Michael Denson: "Walking the last mile with death row inmates, Michael Denson lives in a state where 87 percent of the residents support the death penalty." So begins Michelle Bearden's remarkable portrait of Denson at the uscatholic.org Web site. The Frisco, Texas, rancher founded the Catholic Death Row Ministry two decades ago, and today he finds himself spending less time with his cattle and more hours with inmates at maximum-security prisons. He told Bearden, "The general attitude is 'Let's kill them, and let's kill them as quick as we can.' I don't judge others for holding that opinion, but it doesn't work for me." Bearden reports that Denson's mother frequently wrote letters to inmates who needed pen pals. When he was 8, he asked his mother to write a letter -- on his behalf -- to convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who killed two men in Utah and who was later executed. "Then the FBI called my mom and told her that her young son wrote this letter to Gilmore, saying he wanted the inmate to meet his dad when he went to heaven," Denson said. "My dad died when I was 5, and since it seemed certain that this man was going to die, too, I was hoping he'd look for my dad." In addition to the visits, Denson writes his own letters to prisoners and has witnessed four executions at the request of inmates or family members, according to Bearden. He is often asked how he would feel if someone murdered his child. "I would pray that God would give me the grace to forgive," Denson told Bearden. "No matter what, I still believe that only he has the right to take a life." U.S. Catholic: Walking the last mile with death row inmates
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisitedhttp: //econsultancy.com/blog
Posted 29 January 2010 10:07am by Jake Hird with 15 comments
It’s around six months since I last threw out some truly mindboggling pieces of data surrounding social media. So, what’s happened between then and now?
I try to put as much information as I can into Econsultancy’s Social Media Statistics, which is part of our Stats Compendium (a truly awesome resource) but I find it’s always interesting to go back and review the old against the new.
So, I’ve collected as much as I can from my previous insane snippets of data and benchmarked it against the here and now, alongside rooting out some new stuff for you to mull over.
If six months ago, it wasn’t a compelling case to consider social media in the marketing mix, then this hopefully might change your mind...
- Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
- LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
- Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
- Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
- More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
- Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
- Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
- There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
- Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
- Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
- There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
- Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
- The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
- More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
- Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
- 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.
- At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
- India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
- More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
- 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
- 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
- More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt. As before, no single piece of information can be used to base an online strategy upon, or be used as a forecast as to the direction a specific social media channel may take in the future - you need to fully understand your marketing and business objectives before launching off into this apparently vast space.
[Image source: thekeithhall, via Flickr. Various rights reserved]Learn more...
For more kick-ass statistics, check out Econsultancy's Social Media Statistics Compendium. If you want to build a business case for social media, we've got that too, along with RFP guidelines to help you deal with outsourcing. There's also some top-notch data in our recent Social Media and Online PR Report and we also run our renowned Online PR & Social Media and Online Reputation Management training courses on a regular basis to help you get to grips with this complex channel.
via ow.ly
Get their compendium if you are a social media addict.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Downtown Teens Need your $$$ help blog letter
Dear Friends and Supporters of the Downtown Teens,
I have hesitated to send this email asking for funds for 2010, in light of the crisis in Haiti. I am sure you are all doing as much as you can to help the people of Haiti. However, we (Teka and I) are revving up the Downtown Teens for 2010 and plan to accomplish as much, if not more as previous years. To do so, we will need your help. As you can see from the report and addendum below, we had a great year in 2009—thanks mainly to a single, one-time gift of $10,000.
We are currently planning and budgeting for 2010. Please consider giving a one-time financial gift now or a monthly gift for 2010 so that we can make decisions for the coming year. Currently, Downtown Teens does not have 501c3 tax exempt status, however any checks received prior to January 31, 2010 can be credited to last year and you can receive a tax letter from PIDC. Due to my disgust with the “too big to fail” Bank bail-out, we closed our business account at Bank of America and have temporarily moved the Downtown Teens funds to a separate, but personal account at Saint Louis Community Credit Union, who do not have provision for business accounts. Thus, checks need to be made to either Teka or me. Soon, we will open a new business account for the Teens in a local, community bank or credit union that offers business accounts, once we have received our charter and tax exempt status. Then we will be able to issue tax letters for any donations after January 31, from the Downtown Teens.
Here is the summary from the past 4 years:
Stats are compiled for the 4 years of the program, beginning in 2006 to the end of 2009. Most values are rounded to the nearest $100.
|
|
FY 2006 42 Weeks |
FY 2007 42 Weeks |
FY 2008 42 Weeks |
FY 2009 42 Weeks |
|
PIDC jobs |
$ 10,800.00 |
$ 9,400.00 |
$ 15,600.00 |
$ 4,700.00 |
|
Other jobs |
$ 11,700.00 |
$ 16,500.00 |
$ 13,200.00 |
$ 29,000.00 |
|
Total $ |
$ 22,500.00 |
$ 25,900.00 |
$ 29,800.00 |
$ 33,700.00 |
| Payroll | 11,250.00 | 12,600.00 | 14,800.00 | 15,400.00 |
|
Avg # of weekly (P)articipants |
10 |
9 |
8 |
8 |
|
Avg pay/P |
$ 1125.00 |
$ 1400.00 |
$ 1850.00 |
$ 1925.00 |
|
Total Adult Mentor hours |
710 |
720 |
690 |
700 |
|
Tools and Equipment |
$1,400.00
|
$600.00
|
$800.00
|
$300.00
|
|
Customer Invoices |
$ 10,600.00 |
$ 11,100.00 |
$ 12,200.00 |
$ 16,200.00 |
|
% of total |
47% |
43% |
41% |
48% |
| Write-off Bad debt |
|
|
| 4700.00 |
|
Donors |
$ |
$ 3,100.00 |
$ 4,000.00 |
$ 10,000.00 |
|
Mike/Teka Subsidy/ Donation |
$ 13,300.00 |
$ 12,300.00 |
$ 14,400.00 |
$ 12,500.00 |
Addendum to the Downtown Teen report:
2009 was a different year for the Teens. The slow economy led to several of our former teen graduates to being unemployed and not in school full-time. Coupled with a health issue I encountered in late 2008, I decided to offer temporary jobs to 4 of our graduates at $10.71/hour- $12.75/hour, less taxes. These graduates of our program ranged in age from 19-27. They were a big help on the jobs by both modeling proper behavior and skills, as well as providing some additional strength where I was lacking due to my health, which by the way is back to pre-heart attack condition! They were able to give some direction to the younger teens on the job and during our shared meals at the end of each day.
Of those four graduates, three found jobs during the course of the year as of 11/30/09. In addition, the fourth, Walter, just informed me today that he will be starting work at Dierbergs.
Since these employees were not part of the “educational” component of the Downtown Teens, they did not qualify for tax-free stipends. Instead, we paid them a living wage This tremendously added to the expenses of this year but seemed worth it.
Four of them worked for twelve hours a week for 8 weeks, three of them worked for 19 weeks, two of them worked for 27 weeks and one of them worked for 32 weeks—in exchange for rent and utilities.
I primarily employed them initially on PIDC projects—which never got reimbursed by PIDC after Teka and I left the Board, for a loss of $10,000 and on Little House Projects, which we paid out-of-pocket.
The total payroll and/or other payments:
$3072 weeks 1-8
$3168 weeks 9-19
$1536 weeks 20-27
$480 weeks 28-32
$8256 weeks 1-32
I have no idea how other graduates will fare into the coming year of 2010 or whether we will be able to manage to employ any of our graduates in 2010 with the extra burden of expense and bookkeeping. We will wait and see.
Please send donations by Mail: 1538-A N. 17th Street, Saint Louis, MO 63106. Paypal: mbroute66@charter.net
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
