Students for Life of America has decided to honor me and nine other pro-life Millennial leaders with a Defender of Life award at their conferences this month.

This means a lot to me, as I see Students for Life as being one of the most effective pro-life organizations in the country. To be on the same list as so many other young leaders who are making a huge impact is also humbling.

But mainly, this is really encouraging to me because it tells me that we are helping people. We started ERI to create more opportunities to help pro-lifers learn to be more gracious and persuasive, and I’m really thankful for the success with which God has blessed us. Thank you so much for faithfully supporting us and making this mission possible.

I created this list using the Google Analytics for the ERI blog, instead of complicating the process by incorporating stats from LifeNews.com, where many of our articles are later republished.

Our blog received 79,000 unique pageviews from more than 43,000 unique people this year. That’s a 140% increase in readers from last year.

After running our first reader survey this year, we decided to post more consistently, maintain a calm, respectful, yet uncompromising tone, keep things practical, and keep using stories to model the kinds of dialogues we want people to have. I think we accomplished all of those goals, and we saw great growth to our blog this year.

On to the list!

#5: Avoiding an Embarrassingly Common Pro-Life Mistake

Our mission is to train pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively. We want to help the pro-life movement to make the kinds of arguments that are compelling to pro-choice people. We also want to help pro-life people to avoid common pitfalls, and this post is an example of that.

It was interesting to see some people respond to this piece by claiming that pro-lifers don’t make this mistake while at the same time reading comments from readers saying that they’ve been making this mistake for years and had no idea they were committing a logical fallacy.

It’s been an incredible year at Equal Rights Institute.

In our first full year as an organization we gave 24 speeches in Iowa, San Francisco, Ohio, San Marcos, Oregon, Fresno, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, Visalia, Washington, DC and Canada! Thanks to some great logistical planning from Jacob Nels, we also did five half-day or full-day seminars in Bakersfield, Michigan, Oregon, and Virginia. All in all we trained approximately 6,500 people!

We also continually train pro-life advocates to be more gracious and persuasive through our blog. I’m extremely proud of the quality of the content we’ve produced this year, especially the work Tim Brahm has done. By the time we wrote this letter, we had 40 original articles on our blog from this year! And the reach is far and wide. 37,718 people visited our blog in the year 2015 to date. Most of these people are from America, although we had a significant number of visits from Russia, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom as well.