Bible Giveaway Recap

Last week marked the end of our first Bible giveaway, and we want to share a little bit of our experience.

The idea came from Justin Taylor, who suggested in an email that we give away Bibles to jumpstart interest in our new blog.

We debated which Bible to give away; the Life Discovery Edition, a $9.99 paperback, led the pack for a while. Instead, we decided to do something special and give away Compact TruTones and TruGrips. These Bibles feature a unique design and unusual cover. We hoped that the Bibles would intrigue the recipients (and that they’d tell their friends about them).

At 10:00 AM EDT on April 19, 2005, we launched the giveaway. We only told two blogs about it in advance because we wanted to see how word of the promotion would spread organically across the blogosphere.

Below you can see the number of Bibles we gave away at every half-hour. The curve follows a more linear progression than we expected. We gave away the 100th Bible just before 11:30 AM on April 20.

Graph of ESV giveaway showing a generally smooth curve from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM the next day

The top four Bibles, accounting for 59 requests, were:

  1. Royal Blue (Celtic Cross) Compact TruTone (21 copies)
  2. Olive (Celtic Cross) Compact TruTone (15 copies)
  3. Chestnut (Diamond) Compact TruTone (12 copies)
  4. Charcoal (Crown) Compact TruTone (11 copies)

We had 83 requests from the US, 8 from the UK, 6 from Australia, and 3 from Canada.

Our most unusual finding was that 22 of the requests came from just two metropolitan areas. We didn’t expect that geography would play such a big part in an online promotion.

Additionally, fully 24 of the people making requests used @gmail.com email addresses.

We met quite a few interesting people by email and got to visit a number of fascinating blogs. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 8:55 am and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Bible Giveaway Recap”

  1. New Bible Giveaway Coming Monday (September 12, 2005) Says:
    January 18th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    On Monday, September 12, 2005, we’re going to hold our second Bible giveaway. This time we’re aiming the giveaway at church youth groups (though you don’t have to be a member of a youth group to participate). Unlike our first giveaway,

  2. Blog Changes and My Other Blogs Says:
    January 18th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    Yesterday evening, I changed my archive links and permalinks to the “new style” that is available with 3.x Movable Type. I still have files for the old permalinks so that previous incoming links and trackbacks won’t return a 404.

  3. Blogging for (Bible) Business Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 10:34 am

    Sitting in a breakout session facilitated by the ESV Bible Blog guys… I love their first Bible Giveaway, especially their recap…

  4. rubber bible Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 10:34 am

    My new free ESV Trugrip Bible arrived this morning. (from the ESV blog Bible giveaway) It’s very lovely - the cover is bright orange and made of a really tactile rubber with wavy groove patterns on it so it feels really nice to hold…

  5. ESV Blog! Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 10:34 am

    Apparently 8 of the 100 free ESV’s went to the UK. I know that I got one, and Dave got one and Rach got one, and presumably Adrian… so who were the other four?

  6. ESV Bible Received Says:
    July 1st, 2007 at 7:47 am

    I received my ESV Bible . It is a nice compact size. I was one of the 21 Royal Blue copies…