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First and foremost, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all those who answered our call and donated to the project and helped disseminate the Campaign. YOUR SUPPORT IS TRULY APPRECIATED. Thank you letters and gifts will be mailed shortly.

Our” Half-Shekel” campaign was launched on September 1st 2015 and lasted for four months. The Temple Mount Sifting Project is all about involving the community, and this campaign was the first time we invited the public to partake in helping fund the project. We chose the crowd funding approach, even though we didn’t know what to expect. This kind of platform, when used by non-profit organizations, is often used to help fund and promote social, medical or political causes, and usually not used for scientific research, let alone for archaeological research although many people find interest and value in it, they still prefer to donate to other causes.

We produced a video with an attempt to tell the story of the sifting project in an interesting and touching way for those who are less-acquainted with the story of the Temple Mount, its history and archaeology, as well as for those who are well acquainted and even for trained archaeologists. We knew that a short video would be essential for it to   become viral, but we weren’t successful   in finding  a way to  consolidate  the story of the project  in addition to explaining our financial needs to the non-aquatint in less than 7 minutes although we managed to have the Hebrew version shorter (5 min).

Eventually the Hebrew video became viral to some extend on Facebook and managed to reach 20 thousand people quite quickly with almost no paid promotion (a total of 27 thousand on both Facebook and YouTube). The English version, which was also available with translation subtitles in many languages, was less successful and eventually reached 50 thousand people (16 thousand people have visited the Half-Shekel Campaign website and more than 270 of them have donated. During the time of this campaign, we eventually managed to raise $35,440.  The donations came mainly from English speaking countries and from Israel, but also from distant parts of the world such as Brazil, Chile, Singapore and other places.

A short while after the inception of the campaign, the political conflict concerning the Temple Mount became a hot topic in the media, and we weren’t sure if it detracted or motivated support of the campaign. We prefer avoiding politics   as much as possible, especially since we are dealing with the most politically sensitive site in Israel, although certain aspects of our research may unavoidably have some political implications. The website has also been translated into Arabic, and attracted a relatively large percentage of visits from Arabic speaking countries, surprisingly, we received only few malicious comments, while hundreds of visitors shared the website and clicked like. Perhaps the scientifically oriented nature of the text helped to some extend to reduce the conflict fed by decisive and ignorant historical claims.

We are still far from reaching the project’s needs, and our funding efforts will proceed. This website will be maintained as a permanent funding website, and we will continue promoting it in various other ways.

You are all invited to continue supporting the project by sending a recurring donation and by sharing the websites of the Temple Mount Sifting Project.

With much gratitude,

Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira

In three days we’re about to end our current phase of our crowd funding campaign. After that this website will be converted to a permanent website for donations to the Sifting Project. This campaign has been running for the last four months and has managed to reach 75 thousand people who have watched the campaign video (English 47,914; Hebrew: 27,452). The campaign brought about 16,500 visitors (unique visits) to this website. Since our last update we have doubled the Facebook shares, especially in Arabic and Portuguese (see table below), and currently more 3400 people have shared this website! Thank you all!

Up to this point we managed to raise in this campaign $20,676 by 257 donors (the total sum on the website includes also direct donations that were received recently and were not achieved via this campaign). We are pleased to see that we managed to receive support from all corners of the world.

In our next update we will provide a summary to this campaign and details about the phase.

See below the statistics for more detailed and interesting results:

 

Top Website Visitors by Country

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Country Website Visitors Frequency (1 per x Internet Users)
Israel 4,962 1,195
Jordan 526 6,417
Pal. Authority 133 9,774
Iraq 143 18,937
Venezuela 594 24,492
El Salvador 51 34,173
Norway 124 39,483
Honduras 31 51,695
Ukraine 292 57,702
Canada 521 63,340
United States 4,446 68,203
Bolivia 52 76,357
Portugal 86 81,576
Netherlands 177 91,208
Hong Kong 63 91,291
Brazil 1,045 103,180
Australia 204 103,807
Turkey 285 124,066
Belarus 34 142,852
Austria 44 162,163

Top Donors by Country

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Country Donors Donors Percentage of Website Visitors
United States 116 2.6%
Israel 90 1.8%
Canada 11 2.1%
United Kingdom 8 2.4%
Australia 7 3.4%
Brazil 3 N/A
Italy 3 N/A
Norway 2 N/A
Austria 2 N/A
Belgium 2 N/A
Netherlands 1 N/A
Turkey 1 N/A
New Zealand 1 N/A
Singapore 1 N/A
Finland 1 N/A
Sweden 1 N/A
Germany 1 N/A
Mexico 1 N/A
Chile 1 N/A

 

Website Visitors by Language

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Language Visitors
English 7,291
Hebrew 3,382
Spanish 1,286
Arabic 1,224
Russian 708
French 514
Turkish 338
Korean 274
Chinese-Traditional 153
Chinese -Simplified 126
Norwegian 182
Italian 207
Portuguese 454
German 127
Dutch The Netherlands 141
Farsi Iran 40
Hungarian 53

 

Facebook Shares by Language

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Language FB Shares
English 2100
Arabic 353
Spanish 312
Portuguese 200
Hebrew 111
Russian 89
French 63
Turkish 36
Persian 32
Norwegian 19
Chinese (simplified) 19
Korean 16
Italian 16
Chinese (traditional) 12
Deutsch 11
Nederland 10
Hungarian (Magyar) 0
Total 3399

See more about this in Jerusalem Post report :

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Byzantine-era-potsherd-from-Temple-Mount-may-contain-engraving-of-holy-sites-menorah-436965

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