Thank you for making 2013 an incredible year for ING

Our performance this past year was quite impressive, as we continued doing what we have always done, while branching out into some new areas. Here are some of the highlights of the past year:

• This year ING speakers addressed 37,000 people face-to-face in 500 talks in high schools, universities, community centers, hospitals, and elsewhere.
• 30% of the talks have been panels by the Interfaith Speakers Bureau, which is impressive since the program is relatively young in the organization.
• We placed a major portion of our educator curriculum online and made it accessible to educators across the country.
• We launched the new Interfaith Service Days program which expanded the Interfaith Speakers Bureau to bring people from different faiths together to work on five different service projects this fall.
• We launched two new affiliates in Seattle, Washington and Huntsville, Alabama, thereby expanding our presence to 24 regions around the country in 22 states.
• Our social media and web presence has flourished. We tripled the traffic to our website in 2013 with the majority of the visits going to our online answers to FAQs About Islam and Muslims. Our presence on Facebook and Twitter is growing and we just launched ING pages on LinkedIn and Google+.

Additionally, ING’s Impact Report, which we published this year for the combined results of three years between 2009 and 2012, affirms that we are fulfilling our mission of challenging stereotypes and misinformation; data from surveys of students in schools and universities after ING presentations show that:

• The number of students believing that Islam promotes peace rises by almost a third, while those who believe that the religion promotes terrorism falls by two-thirds.
• The number of those who view Islam as oppressive to women falls by nearly two-thirds.
• The number of students who view Muslims as insular and foreign drops by nearly two-thirds.
• The number of those who regard Muslims as “Americans like myself” rises by almost a third, to 66% of respondents.

But we couldn’t have done it without you – our loyal supporters. For this we are truly grateful. As we end the year and prepare for the next, we hope that you will continue to support the important work of ING. Please consider giving your end-of-year donation today.

Yours,

Randy Pond
Chairman of the Board of Trustees