Project Report
| Sep 26, 2016
Berzin Archives Report: June through September 2016
By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author and Executive Director of Berzin Archives
![Consulting with the Dalai Lama]()
Consulting with the Dalai Lama
In the few months since the new, updated version of our website, studybuddhism.com, has been online, we have already seen signs of success. The average number of articles read by our users and length of time of their sessions have both increased. Usage of the site through mobile devices has increased now to over 50%, with significant growth in third-world countries. Having expanded the information architecture of the site with additional sections, we are currently in the process of migrating the rest of the English material from the archive section to the main section, to be followed by the same procedure for the current five foreign language sections.
In addition, we have:
- prepared a new active homepage in order to keep users’ interest and increase retention
- produced 28 question and answer videos with various Buddhist teachers in order to start our media campaign
- prepared six interviews with these Buddhist teachers in order to attract new audiences
- established connections with external websites in Brazil and Russia in order to increase the website’s search visibility
- began the process of adding our next four language sections: French, Italian, Turkish and Vietnamese
- started to design our first online educational course
- specified further features for development, such as the glossary.
On September 16, during an informal meeting with the Dalai Lama in Strasbourg, France, I informed him of the progress of the project. The Dalai Lama replied that we are making a great contribution and offered further advice concerning future development.
With your continuing support, we will be able to implement his suggestions and thus make the ageless wisdom of Tibet available to all.
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Jun 30, 2016
Expansion of the Berzin Archives Goals
By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author & Executive Director of Berzin Archives
![Website development team]()
Website development team
With the initial version of our new, updated website, http://studybuddhism.com, now online, we are busy expanding the project even further. This requires sustaining the salaries of our five-member core team, maintaining our office and servers, and commissioning new articles and translations. To produce more multimedia content so we can keep our material up to date and expand our user base, we need to travel for filming interviews with prominent Buddhist teachers. To help meet these growing expenses, we have therefore raised our cumulative fundraising goal here on Global Giving to $300,000.
If you would like to see how we have been spending the donations that we have been receiving from you, as well as from other kind supporters directly via our website and from several foundation grants, please take a look at our detailed budget report for the first half of 2016. As you can see, our total income for the six-months was $340,777 and our expenditures were $276,729. As our projected expenses for the second half of 2016 are $282,480, we hope that you will continue to support our efforts to “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”
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Jun 6, 2016
Berzin Archives Trimonthly Report: March through May 2016
By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author & Executive Director of Berzin Archives
![Website development team & projects]()
Website development team & projects
On May 13, 2016, we soft-launched the new, updated version of our website in a reworked content structure. We changed our domain name to studybuddhism.com in order to develop better Google rankings to make our materials accessible to a wider audience, while maintaining the old website, renamed studybuddhism.com/web. The renaming process included a change of DNS provider and server hosting. The website is now fully open for indexing by Google. As a start, the new website contains 630 articles and 470 audios in English and 230 articles in each of its initial five foreign language sections – Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian and Indonesian.
In addition, we have:
- Implemented a redirect strategy to move traffic and materials from the previous version of the website (berzinarchives.com) to the new website
- Implemented basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recommendations in order to pass the Google requirements to be recognized as a new domain
- Developed a content strategy for multiple internet channels (Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitter) in order to deliver our content to a wider audience around the world
- Developed and approved an animation video in order to attract users from Youtube and Facebook
- Filmed three interviews with renowned teachers in order to fill in content gaps and develop media rich content.
This is only the beginning of this next phase of our project. With your continuing support, we will continue to adapt to the ever-changing internet landscape so as to make available to the world the wisdom of Tibet.
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All eligible donations will help this project receive a larger portion of this campaign's $750,000 incentive fund
as part of
the
2024 GivingTuesday campaign!
until December 3, 2024, at 23:59:59 EST
