In a suburb of Orlando, Florida, there is a small office building near the airport where six offices share 6,000 square feet of office space.
As of mid-2005, Exodus International was headquartered in one of the six offices, occupying perhaps 1,000 square feet. Please note that I am not disclosing the office address. (I’d disclose the source of this photo and real estate information, but in this case to do so would disclose the address.)
The office is a bit small for an organization of a dozen-or-so full-time employees, and by itself the office seems inadequate to support 400,000 inquiries per year — unless, of course, most of those inquiries are auto-responded and auto-filed by a forgotten PC sitting in a corner.
I’m not surprised by the size of the Exodus office — it has been clear to me for some years that much of the work publicly attributed directly or indirectly to Exodus International is actually done off-premises — and off-budget, too, by generous organizations such as Focus on the Family that can afford national newspaper-ad and billboard campaigns.
Maybe they’ve outsourced their calls to a call center in Iran, Tonga, or Saudi Arabia.
thanks Phil, I needed a chuckle at the end of the day
Just out of curiousity, why is it that you can’t post the address of Exodus?
Thanks for asking.
I’m not interested in providing an easy way for random Central Florida websurfers with anger-management issues (or a desire for mischief) to pick on this location. Let them figure out the address for themselves.
If people really want to drop into Exodus headquarters; I’d suggest a vist here, and ask for further directions…
(Rest assured, nobody with “anger management issues” is likely to get past the security there… The address is openly on the website. Actually, I wonder how many nutters they do get strolling up?)
Focus gets Christian tourist visitors all the time.
Tourists — and mallwalkers wondering why James Dobson’s private suite is where the JC Penney used to be.
Ha! How freakin’ appropriate. This ain’t cafateria Christianity, it’s Mall Christianity. Buy one, get one free!(Sorry. Just channeled a Singapore shopping mall then…)But they must get a lot of fruitcakes rolling up — I’d guess protesters would be in the minority compared to loony Dobson lovers who want to shake his hand, get the photo, hand over their lifes saving etc. Of course, only the last offer is bound to raise much interest…
Yes, it’s interesting what you can find online today. I downloaded the floorplan of the office building, and although the office suites do differ in size quite a bit, there’s not a one of them that looks large enough to handle the capacity that Exodus claims. I guess they could be counting every phone call that’s received by every affiliate in every country, but it seems that this number would be pretty hard to track.
Perhaps they just sort of make up a number, based on a general idea of about how many calls an average affiliate gets, and a rough figure of how many “active” affiliates they have at any given point in time. That might get them to 400,000 with a little stretching. That would also explain why they feel okay about guesstimating the number of ex-gays out there based on an approximation of the number of phone calls they get and a “gut feeling” of how those calls correspond to ex-gay prevalence.
It would be a lot of guesstimating, approximating, gut feelings, rough figures, and general ideas, combined with a little stretching, but hey — who are we to argue? All’s well that ends well…