Giants of the Earth Heritage Center has just been notified that it has been rewarded two giant grants.
The first grant is a pledge to match the first $25,000 given by donors to Giants Heritage by Feb 14, 2011, to fund heritage programming (more info later).
The second grant, from Google, is designed to help promote our website and our mission of resurrecting multigenerational consciousness for purposes of promoting good community stewardship. The grant provides $330/day in free advertising for our website for an unlimited time. That translates into $10,000/month; $120,000 per year; or $1.2 million over the next ten years. This will be a lot of Google Adwords advertising. So far, every dollar we have spent has drawn two new people to our website. We currently average $1 per day in Adwords advertising, and we have grown tremendously using that, It is hard to comprehend how fast we can grow if we increase our advertising by 330 fold. We already have over 1,000 people a day looking at our online Giants of the Earth Heritage Center web and Facebook pages. Using this grant money, we plan on unleashing a ceaseless hailstorm of online advertising, beginning near the end of January that should draw 660 NEW people per day to our online pages, or over 240,000 new people per year in addition to the number of visitors that the site would have without advertising. Considering that these people will also talk to their friends and families, Giants of the Earth Heritage Center’s website popularity is likely to grow even faster.
With this kind of advertising we can really mobilize a critical mass of people to accomplish our mission of preserving, interpreting, and passing down every family’s unique heritage. By getting more people and families to reflect on the heritage they pass on to generations, we hope to empower people to live their lives with greater purpose, decency, creativity, and “seventh-generational” thinking.
We hope to accomplish these goals without overtaxing people or businesses. Because many hands make light work, we want to encourage as many people as possible to participate, in whatever way they can, by rewarding our supporters at least two fold every time they support our mission in some measurable way. Further, we can reach out to other non profit historical societies and help them to accomplish our common mission by working together. As our Giants of the Earth Heritage Center database grows, so too will our ability to provide complete genealogical and genetic genealogy services. People have been talking for years about preserving video stories of our seniors before they pass away, but they never figured out how to do it efficiently and retain a personal, hometown, touch. Giants is moving quickly to provide both oral history services and a family friendly database to view these in.
When it comes to passing down heritage, we don’t want to just preach to the choir. We hope to excite people who haven’t in the past been all that interested in genealogy, for whatever reasons. Because genealogy empowers a people with a greater sense of purpose, we want to provide at least some of our services for free to young people who are making big decisions. Young families, and particularly most of our youth, who are perhaps in the most need of a personal history, won’t have access to their grandparents and great grandparents stories unless we preserve them now. We can preserve and pass down the wisdom and experiences of grandparents for generations to come. When a community promotes wisdom, good judgment, and virtue it can be truly said that a rising tide lifts all boats.
We will provide meaningful services to members and publicly honor our supporters
Hopefully, Giants can introduce a new word into the vocabulary of all nonprofits: incentivization. Many people have heard of the “tragedy of the commons”, which basically illustrates that systems which don’t reward people or groups for existential/ontological stewardship, but rely on guilt to induce such stewardship, will fail. Guilting people into community stewardship may work in the short run, but such stewardship is rarely sustainable, because people see egotistic free riders enjoying the fruits of their altruistic volunteer labor and they become resentful. Although they might feel entitled to such resentment, it is in practice rarely productive. Hopefully, we can avoid all that kind of negativity from the outset, if possible, and this grant (together with another large programming-related grant which will be announced soon), makes it possible for us to reward our volunteers and supporters and leave freeriders and “naysayers” realizing it is time to rethink their modus operandi. By providing meaningful services to our members and honoring our individual, family, and business supporters we will ensure our continued success. As they say, nothing succeeds like success.
We want to reward people and businesses for doing the right thing and thinking about the greater good. Spring Grove is already talked about in “high places” (that is currently classified, but will be announced soon), and we can now really put Spring Grove on the map by being leaders in genetic ancestry. We can start to thank our volunteeers, our members, and our business supporters on the grand scale they deserve for their vision, their generosity, and their committment by recognizing them on the website. Also, our website’s great popularity will encourage people to use our eBay Giving Works application, which is on our site, because by donating as little as 10% of their eBay proceeds to Giants, they will receive unprecedented exposure that will help them sell their products. Further, for those items that have historical value, our site will help eBay sellers document each item’s individual connection with history by linking it into with the people who used it our genealogical database. Thus, our site will greatly increase the item’s value by documenting its authenticity and identifying others who may have an historical interest in collecting that item.
Please join Giants today. We intend to honor, serve, and reward our members, volunteers, and supporters, who, as good and faithful servants, deserve to be listed among the Giants of the Earth.
