What are other Jewish communities doing?

One question about JewishBoston that comes up frequently is... What are other Jewish communities doing?  Is anyone else doing something like this?

The short answer is no, not really. 

Here's my take on why.  Jewish Federations face two competing demands for web investments.  The first is what do we do for our own websites?  For example how can www.cjp.org best meet the need to educate and engage donors in our work.  The second question is what do Federations do programmatically to leverage the promise of technology throughout our communities.

For most of us, our focus is on our own Federation website.  For many years, we were able to rely on a product from the Jewish Federations of North America.  Perhaps ten years ago, they launched a remarkably innovative set of tools for federations around the country. Called Fedweb, it offers local federations a bundled set of functionality:  content management, ecommerce, event registration, and email marketing.  Over 100 of us, including CJP, still use it.  For what we get, the price is right; our fees are about $2500/month.

Sadly, however, the UJC platform hasn't keep current with the changing needs of nonprofits.  The new Jewish Federations marketing team is doing a great job, offering new flash components for holidays and new media guidebooks from Blue State Digital. But Fedweb itself is a pretty challenging environment to work in. 

So most Federations who have the resources to do so are working on or have implemented alternative platforms.  New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are on different systems.  San Francisco is about to do so, and Montreal is exploring their options.  Here at CJP, we're looking to improve what we're doing in the short run and beginning to budget for a new cjp.org site. 

What's really different and unique about Boston's approach is our decision to focus on the programmatic investment in JewishBoston.com.  When I tell people in other communities that we're taking the community functionality out of CJP.org and putting it into JewishBoston.com, they get it and think it's a good idea. But understandly so, most Federations are focused on their own marketing problem.   

As we launch, it's our hope that JewishBoston.com will be a model for other communities and that others will choose to replicate our approach, leverage our investment, and, most importantly, make it easy for everyone to participate in Jewish life. 

Comments

[john smith]

$2500/month for FedWeb!? $30k/year. What's right about that price? I hope you plan to dump that asap and evaluate what you got out of it.

[JewishBoston]

Do you really think that this cost is unreasonable? What I've seen is that somewhat comparable hosted services from Convio or Kintera run about the same and have higher variable costs.

However those systems don't typically include Federation-specific needs such as the Jewish calendar, candlelighting and Torah portion information, centralized content library, fundraising materials, community calendar and resource guide, and distributed event management. So Fedweb is a bit more than a CMS platform.

While we haven't done a full assessment of the design, implementation, and ongoing costs to replace Fedweb for CJP, I think it will be hard for us to do much better.

After JewishBoston.com is up and running, we'll have a better opportunity to review what CJP needs to have for its own marketing purposes, how it can leverage the capabilities of the new site, and what features are required.

We'd welcome your thoughts about other platforms.