Considering most museums have been around for decades, the CMHR is also likely to be the first of its kind to have a website predate its bricks and mortar.

The museum is the dream of the late Izzy Asper, one of Canada’s foremost entrepreneurs, philanthropists and media owners. His daughter, Gail, has carried the torch since his death in the fall of 2003, and has the museum just a few short steps from becoming a reality.

The only thing standing in the way of setting a construction start date for the CAD$ 265 million project in downtown Winnipeg is money. Not much, considering comparative endeavors, mind you, but seven figures just the same.

Asper has already secured CAD$ 160 million in public funds plus a commitment from the federal government to provide CAD$ 22 million for annual operating costs. The final hurdle is CAD$ 105 million in private sector commitments. Thus far, checks have been written for more than CAD$ 90 million, most of it from people and businesses in Asper’s home province of Manitoba. Yet a growing number of Canadians and international donors are also chipping in.

Even with Asper’s boundless energy, she can’t be fundraising, educating and promoting the museum everywhere there’s a check to be collected, which is where the CMHR website comes in. It contains the kind of information you’d expect to see, such as text describing the museum, why the museum is needed, the construction schedule and, of course, how to donate. It also features a personalized video from Asper herself and interview footage of three million-dollar donors explaining why they made their contributions.

Digitized photos reveal what the final product will ultimately look like, but the piece de resistance is the museum’s virtual tour. It shows how the stories of people—including an Inuit father, a woman from Afghanistan, and a child in Africa—will be told via holograms to give visitors as close a sense as possible to being in their shoes.

The most gripping aspect of the tour, and the most likely to elicit much-sought-after donations, are the stories of four victims of various human rights abuses. In one, a Holocaust survivor tells the harrowing story of being taken away to a concentration camp and being separated from her infant son. In another, a man from Sierra Leone relates how he came home one day after a rebel attack in the region to find no sign of his wife and two sons. Both cases have happy endings, but they’ll have viewers reaching for the tissue boxes before and after the conclusions are known.

Another testimonial relays the tragic tale of a Canadian aboriginal woman who was taken away from her family as a child and placed in a residential school, part of a federal government program designed to assimilate First Nations children into white society. The idea behind the Canada-wide initiative was to “take the Indian” out of them. (The Canadian government recently issued a formal apology to First Nations people for the decades of emotional and physical damage inflicted on their children by the residential schools system.)

There is also the heartwarming story of Hannah Taylor, a Winnipeg school girl who, after seeing a homeless man eating out of a garbage bin several years ago, started “The Ladybug Foundation.” The unique charitable endeavor began with her painting jars to look like ladybugs with a slot in the lid for donations. Over the past five years, she has raised more than $1 million for homeless people.

Kim Jasper, the museum’s director of communications, says the website’s primary purpose is to raise funds so the museum can finally get the green light. The CMHR website was designed to be state-of-the-art and mirror what the museum itself will ultimately represent, she says.

“We want to give people a feeling of being there without actually being there. They’re simulated images so you’ll get a sense of how it will be in the museum. We’ve been selling this project as a vision and a dream,” she says.

Jasper notes the museum’s team has to present a compelling case as to why it is a worthwhile investment, including what the museum can be and how it will be relevant to people by telling stories that haven’t been told before. “There is no place in Canada that tells our social history,” she says.

Jasper adds that few people know the story of Viola Desmond, an African Canadian beautician whose car broke down during a blizzard in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946. While her vehicle was being serviced, she walked across the street to see a movie. She bought a ticket to sit on the main floor but was told by the manager that she had to sit in the balcony with the other black people. She refused, the manager called the police and she was arrested.

After spending the night in jail, she was charged with “attempting to defraud the federal government” based on her refusal to pay the one cent amusement tax difference between the three cents charged to those in the balcony and the two pennies charged to those on the main floor. Even though she had offered to pay the difference, she was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and a CAN$ 20 fine.

Her stand, made a decade before Rosa Parks rode into American history books by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, resulted in the repeal of segregation laws in Nova Scotia in 1954.

Didn't know that? That's what the CMHR, and its website, hope to change.