some of their “volunteer” shifts will be, in effect, paid. 

Some crisis support organizations provide occasional social activities for volunteers to help reduce the rate of attrition of volunteers, either due to the demanding nature of the work or to competing priorities in the own lives of volunteers. 

A crisis support volunteer who answers calls for more than a year or two is therefore of great value to a crisis support organization. 

Some volunteers may go on to train, supervise or support other volunteers and therefore have other positive impacts. If engaging in these other activities means less hours of answering calls their overall positive impact may or may not increase, depending on their supervisory skill compared with their skill at directly assisting distressed callers.