Our 2023-2024 Impact Report
The Chayn family supported our senior staff (including our CEO, our Head of Product and our Head of Movement Building) as they took time out to become first-time mothers. For the organisation, it was a time of shifting and sharing job roles, while experimenting with more of a distributed leadership model.
2023 also saw us deepen our expertise in the Online Safety and Tech-facilitated gender based violence (TGBV) spaces. We created brand new content around this topic for survivors, and made strides with our movement building work to advocate for this issue in UK and international policy conversations.
Our partnership work with Bumble has also grown significantly. We’ve offered support to many thousands more survivors through our Bloom service in the last year. We’ve worked hard to expand our reach in the Global South, with people accessing our resources in more than 70 countries and 14 languages. We’ve made our Bloom service more useful - through listening to survivors and redesigning aspects of it in line with their needs. We also launched a new service - Diya - focused on supporting staff within organisations as they encounter vicarious trauma in their work.
This has been a journey of prototyping and iterating, defining and reframing. We’ve created a method that allows us to review each of our products and services within a single framework, over time. We've figured out what data we need to gather, what it tells us about our work's impact and what the gaps are. We’ve balanced trade offs and ethical decisions, such as deciding how we can collect feedback while respecting our users’ privacy, GDPR and behaving in a way that’s non-extractive. We’ve planned how both qualitative and quantitative data will play a role, and tried various methods of data collection. We’ve explored what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to healing and revisited our Theory of Change. And of course we’ve tried to do all of this in line with our trauma-informed principles.
This whole thing makes my heart warm up, it’s like chicken soup for my survivor soul
Chayn's mission
Chayn creates resources and services for and with survivors around the world, to support them on their journey of healing. Our work helps survivors identify abuse, understand their trauma and the impact of misogyny on their life, and take control of their recovery pathways. We share these resources generously and openly for anyone to use or adapt.
By challenging patriarchal narratives in the media and the web, we contribute to creating a hopeful and just world. Working in the open encourages our peers to open up too, leading to the wider adoption of trauma-informed, survivor-centred and intersectional approaches to helping survivors live better lives. Chayn works to build a better future for technology by modelling its transformative potential, and advocating for safe, open source solutions which serve everyone.
Our 2022-2025 strategy laid out some bold ambitions for us as an organisation. We aimed to increase the number of survivors we support, and grow our movement building activities in the GBV and TGBV spaces, particularly in the Global South.
Survivor impact
We are focused on increasing the number of survivors accessing our services to 1 million, with a particular focus on increasing access for those located in the Global South.
We are aiming for 80% of our user base to report that our resources have ‘transformational’ impact for them - which we define below.
Reach
The impact we've had so far, focused on Reach
- 566,697 survivors have accessed our services since 2013.
- We offer free resources in 14 different languages.
- We have focused efforts on extending our reach for people belonging to the Global Majority, with 138 of our individual resources now available in Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Over 190,000 users have accessed our resources in these languages - this is a third of our user base. 33 of our resources are now available in additional languages spoken in the Global South such as Farsi, Pashto, Arabic, Urdu.
- Our resources that have reached most visitors are Soul Medicine (43,472 users) and our DIY online safety guide (17,653 users) as well as Chayn’s India, Pakistan and Italy platforms (250,000+ users)
- We also reached over 9000 downloads on our Lovie award-winning Podcast ‘Less than 2%’
Intensive support - our Bloom service
We created Bloom in 2020 as a response to the rise in domestic and intimate-partner violence sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, paired with the gaps in support for survivors that stemmed from many services closing at that time. Bloom provides free access to a range of supportive content co-created with survivors. There are 5 different courses to take, ranging from the most popular ‘Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships’ to the newest ‘Image based abuse and rebuilding ourselves’.
Bloom also offers 1:1 therapy sessions (for Bumble partner users), a 1:1 chat service run by our team of experts in GBV, an affirming Whatsapp service which sends messages of solidarity and hope twice weekly, and a broad range of grounding exercises and activities for survivors to try out in their own time. Take a look at the site: https://bloom.chayn.co/
Bloom’s impact in terms of Reach
- We had 8,575 users sign up for Bloom in 2023. This was a huge year for us and represents 93% of our overall Bloom sign ups.
- 3,343 videos were played across the year.
- Our most played course video was the introduction to ‘Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships’, followed by ‘What is sexual trauma?’ and ‘What are boundaries?’
- Over 500 survivors have accessed intensive and or sustained support from us since 2022. Intensive support means that they either had a therapy session (currently available to Bumble partner users) or a 1:1 chat session, watched 3 x course videos (or opened 3 x transcripts)
- Our team supported more than 400 users on 1-1 chat, and 175 people signed up for our Notes from Bloom Whatsapp service since it launched in March 2023.
Depth: Transformational Impact
Our Theory of Change
- The survivor recognises their trauma
- The survivor takes ownership of their healing
- The survivor plans for an empowered future
- The survivor ‘pays it forward’ - and becomes part of the fight against GBV
The impact we’ve had so far, focused on Depth
This data is focused on Bloom, our most in-depth support service. Bloom requires a sign in, and encourages users to visit us multiple times, so it’s more straightforward for us to contact our users and gather impact data for this service than it is for some of our others.
Has using Bloom impacted you personally?
- Yes in a positive way (70%)
- Not yet, but I think it could positive impact me (14%)
- Yes, in a negative way (2%)
- No, it hasn’t impacted me (9%)
- I’m not sure (4%)
Diving deeper
We know that Bloom is having a positive impact, but we’d like to know more about what this actually means to survivors, and address it in line with our Theory of Change.
What kind of impact has using Bloom had for you?
- Helped me to understand my trauma better (52%)
- Helped me take steps to support myself (60%)
- Helped me to feel that I can move forward with my life (39%)
“Help me take steps to support myself” was chosen by 60% of users, and came top. This makes sense, since we’ve recently added more tools to our Bloom platform which help survivors to support themselves in difficult moments. We did a significant piece of work to redesign our navigation and surface some of our more bitesize content such as grounding exercises and activities. Compared to watching educational videos, these activities can have a big impact. These are now much more visible and accessible to users, instead of being buried within course materials.
For example, we help users to find grounding exercises to manage anxiety, or diary activities which help them to spot patterns of negative thoughts.
Not far behind, “Helped me to understand my trauma” was selected by 52% of users, which indicates that our resources are proving educational for users. The course ‘Society, patriarchy and sexual trauma’ is a good example of a course that feels educational and gets users started on their journey with us. Within it, there are modules such as ‘Mythologies of the patriarchy’ and ‘The self and sexual violence’.
Survivors tend to choose “Helped me to feel I can move forward with my life” statement less, at 39%. That’s likely to reflect where survivors are in their healing journeys when they come to us - it might take quite a while, even with support, to feel that they’re able to move forward with their lives. In future, we could think about surfacing the support we have around this theme more clearly.
For example, we have Bloom resources focused on reclaiming resilience, building healthy relationships, and sex after assault - but they tend to be the sessions towards the end of the courses - so survivors are less likely to be seeing them.
Likelihood to recommend (NPS)
The fourth part of our Theory of Change focuses on the survivor ‘paying it forward’ - and becoming part of the fight against GBV. There are many ways that we could measure this, but we use an NPS-style question as a simple metric.
Now that you’ve used (X service), how likely are you to recommend that another person who has experienced abuse uses it?
Survivors score their likelihood to recommend that another survivor uses our services at an average of 8/10
The benefits and limitations of NPS as a metric
The benefits are that our funders like NPS; it is simple and well understood across sectors, and it gives us a high level indication of whether survivors feel that our resources are useful enough to warrant sharing.
It is also standardised, meaning that we can use it across our services and products fairly easily. Finally, given that most of our Chayn services don’t require users to sign up for accounts (and so, we can’t email them for feedback), we don’t have ways of collecting data on impact unless they are actually on our site. Factoring all of this in, using Hotjar to collect some feedback via NPS feels valuable, if flawed as a method - without it we may have no data at all.
The drawbacks are the clear links between NPS as a tool and marketing/sales and commercial research (NPS is mostly used by brands to understand whether consumers would be willing to promote them to friends). It’s not ideal in terms of tone for our sector - healing from trauma and buying products are very different experiences. There’s also the annoyance factor; lots of people don’t like pop ups, or to be asked whether they’d recommend a service that they haven’t had much chance to use yet. We have seen low response rates to our NPS surveys which likely reflects all of these issues, although the data that we do have is positive.
Finally it’s worth noting that we’re careful with the language in our NPS question. We don’t actually ask survivors how likely they would be personally to share our resources with friends or family. We know that they may not wish to actually do this, because they may not want anyone in their network to know that they’ve experienced abuse. That’s why we ask the question in more of a theoretical way - ‘How likely are you to recommend that another person who has experienced abuse uses X service’.
Let's hear it from survivors
Comments from across our services
The courses gave me the understanding and language, then the one on one chats gave space for a voice to emerge. They provided a feeling of safety via warmth and "withness", where I always felt welcomed, always felt like that space was open for me whenever I needed, without feeling like there were time restrictions or like I might be a burden to someone's time.
The teachers kept saying it's not your fault and that's very empowering. Also to have the class must mean a lot of people have gone through something so I feel less alone/ashamed.
I really thank Bloom for helping me learn a lot about trauma and how to transform my thinking from a very sad place, to going on a healing journey. It transformed how I thought about my experiences - I finally named trauma in my life (and hadn't done this before). It helped me see what is and isn't healthy - in regards to respect, compromise and feelings - and there are areas it helped me feel optimistic to be excited about finding something healthy, when I was really sad about what happened. I am learning about my needs, how to communicate them and how they can be respected in healthy relationships.
I signed up right away, I am a survivor of domestic violence. It felt like the mothership calling… like the service I wished I had 15 years ago
The courses helped. Especially because I couldn’t put words to what I was experiencing so the courses really helped me with navigating my experiences. Helped open up the ability to communicate about it. Earlier this I started therapy so Bloom helped me get to this stage.
The concept behind Bloom is fantastic and an unmet need. Free access to content tailored around understanding topics relevant to domestic abuse is critical for so many women who need support to understand what happened to them.
It's nice to see the diversity from all over the world. Makes us feel like one.
Looking ahead
We plan to stay focused on growing the reach and transformational impact that’s outlined in our strategy. Bloom, our flagship online service for survivors, saw many iterations in 2023. This year will be about making sure it is in the hands of even more survivors across even more of the world.
To do that, we’ll continue work on making it mobile-first, and we’ll be doing lots of outreach and comms work to ensure that people know what it is, and how to find it. We’ll be producing new content on digital safety including cyberstalking and online harassment, to reach more survivors of TGBV. Finally, we’ll be creating content on somatics and body work in order to further support survivors’ healing through more holistic approaches.
With Bloom steadily growing, we want to turn our attention to the many other products and services in the Chayn universe. Over the last 11 years we’ve built up a huge bank of resources and our website needs updating to make sure everything is listed there and is up to date. We’ll be doing some work to consider how we can help people in crisis to find the support they need even more quickly.
Movement building
Advocating for GBV on the global stage
One of Chayn’s goals in 2023 was to extend and deepen the type of support that we offer to the movement to end gender-based violence (GBV). By movement, we mean all of the organisations and individuals pulling together to challenge cultures, policies and practices that perpetuate harm against marginalised genders, spot and mitigate against abuse, and support survivors.
She’s also been consulting with tech firms and government bodies to advance the conversation around the harms of technology facilitated gender based violence (TGBV), and advocate for more survivor-centred policies to promote online safety. We’ve been developing a strategy around AI and you might have seen our blog on the dangers of artificial intimacy and deepfakes. We’ll be publishing more of our thoughts around this later this year.
We were mentioned in Reuters, the Economic Times, and our founder was profiled in Mashable’s “The women fighting to make women and girls safe in the digital age”. Hera also did a string of news interviews before going on maternity leave and coming back from it. You can see them on our Instagram.
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- Eva was invited to join a UN Expert Advisory Committee set up by the United Nations to develop a survivor-centric, and human rights-based guidance for advancing legislation to respond to Tech-facilitated Gender Based Violence
- Eva met with the UN Special Rapporteur on VAWG as part of her visit to the UK, as she held a roundtable meeting with human rights NGOs to discuss issues relevant to her mandate. Eva presented Chayn’s recommendations on AI and TGBV
- Eva engaged with Meta, who consulted us on their plan to implement end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger
- Eva was asked to facilitate a meeting between the UK Commissioner on Domestic Violence and the US US National Domestic Violence Hotline Information Exchange
- Chayn was invited to join a panel by World Justice Project México on Tech solutions to tackle GBV
- Eva spoke at the European Conference on Domestic Violence in Iceland to share our Orbits work
- Hera and Nadine co-authored a paper on our experience with chatbots and their limitations for the Social Innovations journal, organised by Ashoka.
- Hera spoke at the UNFPA Global Symposium on TGBV, No More Tech Abuse conference as well as the first summit on deepfake abuse.
Partnership Impact in numbers
In the last year we’ve developed, prototyped and implemented our Impact Measurement strategy - across our survivor facing and sector facing work. We have started to collect data that helps us to understand whether our partnership activities are useful to other organisations and individuals working in this space.
How we’re doing: We shared our expertise with over 780 people and 187 organisations over the last 2 years, with 51% of those being based in the Global South.
How we’re doing: We have positively supported over 72 individuals who have worked with us in some capacity over the past couple of years, and we estimate that they work for around 40 different organisations. One learning here is that we need to redraft a couple of our survey questions to ensure that we’re accurately collecting data about which organisations individuals are working in (vs just collecting info about their sector)
The impact we’ve measured so far
Likelihood to recommend (NPS)
Usefulness of partnership events/activities
Understanding specific impact
We ask people who attend our events or partnership activities:
- This event/programme felt relevant to my work (87%)
- This event/programme helped me to better understand the wider context of gender-based violence and/or tech (48%)
- It helped me feel able to cope with how my work impacts me (23%)
- I feel confident that I can apply the learnings of this event/programme in my own work (61%)
- I intend to share the materials, learnings and/or resources with my colleagues (75%)
- I have already been able to make use of recommendations or findings (23%)
Insights
A high proportion of people (87%) found joining our partnership events or activities relevant to their work. The fact that Chayn provides learning materials/resources in a way that’s very easy for individuals to share with their colleagues seems to be working, with 75% of people stating intent to do so. When it comes to applying learnings in their own work, we have 61% saying they feel confident that they can do this, and 23% saying that they’d already made use of recommendations or findings by the time feedback was collected, post event.
Almost half said that joining Chayn for partnership activities/events helped them to understand the wider context of GBV and/or tech, and just under a quarter felt that taking part had helped them feel able to cope with how their work affects them. The latter two are dependent on the type of training/partnership event that we’re offering, but show definite opportunities for supporting partners further.
Sharing our expertise in TGBV (Tech facilitated Gender Based Violence)
and we were asked to facilitate or speak on many sessions including the Global Symposium on TGBV organised by UNFPA, Deepfake summit by My Image My Choice, and a conference by No More. Eva was invited to take part in a Delphi Study organised by UCL to establish a consensus on how technology-facilitated abuse may be defined, conceptualised, and measured-based on the opinions and judgements of subject specialists.
Eva attended a closed-door roundtable on Technology and Family and Domestic Violence organised by researchers from Monash University at their campus in Prato, Italy. The Australian E-Safety commissioner was present on the day and was engaged with the points we made on TGBV.
The topic of deepfakes aligns strongly with our passion for online safety and supporting survivors to protect themselves against dangers of AI. It also coincided with the launch of our new Bloom course on Image-based abuse. Eva also spoke on a panel at Bumble during the launch event for this course to highlight the importance of free, well researched and easily available support for survivors of this type of online abuse.
Going forwards
- We plan to publish a guide for US University students on deep fakes and TGBV in collaboration with the producers and directors of Another Body.
- We’ll be campaigning about the role of AI in TGBV, using key recommendations from the Orbits report and advocating for more survivor led interventions.
- We’ll be working with influencers across South Asia to highlight the issues of TGBV and we’ll be designing a free workshop on TGBV and trauma-informed design for everyone who is working on this issue.
Collaborating with our volunteer network
Chayn started as a volunteer-run organisation and in 2020, when we transitioned to having paid staff as well - it was our goal to be a thriving employee-volunteer hybrid model. This worked well for the first two years as the first staff were also previous volunteers and they were accustomed to working in this way. As our staff team has increased and the staff members who used to be volunteers have moved on to other organisations, this has become harder and it’s something we’re reflecting on.
Sharing our expertise in Trauma-informed Design
We also published tips and guidance around applying the trauma-informed principles to user research through a series of five blogs, which have been read by over 1400 people so far. Read the blogs.
You can see an early version here: https://org.chayn.co/research
We also shared a number of blogs that are about how we run as an organisation which is part of our commitment to sharing openly:
- How Chayn runs its team retreats: A mix of self-guided and group sessions to encourage team collaboration and reflection
- Gratitude Robin: A yearly activity to deliver a bouquet of love to people you work with
- How we made an award-winning podcast as a small non-profit: Read about the wild journey that led to almost not making Less than 2 percent
Trauma Informed Design Workshops
In these workshops we share practical, tangible tips from our 10 years of survivor-led experience, as well as holding space for participants from many organisations to share what helps or hinders them from adopting these practices.
We held a free, 2 hour Trauma-Informed design workshop in June 2023 and another one in February 2024. 217 people attended the workshops and 212 watched the recording of the event afterwards. Our write up of some key questions asked in the session has been read hundreds of times. We made the workshop recording free to access for anyone - we encourage readers to use and share it.
Hera was such an inspirational, relatable, engaging presenter. I've been reading your blogs for a while and love the work you do. But it was so great to hear directly from Chayn's team - I think the work you do is really impressive. I also love the ethos of sharing the knowledge with others, for free no less! Amazing.
You are truly expert, professional and trusted to work with. Chayn collaborate with other organisations in a way that strengthens our ecosystem rather than creating competition or division.
It was relaxed, safe and informative. Fantastic, thank you
I really appreciated Hera's humility, transparency, and focus on learning. It helped to create a safe space for creativity and collaboration.
Thank you so much for such a robust free workshop on an important topic!
I really appreciated the mutual safety and sharing that the group had as well. I also really liked the explanation of Chayn and what you do, why you do it, and how you learn, grow and adapt your resources. Truly inspiring, thank you!
Thanks for integrating me as an outsider, it was great meeting the activists and support workers from around Europe!
Overall this was a fantastic workshop. I learned so much, and it helped me see accessibility (and design in general) in a new light
Launching Diya
In 2023, we delivered the pilot program for Bumble, focusing on supporting their member safety team through the vicarious trauma that arises as they field and respond to the thousands of reports of abuse that occur daily on the platform. Over the 6 month period, the partnership enabled us to deepen our own expertise in the topic of VT, and share the kinds of supportive policies and practices that can help employees to protect themselves from VT.
15 x attendees
4 x group training sessions
4 x collective care sessions
4 x managers clinics
A key insight that we developed through this pilot programme is that while our content can be centered around what we know from research and working with therapists, our suggestions around policies and practices need to be more bespoke (i.e. aligned with what the organisation can realistically do and is incentivised to do). The types of interventions around managing vicarious trauma that we suggest (and may be possible for us at Chayn or other non-profits) are not always relevant for other organisations such as corporates and tech organisations. In 2024, Diya will continue, and be improved with the support of a dedicated project manager for Bumble and specialist in vicarious trauma.
Sharing our strategy process openly
Last year, La Sobremasa - a civil society organisation working in Latin America, contacted us to share that they’d been directly inspired by our process of openly creating our 2022-2025 Chayn strategy. Read all about that story in this case study.
Looking ahead
Summer of 2025 marks the end of Chayns’ 2022-25 “lived in” strategy. In the run up to that, we’ll be using what we’ve learned in the last few years about how to measure and grow our impact and applying that.
- We’ll be building a resource hub to host open-source content. This will provide free access to our trauma-informed practices, as well as our Bloom content in new languages, for use by VAWG and migrant focused networks and organisations.
- We’ll update and formally launch our “org” website to allow partner organisations to better understand our role and activities, and link to our resources.
- We plan to invest in more network-building and outreach with migrant justice organisations in the UK to reach more survivors especially those from migrant and conflict backgrounds (in their languages). We’ll run workshops with VAWG organisations on supporting survivors online, to share our learnings, challenges, and trauma-informed approaches.
- We’ll continue sharing our thinking about trust and safety in the technology space to influence research, policy and design
- We’ll also host more Trauma Informed Design free workshops for the movement.
If you have any further feedback, questions or comments on this report, get in touch with [email protected]
