Creating an Engagement Map for Your Synagogue

(Technology and Social Media, Marketing, Organizational Development)
 
Your ability to enhance the relevancy of Judaism and to engage constituents, prospective members and the community at large is key to the strength of your congregation. Once engaged, your membership’s participation will grow. It is a wonderful cycle that will continue, and yet, requires a plan that not only invites people in to participate, but creates ongoing paths of involvement with no dead ends. This can often be challenging as we all get absorbed in our day-to-day tasks, and can neglect setting an over-arching engagement course--an engagement map, if you will. Be deliberate in this endeavor, move to a more proactive plan to engage and connect with your community.

Deepening relationships and increasing commitments doesn’t tend happen out of luck. Your course of action may start with creating a new task group to plan this out. Creating task groups is an engagement strategy to involve more members in your community. A task group has a limited agenda and a limited time commitment, plus a lower barrier to entry than committee membership.  

Here are three things you and your leadership should think about with regard to engagement:

·         Not all members are the same. A synagogue has multiple groups it needs to engage. Start by identifying your membership and segmenting. You can use the traditional membership classifications such as Hebrew school Parents, Boomers, Empty Nesters, or create your own based on criteria which might include age, gender, interests, needs, patterns, etc. Every synagogue will have different membership segments. The overall intent is to identify groups of similar members and potential members, to prioritize the groups to engage, to understand their patterns and to respond with appropriate engagement strategies. This path will lead to greater engagement, retention, vitality, new membership and in the end, increased revenues.

·         Engagement needs to be designed for individual members. First, avoid top-down engagement programming. For engagement programming to be successful, you have to understand the needs of your member segments and then create programming that will truly begin to engage them. Understanding needs can be accomplished through several basic assessment options:

             - Low barrier to entry is creating an online survey. Go to www.surveymonkey.com with a prepared list of questions.
              - You can also mail this same survey to your members for those not apt to see it online. Remember to provide them a return stamped and self-addressed envelope with the survey, as this will increase responses.
              - And last, you could create a series of gatherings in members’ homes, engage them in a conversation and give the opportunity to fill out a survey. While this requires a greater commitment, it will yield the most engagement.
Your biggest challenge after this assessment process is to prioritize the outcome. What are the key opportunities that will begin to create an ongoing engagement path for more members?

·         Membership engagement can lead to overall synagogue alignment. Change in synagogue organizational life is part of the new world that we are now living in. There are new challenges for professional leadership and lay leadership. Often these challenges divert attention to (important) short-term issues, which may result in longer term alignment initiatives taking a back seat in the ongoing work load. Focusing and delivering on membership engagement is a way of creating a cohesive and proactive leadership. Membership engagement is about putting your members’ needs first. Focus on member needs and the synagogue organization will come together behind this effort.

Creating an engagement map involves developing the entryways into your community and ongoing paths to deepen the relationship with your members. By creating a task group, you are creating an opportunity to bring key stake holders into the process -- always an excellent strategy in membership engagement. What are the pathways in your organization? Are they navigable? Do you make it easy to get involved? How do you take the relationship to the next level?