darim online

What is a synagogue? A congregation? A community?

We are more than a nonprofit organization, or a local center, or a collection of people who share certain practices or get together for holidays. It feels significant to me that words like “congregation” and “community” are grammatically singular but inherently refer to a multiplicity. The duality of meaning here is so critical for how we lead, congregate, and self-identify.

I've been following Allison Fine's work for years, and have so enjoyed how our paths have crossed in the Jewish community in recent years.  Allison is the author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, and co-author (with Beth Kanter) of The Networked Nonprofit.  Recently, Allison has been serving as the president of the board at her synagogue, Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, New York.

Part of the Connected Congregations series

Point of clarification: your list is not a network.

I sometimes hear organizations talking about the number of people they have involved with their work - their network - and then reference the people who have signed up to receive their email updates. That’s great! It’s wonderful that so many people are interested enough in your work and the difference that you’re making that they signed up to get your communications. That can be really important and powerful. It’s just not (necessarily) a network.

(cross-posted on Beth's Blog)

When The Networked Nonprofit first was published I grabbed a copy for myself, my staff, and my major funders, and further recommended it to the leaders of the Jewish organizations with whom I work. As I read the book, I instantly knew that this was meaty stuff that we’d all need to chew on. Facebook had recently revamped its Groups, and it seemed like the perfect place to take the conversation for a spin.

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Darim Online is thrilled to announce our 2012-2013 cohort for our Social Media Boot Camp for Educators. The Social Media Boot Camp for Educators is a year long experience for Jewish educators and Jewish educational organizations to help them advance their use of social media for marketing, communications, family engagement and curricular uses.  The program has been generously funded by the Covenant Foundation since 2008.

I coach many organizations on the social media, helping them to mature their practice and hopefully use these valuable tools to help achieve articulated goals.  What I notice -- and notice a lot -- is that moving from a broadcast mindset to a social one is hard.  Really hard.  I might spend a full hour brainstorming social content with a team from a congregation, and then notice their next 5 posts on Facebook are still about programs and posting links to articles they think folks should be reading.

Instead of talking with members of their community, they're talking at them: read this, check out that.

Lisa Colton, Founder and President of Darim Online was invited by the AVI CHAI Foundation to be one of six inaugural speakers at the ELI Talks. The first series of ELI Talks took place at the North American Jewish Day School Conference (NAJDS)in Atlanta, February 2012.

This post is cross posted from Deborah Fishman's blog, HaChavaya.