JewishBoston.com

Why do we need JewishBoston.com?

We sent out the email yesterday asking people to submit their data to us for JewishBoston.com. We've received a great immediate response! As of first thing this morning we received 36 completed surveys.  Thank you!  Keep going!

We also heard a few questions about the site.  Here are some of the questions I was asked:

We already have a website, why would we need JewishBoston.com?

• The answer here is simple. We are not trying to replace your website, we are trying to help your market your organization, and reach more of the community.
• One of the big things we heard, not only in the sessions for the CJP Strategic Plan but the community sessions for JewishBoston.com, was that information about all of the Jewish resources in the Boston area is hard to find. By sharing your organization info on JewishBoston.com, you're helping people find you and make the connection that they are seeking. 
• And, if you don't have certain tools on your website - like event registration - JewishBoston.com can augment your existing site.

Why would I need JewishBoston.com if I already have a listserv/mailing list/newsletter?

• JewishBoston.com won't change what how you communicate to the people already involved with your organization.  Use JewishBoston.com to tell your story and promote your events and programs to the greater community.

Is there a cost to being listed on JewishBoston.com?

• No, CJP is providing JewishBoston.com as a service to the entire community.  There is no charge for organizations to list themselves, add events or blog posts to JewishBoston.com. Our goal is to help more people participate in Jewish life across all of Boston. 

Thanks for these questions!  We will be creating a frequently asked questions portion of the site. What other questions would you have for us?

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.

All things in moderation, including moderation

We had a lively discussion last night at the JewishBoston Working Group meeting about moderation policy.  (FYI, the working group is a incredible group of CJP volunteers who have been keeping Liz and me on track.  More about them later in a separate post).

Based on this conversation, I'm compiling a list of best practices and policies so that we can understand how to balance openess, civility, technology development and overhead.

Here's a question we're grappling with - should we moderate before comments go live or moderate after the fact?

Questions for organizations re the directory, moderation, and e-commerce

This morning, I sent out the following note to participants in the organizational brainstorming sessions.  We welcome your feedback as well!

Patty

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Friends –

As we begin the year, Liz and I wanted to give you a brief update on JewishBoston.com and get your feedback on a few open questions.

A brief update:

In general, the project is going very well; our biggest challenge is just how much work there is to do and making sure that we stay focus on what really matters for our first release, which is slated to launch on March 1.  

This release will include events calendar, registration and e-commerce, blogs, and a resource directory.  We also expect to include personalized e-newsletters for registered users to be notified of the events and news that matters most to them.  We’ll be documenting the decisions and progress on the blog at www.jewishboston.com.

If we work backwards from March 1, our goal is to train you on how to use the site in February.  To make it easy for you, we plan on importing basic information about your organization in January.  We’ll be reaching out to you in the October/November timeframe about putting that data together.  Also, we will be bringing in event information from the CJP calendar, so if you aren’t already, please start to use www.cjp.org/calendar to promote your events.  We know that to make the site useful on March 1, we have to begin collecting the information now.

Your feedback please:

Cantina, our software partner, is asking that we make decisions about some key design issues for the directory, blogs, and e-commerce.  If you have a few minutes, your feedback would be very helpful!

1.  Relationship of Programs to Organizations

For larger organizations, there will be a need to create separate resource directory listings for programs. 

• When should a separate listing be created? 
• When should a listing not be created?

For larger programs such as the Boston-Haifa Connection or Prozdor, the program itself starts to look more like an organization and may need access to organizational tools.

• When do programs get blogs?
• Do programs ever need separate e-commerce capabilities from their parent organizations?
• What administrative rights over programs should the organization itself have?

2.  Blogs

For the initial launch of JewishBoston, we are imagining a simple blog functionality that all organizations (and maybe programs) will be able to use.  The blog posts will appear on the organizational page and feed up to the home page.  It will be possible to flag a post as an announcement.

For these blogs, we envision that the organizationally approved bloggers will be able to write and publish their own posts.  JewishBoston administration will have editorial and administrative capabilities if needed. To keep it as simple as possible in v1, we are not planning to separate out blogging roles between people who post and people who publish, but we are expecting to make the user interface very clear and to cover process in training.

Civility is a significant concern for blogging and commenting all around the web.  What do you think about the following ideas on moderation and commenting?

• A centralized moderation policy and administration by JewishBoston.com administrators
• The ability to turn on or off comment moderation across the entire site
• The ability for an organization to turn off commenting on any post.  We think that there may be blog topics that you don’t want comments on, and we will provide the capability to allow or not allow comments on a post by post basis.
• The ability for a user to flag any post as abuse.  Wherever self-policing is possible, we think that would be helpful for community vibrancy and ownership.
• The requirement for all commenters to have a real email address
• The ability for registered users who use their real name to submit comments that are live immediately.  People’s real names, town, and maybe organization would display in the comment.
• The ability to moderate comments from non-registered users
• The ability to block a particular user from commenting
• Filters to block profanity and comment spam

3. E-commerce
At this point, we are leaning towards using either Amazon Payments or Google Checkout because of ease of organization use, the quickness with which payments are deposited, administration, and security.  We are still reviewing if we can make the user experience seamless enough and if there’s a way to reduce the fee structure.

Questions for you:

• Are you currently using a payment system?
• If so, are you happy with it?  What features would you change?
• If we made it easy to transition to a new system, would you be interested?
• If you are a large organization with large programs, do you need a separate credit card capability for your programs?
• If so, how would you want to administer it?

Many thanks for your input!  We’ll circulate answers and draft policies as we develop them.  We’ve also heard that there’s interest in having monthly update meetings, and we’re planning on doing on first meeting towards the end of October. 

With warm regards,

Patty

Pay to pray? There is always a way.

The High Holidays are upon us. This Friday is erev Rosh Hashanah of the year 5770, may it be a sweet year. 

For many Jews, this time of year is the only time they set foot in a synagogue. But for some of us, this time of year is a challenge.  Where do I go to find services?  What if I don't belong to a congregation?  Have you seen the cost of those seats?

For many young adults or families with limited means, those costs can be quite prohibitive. In this morning's Boston Metro opinion section, Levi Fishman from JOI discusses the high cost of being Jewish.

"How can we expect folks to stay involved if they cant even afford to pray?"

We absolutely agree with Mr. Fishman, and we've heard this ourselves in focus group after focus group.  For those people who turn to the community at this time of the year, cost should not be a barrier.  You shouldn't have to pay to be included.

Still, we wish that he mentioned more of the opportunities that are available, because they are many.  Chabad is just one of the avenue for free services.  In the CJP website, ShalomBoston and the GesherCity website offer lists of free or open High Holiday services.  With CJP funding, GesherCity has been able to offer subsidized tickets. Congregations such as Nehar Shalom and Temple Ohabai Shalom are among those who are open to non-members. Some places ask for a modest contribution to help defray costs. 

Beyond cost, the challenge remains that you have to know these services and programs are out there in order to find them.  By next fall, we hope to lower this information barrier significantly.  Until then, we hope that you use these resources to find a service that meets your needs. 

For us at JewishBoston, we will be adding a meditation on creating an open community, an open heart, and a open mind to our High Holiday prayers.

Our kickoff presentation to Cantina on the Greater Boston Jewish Community

One of the more unexpected aspects of the vendor selection process is that we're hired a software partner where not one team member is Jewish. 

Chris, who's the user experience guru, lived in a Jewish fraternity during college, but that's as close as any of them get. (Chris said this was because "they were the coolest group of people."  Right answer!)

It's not that we didn't interview developers who had Jewish team members or managers; we did. It's just that, when it came down to it, Cantina had the best fit, the most experience, and the right technical skills. 

As a consequence, an unusual part of yesterday's kickoff meeting was a 60 minute overview of Jewish life in general and the Boston community in particular. At least, it was supposed to be an hour long.  We did run over over a bit.

It was a fun experience distilling down so much of what I've learned in past five years at CJP - work on the 2005 community study, the intermarriage report, and the strategic plan. 

See what you think of the overview. Was I on track?  What else do YOU think they should know? 

We're comfortable that the team here and all of our partners will provide the right Jewish content and feel.  But still, it made us a little nervous.  What do you think?

Resources for Young Adults

I met today with Karyn Cohen who is directing CJP's young adult strategy.  Lots of great stuff going on - small grants programs, Community Leadership Institute, and new social entrepreneur efforts in process (and much more). 

Karyn pointed me to a list of organizations for twenty-thirty somethings.  Worth sharing!

See the Resource Guide to Young Adult Jewish Boston.  Please let us know if you have organizations to add to this list or any corrections and we'll pass it along.

He said, she said, we all said - the community workshops

One of the things we've been doing in the past six months has been running a series of community and organizational workshops.  It was a great experience.  Collectively, we're not a shy community and people had lots of terrific thoughts about what JewishBoston.com should be doing.

Here are links to two documents from the workshops:

First is the summary of findings.  We've since used this to help inform the RFP for the site.

Second is the detailed list of all the ideas from the community workshops.  (You'll need Microsoft Excel for this one.)

The most inspiring feedback from the sessions was the consistent interest in the same things:  show me all the events, make it easy for me to find them, let me search a complete directory of all resourses, and help me find a path to Jewish life in Boston.

What do YOU want from JewishBoston.com? Take the survey