DoSomething.org

In 2003, Nancy Lublin took the reigns as CEO of DoSomething, Inc. at the request of its cofounder, Melrose Place actor Andrew Shue. The company was distressed; it had $250,000 in debt, had just closed its office space, and had laid off all but one of its employees. Ms. Lublin turned the organization around and moved it online, transforming it into DoSomething.org. The not-for-profit tech company provides volunteer opportunities for young people to improve their communities and earn scholarship money for college, leveraging technology like social media and texting to reach its audience.

Today, DoSomething.org is one of the largest youth organizations in the world with more than 6 million members. As of 2019, it has been rated 4/4 stars by Charity Navigator for the past thirteen years—representing the fewer than 1 percent of charities that have held the title for that long. DoSomething.org was also on The NonProfit Times’ Best Places to Work list for seven years in a row, and for six consecutive years was on Crain’s Top 100 Places to Work.

While CEO of DoSomething.org, Nancy Lublin recruited and managed a team of diverse, young volunteers and employees, creating policies and systems to foster and retain millennial and tech talent, including a student loan and a sabbatical policy. She created a cause-marketing strategy for sustainability, acquiring 83 percent of funding from corporations. Notable DoSomething.org campaigns launched under Nancy Lublin’s leadership included Teens for Jeans, providing over 5 million pairs of jeans to homeless youth throughout the country; Diversify My Emoji, a successful petition to diversify iPhone emojis to represent people of color; GTFO: Get the Filter Out, cleaning up 3.7 million discarded cigarette butts and counting; and Grandparents Gone Wired, aimed at teaching senior citizens how to use smartphones.

In 2007, the DoSomething.org Awards became the first ever televised award show celebrating volunteerism, airing for five years on the CW and then VH1 with celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Justin Beiber, David Beckham and others in attendance.

Crisis Text Line

In 2013, while still CEO of DoSomething.org, Nancy Lublin conceived of and launched Crisis Text Line, a tech start-up that offers free 24/7 crisis intervention by text. She first publicly shared the idea for Crisis Text Line as a TED Talk. In just two years, CTL became one of the largest hotlines in the U.S., with a staff of approximately one hundred employees and more than 30,000 trained volunteer Crisis Counselors who handle hundreds of millions of mssages each year, including intervening in thousands of suicide attempts. Both Crisis Text Line and DoSomething.org were featured at the 2013 Obama White House Mental Health Conference. Most importantly, the service has garnered an 85% approval rating from users.

In addition to serving millions of people in pain, under Nancy’s leadership, Crisis Text Line was heralded as a pioneer in big data for social good, using algorithms to stack-rank the texter queue based on severity. The insights from Crisis Text Line data influenced research and the policies of government agencies and other companies that provide crisis intervention.

Nancy Lublin helped launch CTL in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. Ms. Lublin envisioned CTL as an international crisis text line serving one-third of the planet and competed for and won a 2020 TED Audacious Project grant to fulfill that vision. During her tenure, Ms. Lublin raised roughly $140 million in venture-style rounds from some of the world’s leading tech innovators and planned Crisis Text Line’s international expansion into countries speaking Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic by 2022. She was  committed to giving young employees leadership opportunities.

Nancy Lublin was terminated from CTL in June 2020. She later reached a settlement agreement with the organization.

Loris.ai

Nancy Lublin founded Loris.ai in 2018, giving founder equity to Crisis Text Line. Loris.ai’s artificial intelligence platform is designed to help customer service employees handle hard conversations. Leveraging the aggregated and anonymized lessons of Crisis Text Line, Loris.ai brings AI-based conversational empathy, efficiency, and compassion to customer service.

Loris.ai raised a total of $7 million in venture funding, and Nancy Lublin hired the company’s founding team, including executive, product, and data teams. She served as CEO until September 2019, recruiting Etie Hertz to replace her.

Other Work

Investing and Advising

Nancy Lublin has made several successful early investments such as Gixo (acquired by BeachBody), VirginMega (acquired by Nike), Represent (acquired by CustomInk), StateOf and DeepWellDTX. She has served as advisor for ClassPass and CitrusLane, fund Advisor for firms LeadOut and CityLight Capital, and is currently an advisor to the Daffy Charitable app, FamilyCare, ForThem.com, WickedSaints and others. Learn more here.

Board Memberships

Nancy Lublin has served on the board of American Friends of Oxford University since 2018. Other prior board positions have included McGraw-Hill Education (Audit & Risk Committee, 2015-2020, $2 billion revenue), Wet Seal (2013-2015, 500 retail stores), and The New School (Audit & Risk Committee, 2010-2016).

Writing

Nancy Lublin wrote a popular monthly column for Fast Company from 2009-2011 that focused on cause marketing, governance and fundraising. Her Amazon best-selling book Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business (2010) focuses on smart strategies about brand, talent, and productivity that for-profit business can learn from not-for-profits. That same year, she co-authored Do Something! A Handbook for Young Activists (2010) with Vanessa Martir and Julia Steers, which was nominated for several children’s book awards. In 2014, Nancy Lublin was invited to write another guide for young people looking to create social change. Ms. Lublin enlisted the help of her team from DoSomething.org to each write a chapter, which she edited with Alyssa Ruderman to create The XYZ Factor: The DoSomething.org Guide to Creating a Culture of Impact. Each section focuses on a different aspect of the “XYZ” recipe for success. Learn more here.

Teaching

Nancy Lublin taught graduate-level courses as an adjunct faculty member at both Yale University School of Management (2011, 2009), and the New York University Wagner School (2010, 2009, 2007).

Public Speaking, Interviews, and TV appearances

Nancy Lublin and her organizations have been featured on CNN, Oprah, and 60 Minutes (1999). She and her work can also be seen in features by NowThis (2020), The New Yorker (2020), New York Times Video, Mashable (2018), Dose (2017), CGTN America (2016), WebMD (2016), CBS This Morning (2015), Katie (2014), CBS News (2009) and many other media platforms.

In 2013, DoSomething.org was chosen by The Wall Street Journal as one of twenty-four startups to participate in “WSJ Startup of the Year,” an episodic video documentary for the newspaper’s video platform. As part of the event, Nancy Lublin was a panelist on a live chat during WSJ Startup of the Year’s Power Women Week.

As a public speaker, Ms. Lublin has made hundreds of appearances, including talks at Google (2020 and 2019), the Milken Institute (2020), the Aspen Ideas Festival (2019), Urban Institute (2018) and the World Economic Forum (2017).

Nancy Lublin has also participated on podcasts. In March 2020, she was a guest on the LinkedIn Hello Monday Podcast with Jessi Hempel discussing the state of mental health in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2017 she was a guest on the podcast Masters of Scale with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Other podcast appearances include WP-Tonic.com (2020), American Diagnosis with Dr. Celine Gounder (2017), Sounds Good (2017), This Week in Startups (2016), and the Vice Podcast (2013).

Awards and Honors

Nancy Lublin was awarded the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship by the Skoll Foundation in 2019. She received an honorary doctorate from The New School in 2018. In 2014, she was named a Schwab Fellow by the World Economic Forum and was previously named to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders list in 2007. In 2013, Nancy Lublin was awarded the Henry Crown Fellowship by the Aspen Institute. She has also received Fast Company‘s Fast 50 Award (2002), Fast Company’s Social Capitalist Award, Forbes’ Trailblazer Award (2000), and was named Woman of the Year by the NYC Women’s Commission (2000).

DoSomething.org won Webby Awards for Best Youth Website (2015) and Best Charitable Organization/NonProfit (2013).

Nancy Lublin has been named on many lists of influential entrepreneurs, including: Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders (2014), Fast Company’s Most Creative People (2014), Marie Claire’s 20 Women Changing the World (2014), Fast Company’s list of Extraordinary Women (2012), The NonProfit Times’ 50 Most Powerful (2011-2014), Glamour magazine’s Women of Worth (2006), Ms. Magazine’s Feminists for the 21st Century, and others.

Education and Personal Life

Nancy Lublin earned an Executive Certificate in Leadership from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government in 2008. She holds her J.D. from New York University School of Law (2001, Root-Tilden Scholar), her M.Litt. in Political Theory from Oxford University (1995, Marshall Scholar), and her B.A. in Politics from Brown University (1993, Phi Beta Kappa). Nancy Lublin is proficient in Spanish and Japanese.

Nancy Lublin is a native of West Hartford, Connecticut. She is married to entrepreneur Jason Diaz. They have two children and live in Manhattan.

When she dies, her wish is to have only two words on her tombstone: loyal friend.