5 Ways to Get Your Website Ready for Membership Season

When I was a kid, I would listen to my mom talk on the phone with prospective members.  She would answer all of their questions about our synagogue treating everyone kindly and taking the time to get to know them.  The countless hours she spent at the kitchen table were well worth the time and effort because families felt a personal connection to our community.

Although times have changed, creating that personal connection with prospective members is still very important today.  But, how do we do this in the digital age?  Gone are the days when someone picks up the phone and asks for a membership packet and a tour.  Today, it is your synagogue website needs to make an important first impression and provide a window into your community.  As the summer approaches and families begin to shul shop and register their kids for religious school, here are some sure-fire ways to get your website ready for membership season.

Home Page – View your website from the perspective of a new member.  How easy is it for you to find the membership section of your website? Can you tell what time this week’s Shabbat service starts?  Is there a link to religious school information?  Did you advertise your upcoming open house in a prominent place?  Get the entire congregation involved by asking current members to invite a friend to check out their synagogue.

Membership Page – What is the overall message and tone of your membership page?  Is it "for more information, contact so and so at this number…" If so, consider a more warm and welcoming approach in which you explain the benefits of joining the synagogue.  Provide testimonials of members who have recently joined or who have been in the community for a long time.  Ask your rabbi to write a welcome letter  – or better yet – produce a video of him in his office extending a warm welcome to prospective members. 

Photos – Prospective members want to see people like themselves reflected on your home page and throughout your website.  If you are looking to attract young families, post pictures of other young families in your congregation during holiday celebrations, family education programs or mitzvah projects.  Are you marketing your synagogue to the baby boomer generation and senior population?  Put up pictures of trips, clubs and get-togethers that your older members are participating in.

Forms & Links – When you download your financial aid or membership forms, does it still say 2011 at the top?  Are all of the deadlines current?  Prospective members who see out-of-date forms on your website will wonder if they are the right forms to fill out.  Upon seeing expired dates and the wrong forms, they may delay sending in their information and the check to your office and opt to call you instead – when they get around to it.

Clean Up – Take down old event information and put up new programs.  Instead, add summer and fall events to your on-line calendar.  What open houses or summer events are you planning?  What is coming up in the fall?  How do families get their High Holiday tickets?

When you update your website with accurate information, engaging photos, and upcoming events, you are providing a window into your community. Creating a good first impression on-line will inspire prospective members to pick up the phone or stop by and seriously consider becoming a new member in your congregation.


Elisa Heisman is a Program Director at Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, PA. She is also the immediate past president of Program Directors for Reform Judaism and the founder of Shul Solutions – a full service consulting company helping congregations with membership initiatives, program development and creating effective communications.

A Look at Google Sites

Managing lots of information, relationships, and resources can be a challenge for any organization. While it can be easy to be overwhelmed by the variety of options on the market and their pricing there is one platform I recommend you explore, and its free: Google Sites.

I came across Google Sites while searching for solutions for managing the production of PresenTense Magazine, which entailed upward of 80 volunteers collaborating around 30 articles over the course of several months per issue. Our contributors spread from Los Angeles to Jerusalem to Budapest and everywhere in between. I needed to store items as varied as drafts of the articles themselves; spreadsheets recording who was working on what; and running blog-style thoughts from conference calls and online and in-person brainstorms. It was crucial that everyone on the team could easily access the information necessary to do their job true when working with colleagues, and perhaps even more so when working with volunteers.

Satisfying all of these specifications could be seen as a challenge. However, once the right platform of Google Sites was discovered and properly developed, managing our bountiful ecosystem of data helped enable us to convert our advantages such as geographic diversity, a multitude of ideas, and an eager crew of enthusiastic volunteers into opportunities.

Here are some benefits, tips, and drawbacks Ive discovered in Google Sites. I hope you will consider them and that they will similarly help you turn your organizational assets into opportunities.

Why use Google Sites?

Everything organized in one place.
Rather than dealing with a litany of Google Docs, you can not only store them in one place, but also use article-style pages to organize links to spreadsheets, blog pages, and file cabinets (where you can store files such as images, documents, or presentations).

Easy to learn to customize your own site.
To set up a site effectively might take a bit of practice, but it does not take knowledge of HTML. If you spend some time exploring the different template options, you can build a functional site in just a few clicks and it is easily customizable to exactly your needs.

Convinced? Heres how to use it!

Learn how to take advantage of the templates
Think about how the different templates could make sense for your use. The templates can be highly effective if you apply the right template to the right purpose. For instance, the template called List can be a to-do list or task management tool, a spreadsheet that stores contact information, or a list organizing other items stored in the site (i.e. you can link directly to article pages or file cabinets within the site). The templates each offer great flexibility so you can customize them for your purpose.

The more organized you can be, the better!
You can at any point reorganize the skeleton outline of your site (which pages are organized under which other page). You can also create a table of contents which allows users to easily jump to the page theyre looking for. Take advantage of these organizational methods to make sure everyone working on the project can find what they need, fast.

A word of caution: A few Google Sites drawbacks

Not the best tool for engagement
While Sites is a great way to store information such that it is easily accessible, in my experience it has been difficult to use it to start conversations. Perhaps the user interface is not intuitive, or requires a greater investment of time to figure out than people who are just looking for information to do their job are willing to give.

Sharing can be a little complicated
If you do not have a Google account, you have to go through the extra step of creating one. While in theory this should be an easy process, I have had some non-Gmail-users unable to find how to access Sites, and this can be a source of frustration. If your information isn’t particularly confidential, you could consider making the site public (viewable to anyone) for the duration of the project. I’ve used this approach at times and it has helped overcome this obstacle.

Whether or not you ultimately decide to use Google Sites, I do recommend that, before embarking on any new endeavor in iformation management, you take a moment to answer these questions yourself, and/or survey your coworkers on their thoughts and needs:

  • What tools do you currently use to manage your projects, and if they are not working, why not?
  • What functions are on your wish-list for information management?

Then, you can more knowledgeably find the tools that will work for you and find ways to more consciously tailor and employ them for your specific purposes. After all, at the end of the day, tools are only as effective as what we make of them!

Have you used Google Sites in your work? If so, how? What other tools have you experimented with for information management?

deborahDeborah Fishman is a network weaver interested in new opportunities to create change in the Jewish world. She was most recently Editor and Publisher of PresenTense Magazine. She blogs at hachavaya.blogspot.com.

How Much Should A Nonprofit Website Cost?

Laura Quinn posted a great piece on the Idealware blog recently about what you get for your money when building a web site. We get questions all the time about how much an organization should budget for a new site, and what you get for each step up. We all know dollars are scarce, and it’s important to be able to make the case for why you should or should not budget a certain amount for your site.

First, let’s talk about the variables which influence the cost of a site:

  • Design — less expensive sites offer little or no graphic design flexibility. Choose a template, a color, and drop in your logo. Moderate sites offer more customized and creative design services, and more expensive sites offer more detailed design, and may present multiple design concepts to choose from.
  • Content Management — license of a CMS is usually included in moderate to higher priced sites. May not be in lower range sites. However, many people who save money here end up paying much more in per hour fees to update or change content on the site down the line. And content is key, so a CMS should be a non-negotiable on your list.
  • Functionality — the more functions you want your site to serve, the more it may cost. However, there are many free or low cost third party widgets you can drop into your site these days to add forms, polls, video, donations, etc. Thus, make sure that the platform will support such things if you plan to go this route.
  • Strategic Consulting — any web site is just a tool to help you achieve your mission and goals. Thus, you should think about what you will need, and how you will use towards these goals. A low cost web site project will be just simple execution of the site. A higher cost project will include more consulting, strategic guidance, recommendations and education throughout the process to help you use the tools more effectively. Some will also offer ongoing availability for such assistance through an annual support contract.
  • Support — a low end site will likely leave you on your own once it’s launched. A higher cost project will offer phone and/or email support should you have tech support questions or need guidance after launch.
  • Hosting — some vendors offer hosting with their site development, and others require you to have the site hosted yourself. Though these costs are often not huge, it’s important to budget for a service that updates their servers regularly, offers 24/7 server monitoring should something go down, automatic and regular back ups, and security features to guard against hacking (there have been a small number of anti-semitic web site hacks in the past few years on synagogue sites that were not well protected).

Finally, when budgeting for such a project, don’t forget to add in the costs for the staff time to create (and/or re-purpose) content and post it on the site, and for managing your broader social media strategy if you have one (Facebook, blogging, etc.). We find this cost is often overlooked in the planning stages, but is critical to get a return on your investment and to use the available tools to their best potential.

The Idealware post offers brief descriptions of what you can expect for $1K, $5K, $15K, $50K and $100K. How did you weigh the costs and benefits to determine your web site design budget?