Making Your Website Committee Work Productively

There is a great deal of discussion happening today with regard to all the social media choices available for a synagogue. Should the Rabbi have a blog? How often should we send our e-newsletter? Should we be tweeting? And on and on. All these discussions and tools are important. But just like your own home, you wouldn't add a new porch to a house in disrepair. And in the land of Synagogue social media, your home is your website.  

And just like your home, any renovations you might be making to your website need a plan before you jump in and start building. Here are 3 foundational steps that your website committee cannot overlook:

1.  Establish clear goals for your site.
Designing and building a website through a committee is a challenging process. Your committee should begin by establishing 3 clear goals. Having 5 or 7 goals is like having no goals; the fewer goals the more effective your group will be. The primary purpose of this goal-setting exercise is to have a clear understanding of priorities. Your goals will come in handy as you get into various discussions that could have you headed down a rabbit hole. Clear, simple, direct objectives provide the foundation for your website road map. They will become the guide posts for all the work you do. Simply put—goals help keep you on track.

2.  Look at other websites to establish what you want.
One of the first things your committee should do is look at other synagogue websites. What do they like? What don’t they like? And don’t stop at just synagogue websites. Do a thorough job of reviewing multiple websites in the Jewish community and your favorite non-Jewish sites as well. The more time you spend looking at websites, especially community-based websites, the clearer you will become around what you want and what you don’t want for your website.

3.  Create the roadmap.          
You are one step away from turning this assignment over to a website designer.  And you will find that providing the website designer with an outline of your needs will create a more  efficient and effective process for the design and build phase. The designer needs to know everything you want on your website, what engagement tools you want to feature, and most importantly, your priorities. This is work that the committee should do before it engages a designer. What is more important, the Rabbi’s page or your education program? How are you going to handle holidays? What are you looking for from a calendar? Will your Judaica shop be online? The clearer you are before you meet with the website designer, the more efficient the process will be.

In the land of synagogue social media, your home is your website. Do you use it to engage, inform and entertain? If not now, when?