Today marks the one month anniversary of A Mighty Girl's public launch and what an amazing month it's been with over 50,000 site visitors and 3,600 new Facebook friends! Thanks to all of you for your enthusiastic response to the launch of A Mighty Girl. Your kind messages of support for the site and its girl empowerment mission have been tremendous affirmation that our efforts in building the site were worthwhile.
In honor of our anniversary, I'd like to tell you a little about what led to the creation of A Mighty Girl and our plans for the future. A Mighty Girl was created by my husband, Aaron, and me as a resource for people seeking empowering books and movies for girls (and, of course, they're great for boys too). For years, we had sought out empowering gifts for our four young nieces and decided that having a central place to locate these types of products was a void that clearly needed to be filled. Thus, after several months of work, A Mighty Girl was born last month.
To give you a better idea of who’s behind A Mighty Girl, we'd also like to introduce ourselves. My name is Carolyn Danckaert and I serve as the 'voice' of A Mighty Girl via our Facebok page, blog posts, and emails, as well as being the primary manager of the AMG website and book and movie database. Aaron primarily focuses on the back-end of the site, developing the new features that we'll be adding to A Mighty Girl. While I also work as an independent consultant, AMG has required nearly my full-time attention since our launch. Aaron works full-time in technology so he's been contributing many nights and weekends to the site.
In terms of the future, we're full of ideas about features to add to A Mighty Girl and have received lots of great recommendations from the Mighty Girl community. A few possibilities include adding toys, clothing, parent resources, or girl empowerment organizational listings. In time, we'd love to add all of these features but each is quite a project in itself. Just building the current book and movie database took us several months and, before adding any new section, we have a list of about 600 new books and movies to finish adding to the site.
However, we are looking towards the future and we'd like your input as to which areas to focus on next. To that end, we've created the the first A Mighty Girl community survey and I hope you can take a few minutes to share your feedback about our next steps and how we've been doing thus far.
Many people have written in with product recommendations and asked how else they can help support the site. We really appreciate your enthusiasm for A Mighty Girl and are excited that it’s truly become a community effort! If you find value in A Mighty Girl and want to help support its growth, here are a few easy things you can do:
1. Please help spread the word. We know that many of you have shared news of A Mighty Girl with your friends, school communities, Girl Scout troops and others and we thank you for doing an amazing job! If you haven't yet, please take a minute to post a message on your Facebook page about the site or send out a quick email to those in your lives who you think would appreciate a resource like A Mighty Girl.
2. If you’re purchasing books or movies online, please buy them via the Mighty Girl product links. We certainly understand that many of you are seeking out books and movies discovered on the site at the library or local bookstores and, of course, we fully support that. We’re big fans of local bookstores too and encourage you to support them.
If you’re like us, however, you also use Amazon for these types of purchases. When you click the 'buy from Amazon' link found on each product page and then purchase that item at Amazon, we receive a small commission of that sale at no added cost to you. We also get a chance to see which items are popular on the site – of course, with no identifying information about the purchasers. This data is helpful because we can learn which items are popular with site visitors (like the fact that, among others, Raising Dragons and The Care and Keeping of You were very popular last month).
To run the site, we have to pay for a number of expenses such as hosting and, at the end of our first month, we were able to cover these basic expenses but just barely. In the long-term, it's our hope that these commissions will reach a sustainable level that allows us to continue to commit the time that will be needed to take A Mighty Girl to the next level.
If you aren't an Amazon user, another way that you can help is by making a donation to A Mighty Girl. We received our first, and so far only, donation last month from a woman who made it in honor of her friend’s birthday. She told us that her friend is a long-time advocate for girls and women's issues and a big fan of A Mighty Girl. That first donation was very meaningful to us and a deeply appreciated gesture of support for our efforts and A Mighty Girl’s mission.
3. Please continue to send us your feedback and recommendations. We've received many great book and movie recommendations from this community and look forward to hearing more. The easiest way to send us recommendations is to use the red "Contact Support" button on the right-hand side of the website. And, that leads me to my final point...
4. Please have patience with us. We have been receiving quite a few messages from you. We love and encourage the feedback and have read each message but we are a bit slow at times in responding so please give us time. Also, we have a long list of books and movies that we have been actively working on adding to the site so it may take us some time to add your recommendation. As you can see, A Mighty Girl is a very small yet mighty operation.
Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy message. And, most importantly, thanks for making A Mighty Girl's first month so incredible! Aaron and I look forward to continuing to grow A Mighty Girl with the help of you - the Mighty Girl community. It really is our labor of love and it's our sincere hope that our books and movies (and hopefully in the future, toys and other resources) will help more girls discover and embrace their potential as Mighty Girls.
With admiration,
Carolyn & Aaron
