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Project Mishpacha

December 3, 2012 by

You know how it’s always the best TV shows that get cancelled? Even though they may not be the most popular, they’re always the ones with the most compelling characters and the best writing, right? Well, “Project Mishpacha” was kind of like that for me.

A couple years ago, when I was living in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, I was privileged to be a part of the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel community. They started a program called “Project Mishpacha” with the help of the Legacy Heritage Innovation Project back in 2009. No, it was not canceled. In fact, it’s still going strong. It was that I moved to Brooklyn, so it was canceled for me, which made me feel like I feel when my favorite TV show goes off the air.

Basically, here’s how to make your own Project Mishpacha in just 5 steps:

Get yourself a diverse congregation. I mean diverse in just about every sense of the word; age, Jewish background, hashkafa (worldview), race, you name it. One suggestion for doing this is being a warm and welcoming shul. Oh sure, we’re all “warm and welcoming” shuls, but no, I really mean it. This is a group of people with stellar leadership who go out of their way to invite friends and strangers alike into their lives. I could tell some incredible stories about just this aspect of ASBI alone, but I don’t want to get off track. Suffice it to say that the kindness of the rabbi and his family was enough to inspire an entire musical genre, but that’s a story for another time.
Ask for volunteers to sign up for the program. For a truly warm and welcoming congregation, this should be easy. All you need to tell them is something along these lines:
1. As is natural in any large group of people, cliques form. That’s what’s happened in our shul. Teens hang out with teens, family people hang out with family people, artists hang out with artists, empty-nesters hang out with empty-nesters, etc. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, we think it’d be neat for us to become a “connected congregation.” Not in the sense that we become interconnected with other congregations (because we are actually already doing a pretty good job of that), but in the sense that we become more INTRA-connected, and get to know the people in our own community even better than we already do. Let’s break open our cliques and see what happens.
Get a shadchan (matchmaker). Not the “find me a find, catch me a catch” kind of shadchan, but kind of. At ASBI, it’s the rabbi’s wife. She makes it her business to know every single member by name, what their likes and dislikes are, their marital status, occupation, and all information relevant to connecting a person to the community. And if she’s reading this she might disagree, but believe me, it sure seems that way. Her job in “Project Mishpacha” is to help form the artificial family units, or “Mishpachot.” Depending upon the Mishpacha, the shadchan might need to find groups of people with similar interests, or specifically choose people who have very little or nothing in common at all. The point is that while she does not need to necessarily be the rabbi’s wife, she does need to really know everyone. From what I’ve been told, it’s a lot like the job a network weaver does.
Create opportunities for each Mishpacha to do things together. Things like Shabbat potluck meals, Chanukah parties, and mitzvah projects. Some Mishpachot were themed, like the one where playing board games was a common interest. I will add from personal experience that if your Mishpacha actually does hang out together, it accomplishes the main goal beautifully.
Stand back and watch. Seriously. It’s important not to get too involved in the Mishpachot once they’re formed – kind of like how you’d treat the affairs of someone else’s family. I mean, be attentive to their needs and all, but one of the beautiful things about “Project Mishpacha” is that there is no one person who’s in charge. Being a part of a Mishpacha shouldn’t mean that you feel the need to answer to anyone. Sometimes the Mishpacha relationships don’t work out, and (here’s the tricky part:) that’s just fine – it’s not a “real” family after all. But when they do work out, it’s an awesome experience that enriches everyone.

“Project Mishpacha” is no metaphor. It’s literally a project, an experiment in Jewish communal behavior. Also, it requires the creation of artificial family units. If you start with the premise that we’re all already family in the larger sense, being Jews and all, then take it to the next logical step which is acting like it and actually treating other Jews like family. What’s the next step after that? Well, let’s play it out, said the ASBI leadership. That’s what “Project Mishpacha” is.

Not every congregation can do this; I hope I’ve made that clear. For example, not every shul has a shadchan, and even though we all say we are, not every shul is warm and welcoming. And in the end, there are definitely reasons not every congregation should have a “Project Mishpacha.” It was not 100% successful by any measure. Some “Mishpachot” didn’t get along very well. Some got along, but chose not to participate in any of the activities. All but one have chosen to dissolve their “Mishpachot” at the end of each year in favor of trying a new one (which, admittedly, could also be construed as a huge success if you think about it). Many have tried it out and realized it’s not working for them, so they wind up leaving “Project Mishpacha” altogether. But in the opinion of this emeritus of “Mishpachat Ir HaRuach,” (“The City of Spirit Family” or “The Windy City Family”) its pros way outweigh its cons. I now have relationships with people I probably would never have had were it not for “Project Mishpacha.” I probably would have just stayed with my little clique. Not only did I feel more connected with my Mishpacha, but also with the ASBI congregation as a whole.

The end of the story is that I now live in Brooklyn, which while very Jewish in some ways, can sometimes be culturally light years away from the warmth I’ve come to associate with what’s truly Jewish. I hope my fellow Brooklynites don’t take offense to that; it’s just that we Midwesterners take great pride in our hospitality. I miss that about the Midwest, and I still keep in touch with my friends and some of my old Mishpacha from ASBI. And I’m happy to report that I’ve found an incredibly (and truly) warm and welcoming congregation or two in my neck of the woods. I haven’t found another “Project Mishpacha” out here, but I’m okay with that – for now. New York City is monstrously (even sometimes overwhelmingly) large in terms of the Jewish options available to someone like me, and right now I’m enjoying the experience of exploring what it is that gives the East Coast its own flavor of “warm and welcoming.” The Chabad community in Crown Heights is just as supportive and nurturing as the Jewish Renewal community I met at the Isabella Friedman Jewish Retreat Center, and everyone in between. It’s just different from the Midwest is all.

So leaving the Midwest and “Project Mishpacha” was for me kind of like when “Firefly” was canceled, and moving to Brooklyn’s myriad Jewish communities is like when “Jericho” started. I guess sometimes the good shows need to end in order to make room for great new ones. It’s good to be that kind of excited again.

Alan Sufrin is a musician, producer and Jewish educator. He is half of the 'biblegum pop' duo Stereo Sinai, and has previously worked at the Chicago Coalition of InterReligious Leanring, the Boar dof Jewish Education of Metropolitan Chicago, Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel synagogue, and the University of Chicago Hillel. He has, if you hadn't guessed, recently moved from Chicago to Brooklyn, NY.

This post is part of a blog series on Connected Congregations being curated by Darim Online in partnership with UJA Federation of New York. Through this series, we are exploring what it means for synagogues to function as truly networked nonprofits. Connected Congregations focus on strengthening relationships, building community, and supporting self-organizing and organic leadership. They are flatter and more nimble, measure their effectiveness in new and more nuanced ways, allocate their resources differently, and use technology in a seamless and integrated way to support their mission and goals. We hope these posts will be the launching pad for important conversations in our community. Please comment on this post, and read and comment on others in the series to share your perspective, ideas, work and questions. Thanks to UJA Federation of New York for supporting this work.

“Have We Met Yet?” The Power of Casual Conversation for Organizational Engagement

December 3, 2012 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

Cross-posted from Deborah's weekly enewletter and column in the New York Jewish Week.

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." -Carl Jung

In his New York Times bestselling book, "The Power of Habit", author Charles Duhigg shares the research into what makes people more likely to take advantage of their gym membership. Warning: The answer is so simple it might shock you.

It wasn't about fancy facilities, convenience or a wide range of fitness offerings. Those helped, but they weren't the deciding factors.

The single biggest reason why people were more likely to go to a gym on a regular basis was if the staff knew them by name.

That's right: when we believe that someone really notices and cares about whether or not we show, we are more likely to feel engaged. The simple "Hey, Deb!" I hear from the staff when I check in at my gym makes me feel like I count. (It also makes me feel like someone would notice if I came just to read the People Magazine instead of exercising.)

Most people want to be noticed in some way, to count, and to matter. The staff and lay leaders of our Jewish organizations – synagogues, Federations, schools, agencies, camps, etc. – should consider it to be everyone's job to actively notice and engage the people who come through their doors. People who feel like they have made a personal connection (however small) are more likely to come back.

Let's face it: the future of our Jewish organizations depend on people coming back for more.

Whether you work at a Jewish organization, volunteer for one, or attend one as a member, you have an opportunity more often than not to engage and educate people what your institution and community has to offer them. These aren’t necessarily during informational meetings or members-only gatherings, but during down time, walking-in-the-hallway time, waiting-for-class-to-finish time, nosh time, or any other time when you see someone in the building who could use a warm greeting and a personal touch.

Here are some tips and tools to help you make that connection feel comfortable for both of you.

1. Read body-language to see if someone is approachable. Don’t approach someone who is dealing with a child having a tantrum, but do approach someone looking lost, lonely or bored.

2. Ask open-ended questions like, “What brings you here today?” rather than “Did you find what you need?”

3. Introduce yourself and your role (not just your title), like, “I’m Donna, and I oversee programming for older adults, like our day trips and senior companion programs” or “I’m Ben, and I’m a fourth-generation member here. How about you?”

4. Ask for someone’s name and use it at least once in the conversation – and at the end. (“Nice to meet you, Bob”….”Well, Bob, thanks for chatting with me. And here’s my card in case you have any questions in the future about our day school’s admissions process.”)

5. Be a great listener and use what you hear to go deeper into the conversation. (“You’re new to the shul? Welcome! Who have you met so far?”). Note: make sure not to follow that kind of question with negative commentary, like, “Oh, you’ve met Dave? Sorry to hear that. I hope you won’t hold him against the rest of us!”

6. Share your positive opinions/points of view about the organization (“One of the things that I like most about working here at the JCC is the variety of services. My son comes for camp, my sister works out here and my mom loves the day trips.”)

7. Find out what someone knows about the organization’s programs or services. (“I see you know about our Federation’s Happy Hours. What other events or programs have you been to?”)

8. Assume that everyone has something more they can learn about what the organization offers that could be relevant to them or someone they know. (“Next month is our book fair, and I know you have kids, so I wanted to let you know that Wendy Mogel is coming to talk about parenting. Are you familiar with her books?”

9. Be proactively helpful and memorable. Hand someone a flyer about a program or event you’ve discussed, offer to add them to the mailing list, walk them to wherever they are going, introduce them to the person in charge of the department they are most interested in, buy them a cup of coffee at your café, give them your card and invite them to call you with questions, etc.

10. Know how to end a conversation with ease, like “"I won't take up any more of your time but it’s been nice talking with you, Ellen" or “Well, thanks so much for stopping to chat with me. I have a call in five minutes, Jon, and here’s my card in case you need anything” or even better, “It was great meeting you, Sam. Will I see you back here next week?”

By noticing people and acting on it, you just might get a new member, a new donor, a new family or a new client for your JCC, synagogue, day school, Hebrew school, agency, Federation, etc. – and you may even reengage, re-energize and reconnect with some existing ones. And if you are really, truly lucky, you might make a new great friend.

Read more about how Deborah met her friend Amy with the juicy pickup line, “Hi, I’m Deborah. Have we met yet?" in the New York Jewish Week.

Getting to Know You

November 27, 2012March 5, 2018 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

It's the start of a new Religious School year and you want to do something to start the year with a bang. It would be good to find a way to help parents and children meet the teachers right away. And it's always nice to use new technology to show that the synagogue is moving with the times. These were some of the aims as we embarked on a new project at The Community Synagogue.

It was on the Darim Social Media Success Stories webinar series that I saw the way that Rabbi Rebecca Milder had used social media and QR codes for displaying the work of their students. It got me thinking about the ways that we could use QR codes in our own synagogue community.

The idea was to record videos of all of our teachers with a welcome message to the new students introducing themselves and sharing their excitement for the forthcoming school year. These videos would be available through our website. But the primary way in which we intended to share them was via posters in the lobby of the synagogue, with QR codes linking to all of the videos.

We registered with www.qrstuff.com as I had seen them recommended by Rabbi David Gerber on another Darim webinar. For a small fee this service provided us with analytics for each code we created and also gave us the potential to subsequently change the web page to which the QR Code was linked.

Next came the videos. Teachers who were technologically able filmed their own and the rest we recorded using iPhones. While I am sure we could have made better quality recordings with a more sophisticated camera, for the short 20-30 second clips the iPhone was sufficient. All of the clips were uploaded to YouTube and filed as 'unlisted' so that there was some degree of privacy. We then embedded all of the videos onto individual pages on our website, so that the QR codes would direct people to our website rather than YouTube.

By the first day of Religious School we had 31 videos, all but one of our teachers was happy to be a part of the project. Each teacher had their own section on a poster which included their picture, the classes they were teaching and the QR code to watch their video. These were mounted together onto 6 poster boards and displayed in the synagogue lobby as people made their way into the sanctuary for the opening of school. We also printed out a few sheets with information on how to use QR codes and to download a QR scanner.

There was one line to register new students and there was another line to scan the codes and watch the welcome videos, with a real sense of excitement about the new display. It was great to watch as parents and children met their teachers 'virtually' before meeting in person later that morning.

We've continued to display the boards in the lobby to give people further opportunities to scan the codes and watch the videos. We have had well over 100 scans of the QR codes by parents and children of the synagogue, and it's been a great way for the community to get to know one another.

Jewish Journey Photo Books: Capturing Positive Jewish Memories

November 12, 2012 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

I was thrilled to be accepted into the Social Media Boot Camp for Educators. It was on the heels of the NATE conference on technology and Jewish education, which I had the honor to co-chair with Rabbi Melissa Buyer. I was eager to take the theory and apply it to my educational milieu.

I began with, what I thought, was a simple project – using social media to improve communication with families. I had moved from posting “what happened today” on our website to a blog. And I was the only one reading the blog (I’m pretty sure). I figured I would get some strategies, a few pointers, and be well on my way.

Wow was I wrong! With the constant guidance from Lisa Colton, I think we continually took two steps backwards for at least 6 months before moving forward. We had a lot of prep work to do before bringing the vision to life.

But the success of our work became clear when I had a conversation with a mother who just joined our congregation so her 1st grade daughter could attend our educational program. She said they looked at our website and blog together (her and her daughter) and could see all of the activities and how interactive our program was. And they wanted to be a part of that experience.

So what happened? Lisa pushed me to think about not just the how, but the why. And I began thinking more long-term than just one Sunday morning to the next. This became the focus of our school’s professional learning:

One of the goals of our educational program is making positive Jewish memories.

I decided that we needed to be documenting these memories (because we tend to remember things if we have images). And that documentation could be used to communicate with families as a secondary benefit.

I worked on getting teachers to think about documenting the learning in their classroom through images. We had professional learning sessions where we analyzed photographs and talked about objective and subjective (inspired by the Jewish Lens program we were using in our 6th grade). We reviewed pictures of our program and selected good pictures and identified why.

I worked on how to manage the hundreds and hundreds of photos we started to accumulate. We needed to be able to easily store, tag, sort and retrieve images gathered over many years. This was a systems question that we had to solve before moving forward. After analyzing MANY programs, we are using Picasa – with the Picasastarter add-on (which allowed multiple people and computers to access the database). We can tag people, there is face recognition, and we are slowly working our way through our collection to tag and organize all of our photo assets.

We are using Shutterfly to create photo books that will be presented to students when they become Bar/Bat Mitzvah. I am currently creating the first photobooks for students who will be celebrating in October. In a sense, these are student portfolios, allowing them to reflect on their Jewish journey at our school.

And we took these pictures to create a better blog – where we showed, instead of told. And this allowed at least one family to see themselves as part of our community.

There is more work to do…we are looking to increase the variety of “artifacts” we collect of students. We are trying to share the microphone on our blog and bring more voices in to the conversation. We are starting my profiling new faculty members. Then students who spent the summer at Jewish camps. And then…well, we’ll all have to wait and see!

I am eager to hear from others – are you creating “Jewish” student portfolios? What are some of the tools that are useful?

Beth Ellen Youngis the Director of Education at Temple Judea in Coral Gables, FLwhere she enjoys blending love of education, Judaism, and technology. She participated in the 2011-12 cohort of the Social Media Boot Camp for Jewish Educators funded by The Covenant Foundation. Her personal – and very novice – blog is bethellenyoung.blogspot.com.

Tilling the Soil: An Interview with Allison Fine

October 26, 2012 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

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. This position has given Allison the opportunity to put her theory into practice, and to examine intimately the potential and challenges of synagogues as networked nonprofit.

As part of our blog carnival on Connected Congregations, Allison has written a very thoughtful case study of her work at Temple Beth Abrahram, exploring what it has taken to lay the groundwork for becoming a networked nonprofit. You can download it here. I had a chance to ask her some questions about it.

1) Why did you write this case study?

The role of temple president is enormously time-consuming and difficult. It's a lot like being the president of a local school board with a lot of constituents, technical issues to wrestle with and a fast changing environment. Except that public schools aren't going out of business and synagogues are struggling to stay in business. I wanted to provide a snapshot of my experiences wrestling with the hard questions of what synagogues will look like ten and twenty years from now within the real and difficult demographic, generational and economic shifts that are threatening our survival. How do we stay relevant and meaningful in the lives of our congregants? How do we meet our financial commitments when the dues model is not sustainable? How do we do what we do best and network the rest?

As the case study outlines, just positioning ourselves to wrestle with these questions has taken up much of my tenure as president. The key lessons so far for me is that when we have the courage to look at our ecosystem through a lens of abundance (people want to support us even if it's not at what we now have as full dues) rather than scarcity (people want to game our dues system) good things can happen, like raising over a million dollars to renovate our sanctuary this past summer for the first time in over sixty years. In the future, we are likely to combine programs with other synagogues and our local JCC over the next few years, we are likely to come up with a more flexible donation system that allows people to stay connected to us after their kids are bar mitzvahed, and we are likely to continue to exist into our twelfth decade, but we will be put together differently. Capturing the beginning of that journey to share with others on the same road is why I wrote the case study.

2) You co-authored the book, The Networked Nonprofit, and clearly have thought a lot about what that means. What's your vision for how synagogues can and should be networked nonprofits?

The biggest challenge for synagogues in this century is undoing the membership model from the last century. There are too many choices for ways to be Jewish today for temples to say that there is only one right way to be a part of our community. Synagogues need to move away from transactions (how many tickets to high holidays have we sold?) and have an unrelenting focus on relationship and community building. We need to strengthen the social ties between congregants, not just between members and the synagogue, and engage in meaningful conversations with them on land and online. Synagogues need to be a part of our lives, not an addition to our lives.

3) In your case study, you talk about how we need to confront congregational culture as a starting point. "… the default settings … had to change because they did not reflect the reality of the congregation or the spirit of a networked organization. And the change had to begin in the boardroom." Why does the board need to own the responsibility for culture change, and what kind of leader is needed to make that happen?

Boards and clergy are the culture setters in synagogues. Together they determine the values that an organization lives by, which in turn drives the processes. In my case study, this manifested itself in how we treated people asking for financial relief from dues. Are they considered slackers or community members who need our love and care? That determination will create procedures, forms, approaches that make people feel a certain way. The hard work for organizations is identifying and challenging their own assumptions (often old ones that haven't been aired out in a while) about why and how we do what we do to make sure that the systems and procedures that emerge downstream reflect our values.

4) How do you define community in a networked congregation that is different from the traditional approach to synagogue life?

The dues structure itself is at the heart of a lot of the distance congregants feel from their synagogues. It is a bill that people are expected to pay, unless they're struggling and then they have to go through the humiliating process of asking for relief. Everyone should pay their fair share, but they should be treated as adults who can decide for themselves what that amount is, and if synagogues can't make the case that they provide value, that their continued existence is important and relevant to the lives of their congregants, well, then they won't survive. But I think we will, we just have to flex some communication and relationship muscles we've never had to exercise before.

5) What congregations (or other organizations) and/or leaders have you looked to for inspiration and support as you've been pioneering this new approach to congregational life? What have you learned from them that's been applicable to your synagogue?

As we wrote in the Networked Nonprofit, I found the most exciting aspect of this moment in time is that traditional organizations across issues areas, service organizations and advocacy groups, are remaking themselves as social networks. They are taking down the walls and engaging with their communities, building relationships rather than turning the turnstiles of transactions. And synagogues and Jewish day schools are just beginning this process. The most important part of this journey for traditional organizations is for leadership to have the courage to make themselves uncomfortable by working different, more transparently, learning more about what their community wants from them, engaging them as full partners in problem solving, treating them as smart, generous people not names in a database. It's a very exciting time!

6) You've clearly made a lot of progress during your tenure as board chair. What does the congregation need next to continue this trajectory?

I'm not sure where we will be in a year much less three to five years, but I think we've made some progress in changing the relationship between the institution and our membership. The three most important things I see us doing in the future are:

Providing training and support for new leaders to serve on the board and on our task forces.
Unhooking ourselves from the assumption that the number of members is the most important measure of our success.
And remembering to have fun together!

You can download and read Allison's full case study here.

Case Study: The Networked Nonprofit: A Prequel (Temple Beth Abraham)

October 25, 2012April 11, 2018 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

Editor's note: 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. This position has given Allison the opportunity to put her theory into practice, and to examine intimately the potential and challenges of synagogues as networked nonprofit.

Please download the 12 page case study here.

Two summers ago my worlds collided. A book I co-authored with Beth Kanter, The Networked Nonprofit, was published and at the same time I became president of my synagogue, Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, NY.

I was more prepared for the book launch than the temple presidency. I’ve written books before and the process is pretty much the same each time. You spend months and months writing, then go out and talk to anyone who will listen to your brilliant ideas and phrases. Hopefully people say and write nice things about the book, three people buy it (including your mother) and then you go home.

I was fully unprepared to step into the role of president of a synagogue. While I had fifteen years experience in nonprofit management and more recently researching and writing about the power of social media to reshape organizations and communities, synagogue culture was a mystery to me. My presidency coincided with the Great Recession and significant decline in the number of Jews moving into our area. In the spirit of never wasting a good crisis, lay leadership, clergy and the congregation writ large have given me great latitude for experimentation for which I am enormously grateful. The following reflections as temple president are not intended as a victory lap, we are far from stabilizing, much less growing our membership. Rather it is an opportunity to share what I have learned in the hopes that others can build and improve on them and share their experiences as well.

My efforts at Temple Beth Abraham were based on the assumptions that form the basis of The Networked Nonprofit. Networked Nonprofits are:

“…easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out. They engage people to shape and share their work in order to raise awareness of social issues, organize communities to provide services or advocate for legislation. In the long run, they are helping to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place to live.”

See link below to download the full case study.

Vision and Data: Essential Building Blocks for Successful Synagogue Change

October 10, 2012 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

UJA Federation of New York has recently made investments in helping local congregations collect and analyze data in order to make strategic, data-driven decisions about their work and their future. The results of the project have been extraordinary, ranging from leaders learning how they need to collect different kinds of data, to learning how to use databases for more than contact management, as well as how they can shape their programs and culture to build a sustainable future.

Following this important work, which was lead by Measuring Success, SYNERGY at UJA Federation of New York has released a very informative and readable report, which can be downloaded for free on their website. It's worth downloading, and sharing with your synagogue staff and board members. It's illuminating, and accessible.

The congregations in the project helped leaders examine their assumptions not based on anecdotal evidence or gut reactions, but with hard data. In many cases, the difference was profound.

“We had tried social programming in the past but never got the turnout we hoped for, which led us to conclude (wrongly) that people did not want to make social connections through the Religious School. Measuring Success helped us develop a targeted follow-up survey to probe deeper about social connections. That led to an “aha moment” when we learned that people do want to make social connections, they just do not want us to add new events to their calendars. When we realized that, we took steps to build socializing and community-building into existing events," reported Barri Waltcher, Vice President and Chair of Religious School Committee, Temple Shaaray Tefila.

“Our congregation’s leadership engages in ongoing discussions regarding how to best spend our resources to fulfill our mission. I now understand that we have been acting in a bubble, often divorced from the needs, desires, and perspective of our membership," shared Rabbi Michael White from Temple Sinai of Roslyn Heights. They now have greater focus on where they should be making investments to achieve their goals, and ultimately strengthen their financial sustainability too.

On October 17, 2012 leaders from congregations involved in the Sustainable Synagogue Business Models program will be sharing insights from their experience. Learn more about the lunchtime webinar (12pm-1pm eastern) and sign up here.

How Seattle Childrens Hospital Went Outside The Box With Its Facebook Page

August 24, 2012March 5, 2018 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

Darim is hosting a blog carnival (a series of posts from various guest bloggers on a topic) on "Connected Congregations". The following post from Shel Holtz (originally published on his blog and shared here with persmission) as such profound implications for how synagogues can be supporting and connecting and empowering their community and individual members.

The bold human and emotional statement made clear in this story should inspire congregational leaders to reenvision not only how to use their Facebook pages, but how to be a positive organizing force in their communities. I invite you to share reactions, ideas or your own examples in the comments. What could this look like in a congregational setting?

For some time, hospitals have had Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and a host of other social channels. Like most other organizations, the hard-coded institutional mindset limits the uses to which hospitals put these networks. Upcoming events, health tips, medical news reports, staff spotlights and recognition characterize the usual hospital feeds.

As with other institutions, hospitals need to make outside-the-box thinking with their pages the new inside-the-box. You now have a channel to engage with people who find you interesting, important, relevant or useful. How can you take advantage of that?

Years ago, when I interviewed him for a newsletter article, User Interface Engineering founder and CEO Jared Spool told me that any technology could accomplish only three things. It can solve a problem, improve a process or let you do something that simply wasn’t possible before.

Where are the opportunities to problem solving, process improvement or innovation in a hospital Facebook page?

It took an artist-in-residence to come up with one answer at Seattle Children’s Hospital. John Blalock was making routine visits to the room of 16-year-old patient Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem, who had been stuck in the hospital for weeks for treatment of graft-versus-host disease, which appeared after her November 2011 bone marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia.

Along with all the other things Barzallo Sockemtickem missed about being at home, heer cat Merry topped the list. Merry was the subject of most of her conversations with Blalock, who has worked with other patients on photo and music video projects. He first asked other Children’s Hospital staffers for pictures of their cats, but it was the patient herself who pointed out that he could score a lot more photos with a request on the hospital’s Facebook page. The request asked for photos to be posted to the wall by July 25.

The post drew more than 1,000 comments, the vast majority of them accompanied by photos. Ultimately, more than 3,000 photos arrived, with snail-mail adding to those shared on Facebook.

On the day of the deadline, Blalock erected a tent of sheets over Barzallo Sockemtickem’s bed onto which he projected the images of the slideshow. A video of the virtual cat immersion chamber posted to YouTube has been viewed nearly 190,000 times.

The story is heartwarming. An NPR report quoted Barzallo Sockemtickem saying, “In the hospital, you feel cut off. You lose contact with regular people. So the photos made me feel like I was part of the world again.”

It’s a demonstration of the healing power of felines. Hospitals also should be scheming about how to use the palliative properties of art. “All hospitals are such a blank slate for doing art because you can take a medical experience and transform it,” Blalock said.

For communicators tasked with fueling a hospital’s social media efforts, the tale should also spark some thinking beyond the usual grist for the newsfeed mill. Artist-in-residence Blalock is already on to his next brainstorm for how to tap the power of the Net; he’s thinking about how to fuse Skype to a robot that will move among patients in the cancer ward, opening the outside world to them.

The simple Facebook request for photos no doubt did wonders for Seattle Children’s Hospital, since commenting and adding photos boosts a page’s Edgerank score like little else, getting the hospital’s updates onto the newsfeeds of people who have liked the page. The awareness of the story resulted in considerable news coverage; many of the web reports included the YouTube video, further expanding coverage. The YouTube video invites you to visit the Facebook page to see all the photos.

The thinking behind Blalock’s innovation did not begin with, “How can I use the hospital’s Facebook page,” or even, “Is this something I can use the Facebook page for?” It was rather Barzallo Sockemtickem’s recognition that expanding the search for photos to Facebook improved the process of soliciting hospital staff for their pictures.

That’s a mindset that has been outside the box for most hospitals. The more we can change the way we look at the social tools at our disposal, the more we’ll be able to apply them to problems, processes and innovations that can genuinely help people while shining a light on the compassionate care the hospital delivers.

People Have a Lot to Say About Where to Buy Challah!

July 18, 2012 by

Lisa Colton Leave a comment

Guest post by Pam Barkley, Director of Education at Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, NY

Did you know that people have a lot to say about where to buy challah?

When we began the year as Social Media Bootcamp participants, we had big ideas about building community online, creating an open forum for questions, and having meaningful conversations outside of the classroom.

As it turns out, parents weren’t particularly interested in our big ideas. As others have described here, people read our posts but did not often comment. They would look to see the student work I had posted, but not feel the need to continue that conversation on facebook. This left us feeling enormously frustrated and wondering what we were doing wrong. Were we not asking the right questions? Did parents just not care? Was this whole thing just a bad idea?

And then, following a post I read someplace about keeping things really simple, I posted the following: “Anyone know where to get a really good challah?”

Mind you, my children, through their school, bring home challah every Friday afternoon. I didn’t actually need a challah. But I wanted to see what would happen. And wouldn’t you know it? Turns out people have a lot of advice about challah buying! I got lots of comments and even an offer to pick one up for me and deliver it to my office.

After discussing this with the team, what we have discovered is that grown ups want to feel competent. They like to tell me where to buy a challah because it is something that they feel they really know about. They have tasted the challah and think it is good. But when we asked, “What is one Jewish thing you did this week?” They are silent because all of a sudden it’s like they are in 5^th grade and Mrs. Shaw just called on them when they didn’t know the right answer. It goes something like this: “If I write that I visited a sick neighbor, is that enough? No that’s too stupid for me to write. Is that even a Jewish thing? It’s probably not Jewish enough. But I didn’t light candles on Friday or anything like that which is what they are looking for…oh forget it I won’t say anything.” And so, not only is the comment field blank, but we have actually made someone feel like what they are doing is somehow not enough.

Not exactly our goal.

This is not to say that people can’t be moved into deeper conversations eventually. But for the moment, when trying out the use of social media, it seems best to keep things reasonably light and simple. There can be no perceived judgment about what is the “right” or “wrong” kind of response. I think it is hard for those of us steeped in Jewish education to see that sometimes even the most innocent questions are in fact laden with judgment to the average reader. As we move forward with a brand new website, weekly blogs and the rest, it is important for us to remember that we have to build our online conversations around topics everyone feels comfortable discussing. We have to make people feel like they have something to add to the discussion and that their contributions online are valuable. This is not an easy task, but it is the first step towards those bigger goals we started with.

In the meantime, since it is summer now and my children are no longer in school, I have plenty of new places to get challah from!

Pam Barkley is the Director of Education at Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, NY. This congregation participated in Darim’s Social Media Boot Camp for Educators over the past year, generously funded by the Covenant Foundation. You can find them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tbatarrytown