From Insight to Action: A Case Study in Synagogue Engagement

Using bright spot insights as a framework for smarter, more targeted synagogue engagement

Hi, Ari here. Welcome to The Business of Jewish, my free newsletter offering an insider/outsider’s perspective on the management of professional Jewish organizations. Every month or two, I share observations and ideas from the world of Jewish communal life. If you’d like to get future issues, you can sign up here.

In The Jewish Leader as Cultural Anthropologist and The Power of Customer Insights in this Jewish Moment, I wrote about the value of taking a deeper, more human-centered approach to understanding the customers of our Jewish products and services. I argued that in a world where traditional Jewish offerings may be losing their resonance, we need to take a page from early-stage startups rebuilding from first principles using deep qualitative observations to fuel hypotheses that drive action.

In that spirit, I wanted to use synagogue life as a case study that might help illustrate the connection between insight, hypothesis, and action.

The backdrop for these observations is a challenge that's been widely discussed: Non-Orthodox synagogue attendance has dropped significantly over the past few decades, mirroring broader declines in religious participation across American prayer institutions. Synagogues have tried a wide range of tactics to address this from new service formats to different types of creative expanded social programming. There have of course been some success stories but overall, very modest movement on the broader trend.

It’s well beyond the scope of a single article to suggest how Synagogues might turn the tide. There are macro forces at play that create such strong headwinds, that even the most innovative non-orthodox synagogues often continue to struggle attracting and retaining new families. Still, in the spirit of using insights to fuel human centered solutions I wanted to suggest a few ideas.

Bright Spots as Fuel For Insight Generation

Insights can come from a wide range of sources, some more rigorous than others. We can rely on qualitative and quantitative research to systematically understand human behavior, providing structured insights into what people do and why. At the same time, we can also draw on personal experiences acknowledging the small sample size, but still giving our intuition some credit when patterns emerge.

One method for generating insights is through the concept of bright spots. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath describe bright spots as the practice of identifying what’s working and asking how we can do more of it. Rather than focusing solely on fixing what’s broken, a mindset that often leads to incremental thinking, bright spot thinking, encourages a more positive framing, using real-world successes to point toward plausible solutions.

Insight 1: Proximity Amplifies Participation

Recently, my family experienced a bright spot at a Shabbat service at our synagogue, where a rabbinic intern trained under song leader Joey Weisenberg led an alternative service in a smaller room. Weisenberg is a passionate advocate for the idea of “communal intimacy,” the notion that when you are surrounded by people who are truly singing, the energy becomes contagious. It is a bit like a rock concert: even if you are usually shy about dancing or singing, when the energy around you builds, you find yourself swept up in it.

Synagogue is no different. But for sound to become contagious, people need to be close enough together to hear and feel one another. In large, half-empty sanctuaries, energy dissipates. I’m more likely to be inspired to sing if I can hear and see other people singing around me.

Hypothesis: When people are immersed in communal sound, they are more likely to join in singing, creating a more spiritual and meaningful experience.

Potential Actions: When attendance is low, shrink the physical space. Encourage people to cluster closer to the bimah. If necessary, use a smaller room, even if it’s less grand. Prioritize density of sound over aesthetics.

Insight 2: People Want to Know Their People Will Be There

Another major factor that holds people back from attending synagogue is social uncertainty: Will I know anyone there? Will my kids know any other kids there? In Orthodox environments, it’s often a given that 75% of the time you’ll see the same families in synagogue week after week. This is not the case at non-orthodox congregations where attendance can be sporadic across different age demographics from week to week.

While it’s perhaps impractical to ask families to fill out an Evite for Shabbat, synagogues can create the next best thing: A calendar full of "anchor Shabbatot" geared toward specific communities.

Instead of generic programming, synagogues could structure their calendars around themes like:

• Day School Families Shabbat

• Teen Shabbat

• BBYO Shabbat

• Overnight Camp Shabbat

• Ramah Shabbat

Hypothesis: People are more likely to show up when they have greater certainty their peer group will be there.

Action: Build an aggressive year-round calendar that clearly signals when specific peer groups will gather. It is not enough to hope people will come; they need a clear reason to believe they will belong that day. Give specific demographics multiple opportunities per year to be in synagogue in order to build momentum.

Insight 3: If It’s Not Excellent, Don’t Run It

Synagogues face an acquisition challenge. Getting someone from their first program to their second and beyond is the ballgame. In Winning the Competition for Time, I wrote about how today’s consumers benchmark experiences not just against other Jewish institutions, but against everything else they could be doing with their time. The quality and breadth of consumer experiences have exploded over the past 20 years, and synagogues, like many institutions, can no longer assume ownership over "boring Saturdays" the way they could when I was growing up.

In many ways, synagogue experiences from the 1990s and early 2000s have had a cascading impact on how today’s parents perceive Jewish life. During their youth, competition for time was less intense, and many had less assimilated parents with a different mindset who encouraged them to attend. As a result, many people in their thirties today carry a negative impression of synagogue programming.

To change this perception, synagogues today cannot afford to endorse anything less than excellent. This means bringing in the best programmers and facilitators and sweating every dimension of the experience.

One personal illustrative bright spot comes from a Friday night service I attended at Beth Torah in Miami. The service featured four professional musicians accompanying the rabbi and cantor. The music was of a quality you might expect at an off-Broadway show and made it look like the synagogue really cared about the quality of their experiences. While the live music style service is not everyone’s cup of tea, the key takeaway is their serious investment in quality.

Hypothesis: Changing perceptions of synagogue life will require offering consistently excellent experiences that meet or exceed the standards people encounter elsewhere in their lives.

Actions: Synagogues could start by defining the guiding principles for excellence. What does success look like for every program or service? Focus on hiring top-quality facilitators, musicians, educators, and other programmers, and pay close attention to every detail from logistics to atmosphere. Be self-critical by surveying participants, reading the room in real time, and gathering qualitative feedback after programs. If a program cannot meet a high standard, it may be better not to run it. When resources are limited, it is wiser to invest in fewer, higher-quality experiences rather than spreading efforts too thin.

Conclusion

These are small, not particularly revolutionary potential actions, drawn from personal observation. But they highlight how insight, hypothesis, and action can work together, and how paying closer attention to what is already working can help plant the seed for stronger engagement. The larger challenges facing synagogues are not ones we can solve overnight. Nor can we philosophize or brand our way into a solution. Real progress will require painstaking attention to detail, a willingness to meet people where they are, and a commitment to design experiences that align with how people actually live their lives, not how we wish they lived them.

Thanks for reading my article. I’m eager to get your reaction or feedback if you’re willing to comment. Alternatively, you can email me at asussm@gmail.com.