Ever wanted to make your own texting helpline to meet your community’s health needs? Join us to see how just about anyone can quickly set up and manage a texting service using free or low-cost online tools. Attendees will see a live demonstration where we’ll set up a texting service from scratch and answer questions texted in from the audience. People will also learn about the impact texting helplines can have on community health, and common challenges and solutions. We’ll speak from our experience with the SextEd program. This Montreal-area texting line was made to provide up-to-date, reliable and inclusive sexual health information to Quebec youth who have not had sex education for the last ten years. We’ll show how we use Twilio, Smooch and Slack to send peer-made responses to youth questions. These simple tools can let anyone create a grassroots, by-and-for texting helpline.

1. How to Start a Low-Cost Texting
Helpline in Under an Hour!
Andreas Mertens, B.Ed., AIDS Community Care Montreal
Kimberly Wong, M.A., AIDS Community Care Montreal
Iradele Plante, M.P.H., Egale Canada Human Rights Trust

2. Overview
• What is SextEd?
• Setting up a texting helpline
• Demo
• Questions/Comments?

3. What is SextEd?

4. SextEd
• Well-researched answers are written by youth
volunteers
• All responses include links to…
– Relevant local clinics and community organizations
– Credible online resources
• Answers focus on risk reduction

5. What’s the set up?
We use three online programs:

6. • An online phone number that accepts texts, calls, and MMS
• Let’s you send and receive through integrations like Smooch
• Reliable, we haven’t had delays or errors
• Lets you export the history of incoming and outgoing texts to
Excel

7. • Redirects texts from Twilio, Facebook messenger,
website messaging, and other places to apps like Slack
• Lets you answer messages from any of these platforms
through email or programs like Slack

8. • Messaging system
• Built-in co-worker messaging, which we use to share
and edit drafts
• Easy to customize with JavaScript integrations
• Lets you save and search past answers

9. Messaging Costs
• $1 per month for a number
• $.0075 for each text
• That’s it! Up to 500 users a month
• $4.75 buys you about 100 exchanges per month

10. Cost for messaging – Charity Status
• Twillio gives $500 credit, and a 25% discount
• That can cover over 100 months!
*Smooch costs $60 if you have over 500 users a month

11. Step 1 - Sign up for Twilio and
get a phone number

12. Step 2 - Sign up for Smooch and enable
Twilio SMS integration

13. Step 3 - Connect Smooch to Slack

14. Step 4 – You’re done! Start Texting!
• Really, that’s it!
• Promote the number that you registered!
• Any texts that come in will be sent through
Slack and you can reply back right away

23. Key Considerations
• When answering a text:
– What is the person asking for? What topics are relevant for them?
– Am I making assumptions about gender, orientation, age,
experience, etc.?
– Am I answering the question?
– Am I using accessible and youth-friendly language?
• Check out our Resource Kit!

24. Take home messages
Setting up a text-based program is…
– Inexpensive
– Fast
– Easy to add to other organization programs

25. Take home messages
Texting-based programs are great because
they…
– Increase accessibility
– Make it easy to connect people to resources
– Automatically collect data

26. Thank you!
• Leave us your contact info for digital copies
of our resource materials!
• You can also find them on our website:
sexted.org/start-a-texting-helpline/

27. Contact Info
Andreas Mertens | sexted@accmontreal.org
Kimberly Wong | jqy@accmontreal.org
AIDS Community Care Montreal | 514 527-0928
Sexted.org | @SextEdMTL
Iradele Plante: iplante@egale.ca