I am sad to announce the resignation of Rachel Crawford as Director of Training, which becomes effective on July 24th, 2020. Rachel would like to thank all of our followers who support our work and have helped to bring our message to pro-life individuals who benefit from our content. She is excited to see what God has planned for her next!

Rachel had big shoes to fill when she stepped into Timothy Brahm’s position as Director of Training. Looking back at her work in the last year, it is clear to me that she not only filled those shoes well, she far exceeded my expectations. I think the best compliment a manager can give to a resigning employee is, “I would hire you again in a heartbeat.” And I can definitely say that about Rachel. She did great work, and she is always welcome back.

This week marked the six-year anniversary of the launch of Equal Rights Institute!

I failed to make a five-year anniversary post happen last year because it was right around the time of Tim’s transition out of ministry, and there was just too much going on. My apologies! If you want to know our main accomplishments during that time, this PDF covers our main accomplishments of 2018 and this post covers 2019.

I’ve already updated our GuideStar profile this year, earning their platinum rating for the second year in a row, the highest rating a non-profit can attain by being transparent about our goals and metrics.

In the last year we spoke to 2,459 people in 31 speeches and two all-day seminars, representing a 69% decrease in how many people we spoke to in the last year. That’s a big decrease and even surprised me when I saw the numbers, so reviewing the data from the last few years, here are the main factors that I think contributed to that:

1. COVID-19 has had a negative effect on our speaking. Several talks were canceled because of that.
2. When we lost Tim last year, we went from having three speakers to only two. We got a ton of speaking done last spring when Tim and I were both available to speak in different parts of the country simultaneously.
3. Our average audience size spread across the year is roughly the same in the last two years, so it’s not that we’re speaking to smaller audiences. It’s almost entirely that we’re doing fewer speeches and trips than we did before. Our staff agreed last year that I should do fewer speaking trips to help us focus on finishing some of our big projects like the advanced module to the Equipped for Life Course, the Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass, and the Equipped for Life Podcast relaunch. In the last year, I did eight out-of-town speaking trips, while in the previous year I did 10 and Tim four on top of that. So our out-of-town speaking was cut roughly in half, and that’s a combination of losing Tim and me accepting fewer gigs.
4. One of our talks in 2018 skew the numbers a bit because it happened at a megachurch.

We also published 19 new articles to our blog which were read by 40,344 people, a 10% decrease from last year, but that’s just because we published five fewer articles this year than we did last year.

In the last year we relaunched the Equipped for Life Podcast, which used to be for Equipped for Life Course members only. This was a huge project, and we ultimately republished 38 previously recorded episodes that are now edited for the public podcast feed, knowing that some listeners won’t already have access to the Equipped for Life Course. Once we’d finished that project in March of this year, we could focus on creating new episodes. We’ve published eight new episodes of that podcast in the last three months. In the last year we also posted five new speech audios and discussions to the separate ERI Podcast Feed. You can subscribe to both podcasts here.

We also have turned a lot more attention to creating videos for our YouTube channel. We’ve published 41 videos in the last year, not counting podcast episodes which we also publish to our YouTube channel now. Those videos have 21,442 views cumulatively.

Here are a few of my favorite memories from the last year:

Download Audio MP3 | 00:23:33

Josh Brahm took a walk along the cliffs of Ireland to share with you what the ERI staff are up to lately. We’ve intercut the footage with a lot of beautiful pictures and videos Josh took around Ireland.

I found the top 5 articles by checking 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. (We didn’t do this annual post last year because we had lost two months of analytics due to a technical issue we were unaware of at the time, so we had no way to accurately rank all of the pieces. Luckily that issue is fixed!)

Our blog received 96,622 unique pageviews from more than 44,402 unique people this year.

On to the list!

The Five Most Read New Articles This Year:

#5: How to Help People Talk Themselves Out of Abortion

This is one of the most surprising things I learned from Jacob Nels about sidewalk counseling while we were creating the content for the Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass. It’s also incredibly encouraging for people who are worried about saying the wrong thing.