Published on 3/11/2025

How Izzy Transformed Crisis Hotline Response at SASS Lane

Martina Shabram, PhD
Executive Director
Sexual Assault Response Services - SASS Lane, Oregon

 

At Izzy, we want to support you in supporting your communities. We also believe that communicating our successes, and those of our clients, is of value to others. That’s why we want to share the stories of folks who’re using the Izzy platform — to show how we can help and to hear from our clients about who they are and how their work supports the communities they live in.

This February, we sat down with Martina Shabram, PhD, the Executive Director of Sexual Assault Support Services (SASS) in Eugene, Lane County, Oregon, to learn more about SASS’ history and how Izzy helped them achieve their goals.

Martina has been working at SASS for five years and has been the executive director for nearly three. SASS was founded in 1991, following the closure of the University of Oregon’s Rape Crisis Center. “A coalition of community members came together,” Martina said, “and founded Sexual Assault Support Services as a 24-7 crisis response organization for survivors of sexual violence.” Since then, they’ve been growing and responding to the needs of their community, providing a 24-7 crisis response line and emergency medical advocacy — both of which, Martina told us, have been facilitated by the Izzy platform.

With a PhD in English, Martina’s area of research and expertise was in disability studies. After she finished her PhD, rather than going into academia permanently, she went into the non-profit sector. For a long time, she taught sex ed. “The research from around the world,” she said, “but particularly from Western Europe, really shows that comprehensive sexual health education is sexual violence prevention.” For Martina, the transition from her academic career into sex education, and now into her work at SASS, made perfect sense. “Doing that work in disability justice, reproductive justice, and sex ed,” she said, “led me to doing survivor justice and direct response.” 

Outlined in the organization’s three-year strategic plan, Martina and SASS have some noteworthy future goals. The first is to respond to the growing housing crisis in Lane County and meet the emergent needs of survivors who are unhoused or unstably housed — but SASS’ aspirations don’t stop there. “Our big moonshot goal,” Martina said, “is expanding into a stand-alone medical center.” Such a center could offer acute care in the immediate aftermath of an assault, collecting forensic evidence, and providing a better alternative to the long wait times and other stresses of visiting the emergency department of a hospital.

The Struggles of an Outdated System

The team at SASS hasn’t always used Izzy Helpline to address their needs. Until 2022, they’d relied on twelve phone lines and an after-hours call routing service to operate their crisis line. Martina told us that this had worked well for years, but about five years prior to the switch to Izzy, the reliability of the phone line system and the quality of the service offered by the call-routing center began to decline. Additionally, Martina noted that the training call center workers receive has never been adequate for response to people in crisis, nor was it ever intended to be. “Their primary job is not dealing with people who are in crisis,” she said, “and so we struggled a little bit with the affect of the people who were answering the calls.” Giving a perfect example of what that experience could sometimes be like for callers to the crisis line, Martina said, “It's a little bit jarring for someone calling a sexual violence hotline to be met with ‘Hey, there! How are you doing tonight?’”

 A climate-driven problem also arose. “We've experienced some profound wildfires here,” said Martina, “and our 24-7 crisis line was dependent on the infrastructure of the building. So, when the power went out, the lines went down.” Since there was no way to route calls without going into the office, restrictions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic created further problems.

The Izzy Solution: A Seamless, Survivor-Centered Approach

 For Martina, Izzy has solved these issues. “It has been such a sea change,” she said. “We looked around for the options that were on the market, and Izzy came really highly recommended from some of our partners who are in sibling agencies throughout the state. Meeting with Eric and the whole Izzy team really demonstrated that not only was the platform what we needed, but also that the whole team, Eric in particular, were deeply invested in continuing to make it work for our unique needs.”

No longer constrained by the limitations of localized phone infrastructure, SASS can meet the needs of people in crisis with newfound ease. “Our wait times are much lower,” said Martina. “We can easily update our outgoing messages and what people hear when they call-in. We have our messaging in English and Spanish to meet the needs of our bilingual community.” 

Izzy has eliminated the need for the mediation of a call-routing service. “Callers don't have to speak to some third party to get connected,” Martina said. “They just get connected directly to an advocate as soon as someone picks up.” 

SASS now has chat and text functionality. “It has been huge,” said Martina, “something that is a real benefit, especially to our younger clients.” Another thing Martina found through her research was that rural clients, who may not always have a quality cell or internet signal, benefit from text message functionality, which requires less data.

Empowering Advocates and Protecting Their Well-Being

Advocates at SASS, the very people answering the lines, have also benefited from the change. “The sound quality is improved” Martina noted. “We are able to flag and track unique callers so that we can know if we're getting a call from, say, the hospital, or the county jail.” Izzy has also helped SASS with scheduling and administrative issues. “If somebody has an emergency and needs to change their shift,” Martina told us, “they can switch it over to someone else really quickly.” 

Adding to these successes, Martina highlighted the resolution of another significant problem. “We can block line abusers,” she said, “which is something we could never do before.” For those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of working a crisis line, line abusers may come as a surprise. “It is an unfortunate reality,” Martina said, “but there are people who, for whatever reason, enjoy calling and harassing people who work at organizations like this.” She noted that this is itself a form of sexual harassment. “That's a form of sexual violence,” she said, “and my staff aren't paid to deal with that. So, being able to block those calls is something that profoundly affects my staff's health and well-being.”

A Future-Proof Solution

For Martina, looking back, the transition to using Izzy was swift. “I took over in March of 2022,” she said. “We started the research around that time and had made the transition by January of 2023.” In just under a year, SASS moved from its cumbersome landline system to an efficient, fully integrated online system. “When I think back to what it was like to onboard new advocates and staff and train them with the old model versus this new model,” she said, “I can't imagine going back to that level of analog and lack of functionality, having had the amount of control that I do now.”

For all of us at Izzy, Martina’s words confirm our efforts. We strive to offer a comprehensive platform that eliminates the hassle of older systems, helping you to help your communities faster and more efficiently than ever before. Hearing from our existing clients and receiving that positive feedback affirms what we do and shows that the Izzy platform meets a worthy need. 

By Will Belton