Histpres.com: 2012 Annual Report on Preservation Employment and Website Stats

Thank you for reading Histpres, thanks for reading it every month, or week, or day. Thank you for having us as your homepage. Thank you for sharing our awesome bloggers’ blogs. Thank you for saying you found a unique job or professional development opportunity on Histpres. Thank you for emailing us your questions, your hometown causes, and just to let us know about dead links.

We’re going to recap the year through website statistics for you, but want to highlight some really exciting moments, as well as needs for the new year.

Our Advocacy and Activism Success

With your support and contributions, we have been a part of several successful preservation initiavies including;

• Supporting the Moline Preservation Society’s campaign to relocate their last train depot in the face of demolition for a transportation project, with help from the Governor of Illinois, it will be saved!
• Bringing home an original art deco light fixture from a Toronto antique dealer to Central Terminal in Buffalo, which is making major strides for rehabilitation under new leadership!
• Helping crowdfund the recording of original music composed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s father, William Carey Wright!

We  also beat the drum in raising awareness and doing what we can to stop the demolition of Peavy Plaza in Minneapolis and the demolition of Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo. And there is still so much work to be done.

Research: The Gift that Keeps Giving

Our research culled from the website and from last year’s web survey continues to educate folks about the status of preservation jobs and education. In fact, Danielle Meunier at the Historic Savannah Foundation is using it in her presentations to SCAD and local high school students. Some stats were also used by Danielle Del Sol, Assistant Editor of Preservation in Print by the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans when she published her interview with us and introduced us to a smart new word: meliorist. A meliorist is one who believes that the world can be improved through human effort.

Support our Website Improvement Campaign

Can you believe it’s 2013!? Since the October 2011, website redesign, we’ve gotten pretty good at bringing you jobs, internships, professional development opportunities and weekly blogs. In fact, since then, we have published over 700 jobs and internships, and nearly 450 professional development opportunities, as well as over 60 awesome blogs authored by young preservationists across America. Our content is always improving. But over time a couple of features on the website have stopped working and we want to introduce new features that help you build your preservation career.

The goal is $645 dollars, because we plan to work with a WordPress development company that is so interested in what we do at Histpres, that they are discounting our rate. The more funds we can raise, the more features we can add for you. All funds raised will go directly into site improvements and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.

• 199,737 total visits
• 77,927 unique visitors
• 483,945 page views

Return vs. New Visitors

• 62.45% return
• 37.55% new visitors

• 1,191 Facebook friends
• 521 Twitter followers

Number of Posts

• 532 jobs
• 99 internships
• 390 other opportunities
• 65 blogs

Most Commonly Posted Job Category

• Museum Collections Management
• Architectural History/Historical Research
• Urban Planning
• Cultural Resources Management
• Education/Interpretation
• Preservation Trades/Historic Site Maintenance

Detailed Visitor Information

Vistors by City

• New York City
• Philadelphia
• Chicago
• Boston
• Charleston
• Denver
• Arlington
• Austin
• Savannah

Visitors by State

• New York
• Pennsylvania
• Virginia
• Massachusetts
• California
• Georgia
• Illinois
• North Carolina
• District of Columbia
• Texas

Visitors by Country

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• India
• Germany
• Spain
• Italy
• Australia
• Philippines

Most Popular Blogs 

Keep in Touch

Moving into the new year, please make sure you are seeing our posts on Facebook. Shoulda known that was coming, sorry. Here’s the easy way to do it: Like us, hover over Liked and check Show in News Feed and Get Notifications, and then consider making a Interest List with all of your favorite preservation pages, like Preservation Generation, Preservation Action and Sustainable Preservation Initiative, etc. You can also sign up for our daily email and follow us on Twitter.

On a Personal Note

Lastly and personally, we have had a very busy year. Laura is now an Archeologist with the National Park Service at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas. Meagan moved to Washington, DC and is working with Preservation Action to bring you Advocacy Week coming up in February. Fully fund the HPF now! So if you’re in Texas or Washington, we’d love to meet up.

Happy new year! Please contribute to our fundraiser! Thank you!