Here we are at Giving Tuesday! We’re sure you are inundated with messages like this today, and perhaps every day.
But we sure would appreciate any contribution you might make to help us continue our work here at the American Business History Center.
Each week, we publish a newsletter, ranging from biographies to company histories to animated charts about business and economic history. We gave out $7,500 in prizes for our high school essay contest and have published the winners in the newsletter and on the website. Within the next several days, our first book, Bedtime Business Stories, will be available on Amazon. Gary Hoover will soon introduce a zoom course on American business history, the first course on the subject available online. We continue to get more attention from podcasters and the History Channel. We plan to continue to add products and services in our efforts to get people enthused about learning from history.
We’ve been very pleased with our results so far. The number of newsletter subscribers is up 55% since the beginning of 2021. The website has generated 220,000 page views by 130,000 users since our inception two-and-a-half years ago. Year-to-date page views as of yesterday are up 370% from the same period in 2020. Our stories continue to rise in Google organic search. In other words, we are reaching more people, who are at last learning the many lessons and ideas found in our deep business history.
To accomplish this great start, we have kept our head down and our nose to the grindstone, creating fresh content. At the outset, we decided that great content was the most important thing, that people would discover us if we wrote interesting stories. So we have also purposely not focused our efforts on fundraising, as so many other 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profits do.
At the same time, we could use more funding. In our initial plan, we said that Gary Hoover would be paid up to $30,000 per year for his work, up to about 40% of whatever funds we raise. As it turns out, we’ve paid him less than that in total over the 30 months since we began. We also have other expenses, such as books for our research and email and other online services. And we would love to start traveling, both for research and perhaps to speak with donors.
Any donation you make, whether a monthly commitment or a one-time donation of any size, would make a big difference in our lives and our ability to keep growing the American Business History Center.
Just click here to donate to the cause!
If you have any questions or issues with the website, please let us know by replying to this email.
Thank you!
American Business History Center Team
