Institute Statistics Reveal Huge Gains in USC Shoah Foundation Outreach This Year

The number of people who watched testimony in the 2013-14 fiscal year more than doubled from last year, USC Shoah Foundation’s year-end statistics reveal. And that’s just one of many impressive numbers that show how USC Shoah Foundation continues to grow its influence around the world.

USC Shoah Foundation’s “eyes on testimony” – the total number of people, from students working in IWitness to visitors to the Visual History Archive, who watched testimony in each fiscal year – increased 114 percent, from 1.6 million in 2012-13 to 3.4 million in 2013-14.

The number of searches conducted in the Visual History Archive Online increased 143 percent, from 75,278 last year to 183,617 this year.

Over 5,700 teachers and 21,434 students registered on IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website, this year, compared to 3,448 teachers and 11,441 students last year (gains of 65 and 87 percent, respectively).

More people interacted with USC Shoah Foundation online this year. Nearly 1,600 people became fans of USC Shoah Foundation’s Facebook page, about 1,500 followed its Twitter account and 1,400 subscribed to its YouTube channel over the course of the year. The number of visitors to the website also increased 116 percent, and 59 percent of them were repeat visitors, compared to 41 percent last year.

With USC Shoah Foundation’s acquisition of three new testimony collections this year – JFCS San Francisco’s Holocaust collection, Nanjing Massacre and Armenian Genocide – several new countries and languages are represented among USC Shoah Foundation’s 53,000 testimonies. There are now interviews conducted in Armenia, China and Syria, and in the Arabic, Armenian, Khmer, Kurdish, Turkish and Mandarin languages.