Jumping in with Both Feet: Reasons to Participate in Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts Program

As VAM is wrapping up its nomination period for the 2013 Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts Program, we thought we'd use this space for a little food for thought.

In it's third year, Virginia's Top 10 program has already come a long way. The program has been replicated already in several states, and two more states have plans to launch similar programs. Why? To put it simply, it's been a great success for the nominating museums and for VAM! Here are a few stats:

• Back in 2011, we logged over 100,000 public votes for the inaugural "Top 10" !
• Last year's program resulted in over 100 high-quality press clippings from media outlets such as The Washington Post and Virginia Living magazine, as well as radio (WTOP) and TV coverage!
• Our second year resulted in over 120,000 public votes cast for conservation.
• In this, our third year, we have already been picked up by the AP, and we haven't even announced our nominees yet!
• To encourage donations to nominating museums, we have added a "donate" button to each nomination entry on this year's voting website. We hope that this results in museums attracting not only attention, but donations in support of conservation.
• Many of our nominees from prior years have had great success leveraging their participation to get support for conservation efforts. From securing volunteers to funding, the Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts has been instrumental in many of our nominees and honorees conservation success stories!

Here's one final piece of good news - it's not too late to nominate! We'll be accepting nominations through this week and it only takes 10 minutes to nominate an artifact from your collecting institution! What are you waiting for?? Make a nomination now!