Reports from the Canvassing Work

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 27, 1908

Reports from the Canvassing Work

From South Dakota comes a report for the week ending August 1, showing that twenty-one agents worked an average of over thirty-eight hours each, and took orders amounting to $743.50,—an average of ninety-two cents an hour for each agent.

Statistics recently compiled from reports of work done in one of our smaller union conferences show that if every agent in the conferences composing that union had worked full time, the sales in those conferences would have increased enormously, the increase varying from twenty-seven per cent in the conference where the workers put in the best time, to one hundred fifty per cent in the conference where the average time was lowest.

Brother L. E. Borle, director of our printing plant in Mexico, reports that the four canvassers who went from California recently to that field, began work on August 10. That morning one of the workers, laboring among the wealthier class of people, took five orders for Spanish “Coming King” in two hours’ time. This was done by a man who knows nothing of Spanish, except what he has learned in a two weeks’ institute. Let us daily remember these workers in that difficult field, and pray that doors may be opened, and hearts softened, for the reception of our truth-filled literature.

Faithful work is being done, and good time put in, by the workers in the Eastern Canadian Union Conference. As a result, the sales for the week ending July 29 averaged considerably over a dollar an hour for each agent.

A recent report from the Chesapeake Conference shows that out of thirteen agents in the field, six worked an average of forty hours or more in one week. These six agents took orders amounting to $333.60, or an average of $55.60 each for the week’s work. Less than half the agents turned in practically seventy per cent of the business done in that conference for the week. Faithful labor in the Lord’s vineyard brings sure reward.

The Kansas City branch of the Pacific Press Publishing Company reports a gain in sales for the month of July, 1908, of thirty per cent over the corresponding month last year. Aside from the financial aspect of this report, it is encouraging to know that many additional homes in the Central and Northern union conferences, whose inmates perhaps have never before heard the gospel of a soon-coming Saviour, have been entered by the silent messengers of truth.