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.

Our website just got a huge redesign! Beyond incorporating a more contemporary look, here are a few of the main changes you may notice:

New Logo

We finally have a real logo! When we launched ERI I created a basic website and logo so that we could focus on more urgent tasks like developing our training materials. We knew they wouldn’t be permanent. Any good businessman knows the importance of clearly communicating who you are to your audience. Figuring out how to connect to current college students about abortion is one of our greatest strengths, so it’s important for us to communicate with our branding that we are forward-thinking.

Our new branding will also help us show that we’re a pro-life training organization worthy of speaking at a national level. It will establish trust with potential donors who want to see that we’re professionals who aren’t going anywhere, and who can accomplish our goals.

Expanded Staff Page

Our staff page not only features our office staff, but also our Board of Directors and our Board of Advisors now. 

We at Equal Rights Institute hardly ever talk publicly about the topic of abortion images. This isn’t because we don’t have opinions; it’s because there is almost no other topic that is as effective at dividing well-intentioned pro-life advocates. But saying nothing at all can also create division of a different sort. I’ll give an analogy.

I’m not Catholic, so discussing Catholic theology with my Catholic friends is risky. When I lived in Wichita, I became good friends with three Catholics named Rebecca, Catherine, and Anthony, and we talked about theology a great deal. We argued, wrestled, and disagreed, but we became closer friends as a result, and I think we all benefited from those conversations.

I’m also not a Calvinist. Some people say “it’s not worth Christians dividing over questions about free will and predestination.” I agree that it’s not worth dividing, but it is worth discussing, and I’m much closer with my Calvinist friends like Jacob and Brit because we can talk about controversial issues in a respectful way. But if after having one of those conversations, we couldn’t pray together because we were upset with each other, something seriously wrong happened.

My hope is that this post will bring us into closer fellowship with our pro-life friends. I will be very sad indeed if this post means there are fewer people I can pray with. I hope the discussions that follow from this post will be charitable. I hope people from both sides of the debate will be charitable to each other, and part of charity is taking people at their word, and not making assumptions about what their “real” motivation is.[Tweet that]

UPDATE: This is the post we wrote announcing the Equipped for Life Course. That course came out in August of 2016. You can learn more about it and purchase the course for you or your group at https://EquippedCourse.com.

There’s a need.

Right now there are approximately 900 pro-life clubs on high-school and college campuses across the country. One of our partners, Students for Life of America, has done a fantastic job starting these clubs and providing them with coaching and logistical support they need to be effective. This is where the mission of ERI comes in to help students make their groups even more effective, by partnering with SFLA, we are training their club members to have productive conversations with the pro-choice students on their campuses.

Here’s the problem.

No pro-life organization can physically go to every club and train them in person. Several pro-life groups are going to one or two dozen a year. Those that get to more don’t typically spend much time training the pro-life students from that university. But it’s those students who have the best opportunity to change hearts and minds on their campus, because they are the ones who will have the most long-term exposure to local pro-choice students.

There are hundreds of campuses with pro-life clubs where no pro-life apologists go, but there are students there who are killing their babies every month. The pro-life students are there and are organized, but they desperately need to be equipped to create the kinds of dialogues where people actually change their minds. Who’s going to train them?

We have a solution.

We’re creating a comprehensive online training course that any pro-life club can take together. Our course will be designed for pro-life college clubs, but will be available to any person or group who wants to take it. When a club registers for the course, they will get a login to a website that will feature more than a dozen primary training modules, broken down into smaller units. The club will watch short videos together of an ERI staff member explaining a topic. They will also have access to optional bonus videos of us roleplaying these ideas, for those students who learn better by watching people demonstrate in real-time the concepts they just learned. Then the club leader will pass out training handouts she printed before the meeting so that everybody else can put the idea into practice, and eventually use it without the handouts!

If you’re like me, you need to hear concepts explained multiple times to really digest it. This makes our live seminars challenging for people who learn that way, because they can’t go back and listen to the seminar over and over again. We are designing this course so that it’s helpful to different types of learners. For example, we’ll help audible learners by making all of this material available as MP3 downloads, so they can listen to the course as many times as they want.

Our vision is for every pro-life college student in the world to have access to a course that trains them in the art of gracious, persuasive conversations.

We’re the right people to create this course.

“Josh Brahm is a great ambassador for the pro-life movement, and we’re excited to work with Equal Rights Institute on campuses nationwide to help train the next generation of pro-life activists. It’s not only their arguments that are effective, but also the innovative and creative ways they present them.”

Kristan Hawkins, President, Students for Life of America