The Hotline Directory is constantly working to update and to improve the data and information that we provide on our websites.
Teams of volunteers have collected and vetted tens of thousands of hotlines, helplines, and chat lines. In fact, our entire directory was built by volunteers.
For 2023, our goal is to update the caliber of our database, and to improve its seachability. For this reason, we are looking for several volunteers to dig through our spreadsheets, to make our data more uniform by reviewing our existing data and transitioning it to one set of well-designed drop-down and multiple choice menus.
This work may be a little tedious, but definitely not as grueling as our original collection work. Once completed, this work will drastically improve our websites, and allow us to complete the phone search by voice recognition that we've been planning since the outset of this project.
You may know similar data to ours is sold and licensed in other formats. We are proud to be able to save worthy agencies thousands of dollars by sharing our database for free.
Our database is also the foundation of our long term mission.
As far as we know, there are no statistics about the efficacy of individual hotlines or the hotline industry. By collecting ratings and feedback about hotlines, we hope to be positioned to assist the presently unregulated hotline industry by creating a nonprofit oversight organization, staffed by volunteers. This organization's mission will be to use our collected data to analyze and make suggestions about ways to improve the hotline industry. This organization will discuss and consider developing hotline best practices, and/or choose to become a HotlineWatchdog agency.
The rapid growth of and omnipresent role that hotlines play in society cannot be overstated. Yet there are no regulations or oversight of the hotline industry. A reasonable concern, shared by many people in the hotline industry, is the duplication of efforts by hotlines.
We hope to investigate many questions about the hotline industry.
How is money being spent by individual hotlines and by the industry as a whole? Can/should duplicative hotlines be merged? Can executive positions be merged? Should there be a registry of hotline services? Should there be organizations tasked with recruiting and training volunteers for multiple hotlines? Should there be minimums on the ages of volunteers covering hotline calls, texts, chatting? Can we find a way to limit the amount of people that one volunteer can chat with at the same time? Should there be a routing system for overwhelmed hotlines?
Please consider joining with us by volunteering to participate in our upgrading this winter. If you are interested, please contact us at admin@what.ngo.