Increasing Jewish retention in an episodic future

Ideas for building retention mechanisms into Jewish programs to counter the "choose your adventure" world consumers have come to expect

One of the byproducts of America’s entrepreneurial spirit is the proliferation of increasingly well designed user experiences. As the barriers to create new experiences online have gone to virtually zero, new experiments are launched daily to please consumers in new ways. Some of these experiments make it into the American ethos. Names like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Peloton, and Netflix are pervasive and entrenched in our culture, but while those names may be well known there are hundreds of regularly used web applications for mini segments of our population. For instance, if you are single and looking to date you can choose from eHarmony, Bumble, Jdate, Hinge, OKCupid or hundreds of others. If you want to try a meditation app you could try Headspace, Calm, 10% Happier or dozens of others. All cater towards a slightly different demographic or choose a distinct model to tackle the same problem.

Even in the more capital intensive offline world, choice has proliferated. While options to purchase a cup of coffee used to be limited to companies like Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, there are now dozens of chain coffee shops. What was a fairly narrow set of fast casual food restaurants like Panera and Clover has ballooned into an entire category each competing for the micro need their customer wants to experience that day. Again, each caters to a slightly different demographic and has a nuanced offering from their peers. Choice is now the default expectation for American consumers. We have the luxury of piecing together the life we want to live offline and online by choosing the perfect experience for each day and time.

In a world of virtually unlimited choice, Jewish institutions have suffered. Synagogues that used to have a monopoly on the time and mindshare of their congregants struggle to attract people to come to their programs. As a result of the doubt that is cast upon regular engagement it has become harder to justify the cost of membership. Youth programs, like USY, that would previously cobble toggle a series of regularly attended programs in order to build community among its members struggle to compete with the alternatives that exist for teenagers.

As a result of these trends Jewish institutions will be forced to increasingly adapt to more episodic interactions with their constituents while still seeking to build community. As a member of an institution 30 years ago you were used to regularly seeing your peers at events and through those interactions build community. Nowadays, with more episodic engagement you are less likely to see the same person or family again and again and as a result it is harder to build community with them. Given how powerful community can be in instilling a love for Judaism, this episodic syndrome is an important and vexing one for the community. The question becomes how we might reasonably adapt our episodic reality into one where community building is possible.

5 models for communal retention in an episodic world

While there are plenty of engaging programs that exist for discrete purposes most are characterized by engagement that ends with the event. In business terms, Jewish institutions are not terribly bad at acquisition, but they don’t seem as well positioned to capitalize on retention.

What if programs attempted to look beyond acquisition to think about how they might build retention mechanisms into their programming?

Here are 5 tactical themes to experiment with in order to incentivize retention oriented behaviors.

1. Plant the seed and incentivize future connection - 

Most of our programs do a nice job acquiring families for point in time experiences, but then resort to email for retention purposes. Programs could offer at-event-only sign ups for subsidized future engagements with families they meet at the event. Picture a simple sign up sheet where families pair together and receive highly discounted shabbat dinners to be delivered to their home. If the goal is communal connection as an antidote to loneliness, future engagements do not need to be Jewish. They could offer gift cards to trampoline parks, coffee dates, or kid play spaces. They could minimize waste by only allowing families to take advantage of these incentives once or twice. There is also a future data angle to this idea. By collecting the names of connected families on signup sheets and converting them into digital systems we could begin to learn which families are connected to one another in our community and target them for the same events.

2. Publish event attendees (with an opt out) - 

This idea might be a bit more controversial, but what if we were more open with the names of attendees at our events? Similar to an Evite where you can see who is invited and who has accepted, what if we were able to de-risk events by helping participants know who was going to be there? In post-event mode, what if we published pictures and tagged individuals who attended, so that people who had connected with them could get their contact information?

I realize the default question here might be to question the privacy implications of publishing the names of event attendees to other attendees, but have we ever tested people’s appetite for this type of sharing? Maybe consumers will grant us more license if they know that the audience is limited to people that attended the event. By publishing event attendees and photos we could leverage the same tools social media sites use to get people to come back to their sites.

3. Multi-part programs - 

One way to ensure that you will see the same people again from event to event is to make these events multi-part. What if an art event allowed your kids to create two distinct objects that connected to one another? If the task is to create a purim costume maybe one event is for shirts, and the second event is for pants. If you’re hosting a storyteller, maybe part 1 of the story occurs at event 1 while the rest of the story happens at event 2. There are an endless amount of 2 part ideas we could experiment with. They might entail some incremental risk based on the idea that a family would need to sign up for 2 weeks worth of events, but perhaps the benefit of repeat connection is worth stomaching this risk.

4. Target micro groups in an intimate environment - 

The easiest way to optimize for program participation is to target as broad of a population as possible. For instance, a kids Chanukah event could target ages 3 to 12. A narrower event that might draw in fewer people but provide a more likely connection between participants could serve to make future connections more likely. Our local JCC in Boston has a robust Family Engagement strategy where they capitalize on this type of idea with events like stroller walks that seek to attract a demographic of families with young children that are less than 6 months. While that might make it hard to attract a robust crowd, the crowd that you do attract are at a very similar life stage, the activity is inherently social, and thus the people who meet in these events are more likely to make connections with one another.

5. Center multifaceted engagements in a single place - 

This is a much bigger, potentially capital intensive idea, but one worth mentioning on this same theme. Relationship building is often a matter of serendipity. If I bump into the same person enough times, we might discover something about one another or have a conversation with one another that could drive future interactions or thinking. Steve Jobs was famously strategic in where he placed the bathrooms in Apple offices in order to encourage serendipitous interactions and many other companies have followed suit to encourage casual in-office interactions.

In a world where consumers can’t help but piece together their activity of the day, what if all of those activities happened in the same place? What if there was a single location that housed multiple activity types? What if multifaceted Jewish hubs became the meeting point for serendipitous meetups? Institutions like JCCs who house fitness facilities and host many other programs are in a tremendous position to capitalize on this trend. Perhaps the question we should be asking is how we design those spaces to capitalize on serendipity? If people arrive to attend programs of their choice, how do we design their routes to make sure they ‘bump’ into one another? Another broader question becomes, how more diverse organizations do their own programming at these single locations. Should JCCs serve as inexpensive rental points for other institutions to encourage meetups?

Conclusion

Consumer desire to interact in a more episodic way is likely here to stay. If we believe that relationships are built on the back of multiple and sometimes serendipitous connections we need to make efforts to facilitate more strategic run-ins. The ideas listed above are only a partial list of things that we can do. If we believe that a core end goal of our programming is connection, perhaps in the future we can look past the metric of ‘how many people attended my event’ to ‘how many connections did the people who attended my event make’.