Samaritans
Things on your mind?

Facts and figures

All information taken from the Information Resource Pack 2007.

PDF documentDownload the Information Resource Pack 2008  

Numbers of Contacts

In 2007 Samaritans received almost 5,319,462 contacts, by phone, email, letter, face-to-face at a branch, through our work in prisons, and at local and national festivals and other events.

48% of these contacts (mostly by phone) were ‘snap’ or silent contacts; this was over 2,500,000 contacts.

Means of Contact

  • 90% of calls were made by phone – this was the most common method of contact.
  • 137,627 contacts by email – a growth of some 24% between 2004 and 2005.
  • 39,336 face-to-face contacts in branches.


Dialogue Contacts against Number of Active Volunteers 1984 to 2007

Dialogue contacts against number of Samaritans volunteers 1992 - 2007
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Who Contacts

Samaritans receives more contacts from men (49%) than from women (45%). 6% were unidentifiable.

Suicidal Contacts

In 21% (571490) of contacts to Samaritans, the caller expressed suicidal feelings at the time of the call.

More statistics about suicide

Samaritan Volunteers

There were a total of 16534 volunteers (active and inactive) in 2007. The majority of active volunteers are women - 61%.

Almost 3,559 people were newly recruited and trained as Samaritans volunteers in 2007

More statistics about Samaritans

 


Nature of all dialogue contacts 2007

Samaritans dialogue contacts in 2007
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Samaritan's Service

Last year our active volunteers gave 2,058,744 hours of their time to provide confidential emotional support.

This amounts to an average of over 20 working days a year per active volunteer.

The cost to Samaritans

If our volunteers were paid at an average wage of £11.34 per hour, the cost to Samaritans would be £23.3m per year.