Supporting the LGBTQIA+ community with Switchboard
By Dulcie Vousden, Head of Data Science, and Nicole Holgate, Communications Manager at DataKind UK
A wordcloud showing frequently discussed topics with Switchboard
Behind Switchboard's topic tags are thousands of real conversations that represent the concerns of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Meet Switchboard
Switchboard is the national service dedicated to providing free, confidential support to the UK LGBTQIA+ community and allies through chat, email, and the phone. In 2025, their team of volunteers had more than 17,000 conversations with individuals on topics ranging from relationships and sexuality, to mental health and gender identity.
Listening and learning
Each year, Switchboard’s ‘Listen Up!’ report provides key insights into issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community, based on the anonymous data they collect through their service. This year, DataKind UK supported Switchboard to analyse their conversation report data and identify key issues affecting the LGBTQIA+ community they serve.
Deepening understanding
All of Switchboard’s conversation records are anonymous, but get tagged using a main list of issue categories, and useful details that these categories don’t cover are captured as free text notes by each volunteer. We analysed this data to identify the most frequent words and phrases that appeared across these written summaries.
A word cloud showing the top 50 two-word phrases that appear in conversations summaries written by volunteers - some of the most common phrases are ‘mental health’, ‘sexual health’, and ‘gender identity’.
The Switchboard team talks to people about a huge range of issues, such as relationship challenges (30% of all conversations), queries about gender identity or sexuality (each 23% of conversations), or concerns around mental health (19% of conversations).
Mental health was frequently the main tag and a widespread concern, but the free text notes for these conversations showed more nuanced topics that they also often covered under this main category, such as “seeking asylum”.
This extra detail in the free text indicates that Switchboard is supporting a group of callers hidden beneath the tagged data: asylum seekers reaching out for support. This is an unexpected but important piece of context for their support volunteers and future service provision.
We also dug into the conversation records to understand how specific political moments in the UK impacted demand for Switchboard’s services. The most striking finding was the impact of a UK Supreme Court ruling in spring 2025.
On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to “biological sex assigned at birth”. The following day, Switchboard handled over three times more calls than on an average day. This increase was driven by people calling to discuss trans-, homo-, and bi-phobia, gender identity, and discrimination.
This immediate spike in calls shows the huge impact that external influences can have on third sector services, and just how directly that hit Switchboard's phone lines and inboxes.
Building future support
Behind Switchboard's topic tags are thousands of real conversations, and this project showed what those conversations reveal when you look closely. Being able to point to that data, rather than describing the impact anecdotally, gives Switchboard something concrete to bring to funders, partners, and its own team. It demonstrates how useful more nuance and depth of understanding is for their support services, and that discovering this is achievable for them.
This is exactly the kind of work DataKind UK exists to do: helping third sector organisations get more out of the data they already collect, so they can make a stronger case for the support their communities need.
