JewishBoston.com

Organization Rountable Discussions

For the last several months, Patty and I have been holding roundtable discussions so organizations can actively play a role in the building and marketing of JewishBoston.com. We've had great participation and many great thoughts and ideas have come from these meetings.

On December 7th, we're holding another one. This discussion will focus on marketing and launch plans (an idea that came from our last meeting!), and as always to answer any questions and hear your thoughts and ideas about this project. We currently have 17 participants and can only squeeze in a couple more for this session. If you want to join Patty and I for this discussion, please email me and I'll be happy to include you. If we go over what we can fit into the room, we'll simply hold a 2nd meeting to accommodate everyone. These meetings are held at JF&CS in Waltham.

If you want to talk about JewishBoston.com or want to find out more and are unable to make it to Waltham for these meetings, please contact me and I would be happy to fill you in on this exciting project!

We have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving! Have a great week!

Website metrics and knowledge management

One of the things that can be mind-numbing about websites is just how much data they generate. 

How many visitors did you have today?  Did they just wave or did they stay and talk?  Did they start to do something - register for an event and then change their mind? 

Making sense of these the options reminds me of the knowledge management graphic that that we used during my Notes consulting days. I still like it.

[See Wikipedia for more about the DIKW model.]
 

What JewishBoston.com will look like

With Cantina and the very talented Chris Capotosto, our designer, we're buttoning up the final site design.  Starting now, Cantina starts coding and we focus more and more on site rollout, marketing and training. 

So here they are! 

These jpgs will load in your browser. You will need to click on them or zoom in to be able to see them at the right size

Home page

Events listing

An event detail

The events newsletter

Voices listing

Resources listing

Resources detail

User registration and thank you

If you go really deep on these, you'll see that there are slight changes on some mockups that didn't get made across all of them.  Also, the categories are close but not final or complete. And the data is a little wonkly.  Just letting you know :-)

40 great resources for developing a community management strategy

A straight up shout out to the Venessa Miemis of emergent by design for this great list.

Thank you!

How do you define success?

In the last week, I've been asked the same question several times:  What does success look like?

The answer depends on how we define success.  

On a tactical level, we can define and measure success in very granular ways.  Success might be the the number of unique visitors per month or hitting a a target for the number of event registrations executed through JewishBoston.com. 

We'll be using Google Analytics to track these types of statistics, which are essential to improving the site over time and to understanding what services and functionality people are using the most.

Beyond the numbers, success is also anecdotal.  Success is hearing from our community partners how much easier it is to promote their events, from our young adult leadership that it's easier to invite their friends to join them, and from someone new to town that they found everything they needed to learn about the community on JewishBoston.com.

But in case you ARE interested in the numbers, here's a really early and really rough draft of our metrics which we're discussing tomorrow.  After we finalize our key performance indicators, we'll set up the reporting and targets. 

Download JewishBoston_Metrics_Draft_of_Nov_18_2009

 

Moderation redux

Just to close the loop on the moderation discussion that we had around Yom Kippur, here's where we ended up:

In the first version, registration is required for all comments and posts.  After your first post is approved, you'll be good to go for live posting, except if we decide that certain categories - such as Israel - require moderation of all posts. 

Organizational and JewishBoston.com bloggers will be able to post immediately but are subject to the same community rules that apply to everyone.

The moderation guideliness will lay out these rules succinctly and clearly, and all users, whether registered or not, will have the ability to flag a post for review.

We'll post these community guidelines in a month or so once we start editing them.  If you have a site with guidelines you like, respect, and use, please let us know. 

JewishBoston.com - Home Page Design Finalized

We're delighted to be able to share the home page design for JewishBoston.com.  Let us know what you think!

 

You may ask... how did you make these design choices?

1. The number one request that we heard from individuals and organizations was... "Make it easy for me to find out what's going on."  So we designed the site to make it easy to see featured events, events in date order or events near you.  Clicking on the Events tab will take you to a detailed page where it will be easy to find exactly what you want by interest, geography or age.
   
2. You also asked for a bit of chatter.  Organizations, JewishBoston.com bloggers, and all registered individuals can contribute their own blog posts, recommendations, and commentary for everyone to see and comment on.  These bubble up to the Voices column or tab.
   
3. We also heard people asking for a complete resource directory - and also for tidbits here and there about organizations that they may not have heard about.  The third column features different organizations or programs every week and the full directory is on the resources tab.  Of course, at any point you can use search to find what you need or want. 

Three other elements to note:

• We heard people say... I get too much email. So now you'll be able to sign up for your own personalized event email, which will send you weekly updates with the types of events you're interested in.  It's up to you.
  
• That same information will show on the My JewishBoston.com tab. Over time, we'll add more personalization options but even in the first release you'll have a shortcut to your own specialized event listing. It really is My JewishBoston.
  
• If you're a Facebook user, you can login with your Facebook id - and easily share information about events and voices and resources with your friends on Facebook.  Our goal is to be part of your social media life online, not something separate.

Anyway, it's all very exciting.  Hope you agree!

 

Questions from the Community Leadership Institute

Liz and I had a terrific session yesterday with 15 young community leaders at CJP's Community Leadership Institute. 

They asked great questions: 

• What are you trying to achieve with the site?
• What are its long term goals?
• What will make people come back to it?
• How will it be different from other sites?
• Who is it targeting?
• Will it be accessible to all demographics?
• Are there other sites like this?
• Where did the idea come from?
• Where will the content come from?
• How will this benefit people who are new to Boston?
• How will this make people come to my programs?
• How do we leverage, but not overuse, social media?

What I love about these questions is both their accuracy and their persistence.  In all our conversations about the site, people consistently say they want the same things (events, resources, interesting info, convenience) and have the same questions.

Below are a few answers. 

• The goal of JewishBoston.com is to make it easy for more people to participate in Jewish life. 
• The site has to serve everyone in the community, with a special focus on engaging the next generation. 
• We don't underestimate the content challenge. If it's useful or interesting, people will come back.  Of course, this assumes good marketing, an effective launch process, and good support for all of our organizational partners!  We will be monitoring usage very carefully and continuing the feedback process to adjust as needed. 
• The idea came out of the CJP Strategic Planning process.  We're breaking new ground here; as far as we know, there is no other community doing this.  All of what we're developing is open source software that will be free for others to re-use.
• Social media continues to grow and evolve. We've focused on the key building blocks for this release, with the expectation that the site will also grow and evolve.

We're collecting all of these questions, which will form the starting point of the FAQ on the site.  Very helpful! 

Let us know what questions you'd like to add to the list.

Participating in the conversation

Last Wednesday we had a fantastic meeting with 15 or so professionals from different Jewish organizations and discussed content for JewishBoston.com.  

One of the best parts of working on this project is the shared feeling of ownership that is emerging in these conversations, the sense that this site is something that we're creating together, and that together we will make it successful.

If you work for a Jewish organization and want to make sure that you or your organization is included in these discussions, please drop us a line at jewishboston@cjp.org.

Thanks!