A digital solution at the center of Boston’s Israel crisis response
How a no cost low overhead digital solution is solving for some of Boston's most pressing Israel crisis needs
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For Jews in Boston, similar to other geographies, the crisis in Israel has had a wide variety of impacts on their mindset toward Israel and Judaism as a whole. These impacts have triggered a cascading set of emotions and actions that have become a predominant focus for many Jews over the past number of weeks. As a result, many people, even those who previously had little connection to the Jewish community or Jewish causes, have been spurred into action.
“Action” has bared itself out in a wide variety of ways. Many people have started to talk about Israel, the Jewish community, and anti-semitism in ways that were unfamiliar to them prior to the crisis. Others have spent time at rallies and Israel support events. Other people have volunteered their time, while others have spent time rallying around Israeli families who are new to the Boston area.
All of this demand for action has in turn spurred individuals and Jewish institutions to create mechanisms for impact. It’s hard to count the amount of concurrent actors putting new programs and other volunteering opportunities out into the market. All of these well intentioned organizations and individuals have created an overlapping mishmash of opportunities for Boston area Jews to express themselves and take action.
There are 2 main challenges with the array of opportunities offered.
There are lots of opportunities to help out that are hard to choose from - This makes it harder for volunteers or donors to know the best way to apply their resources.
The Jewish community is geographically dispersed - This leaves some Jews feeling isolated from like minded individuals to build community with not to mention assessing the opportunity to find ways to help out.
In Boston, a somewhat unintentional resource has emerged that is solving these problems. A Facebook Group called Jewish Families of Greater Boston (“JFGB”) is serving a variety of use cases to serve a wide constituency of Jews.
JFGB Use Cases
Let’s examine just a subset of how people use JFGB.
Looking for connection
Looking for help
Gathering data
Soliciting volunteers
Marketing programs
Why is this working and what can we learn?
Given the general lack of innovative digital experiences that exist in the Jewish community it’s worth asking why this one is working so well and how those characteristics might inform the way we think about building Jewish digital solutions going forward.
A flexible, simple, and well understood content medium
The core action of a Facebook group is very simple and paramount to its success. People post and then other people comment - That’s it. Facebook enhances content posts by exposing links in a visual way, but other than that it’s a bare bones solution. It stands to reason that someone could create a more efficient solution for matching new Israelis with housing or soliciting volunteers for a particular event, but both of those applications would take time to build, would take time to incrementally enhance, and would likely have narrower distribution to start with.
Built in distribution
This is perhaps the most critical characteristic of JFGB. JFGB has almost 8,000 members and as of late a remarkable 86% of them or 6,900 are ‘active’ which Facebook defines as clicking, liking, or commenting on a post. Boston’s 2015 community study estimated a total of 35,000 Jewish kids under the age of 18. If there are 2 kids per household that equates to ~18,000 households with kids, which means JFGB reaches a staggering 44% of Jewish households in its target demographic.
How does it do this? While the group needed to build its member base, it built itself into a platform that was already regularly used by most of its members for many purposes. Facebook contains a single feed that includes JFGB and posts from every other friend and group that person is affiliated with. This means JFGB has the opportunity for eyeballs on its content every time a member logs into their Facebook account. Cost efficiently achieving scale is incredibly hard, but JFGB skirted this issue by launching on a platform that already had it.
Neutral affiliation
JFGB was started by two colleagues, Shira and Shayna. Shira is the director of enrollment and advancement at a local day school. Shayna was Shira’s colleague at that same day school and now runs admissions at a Rhode Island day school. They launched JFGB as a mechanism to learn about what was on the mind of young families in the Boston area and as a means for local organizations to market what they do. After Shayna moved to Rhode Island, and Shira realized the important role this group was playing in the community, she recruited her sister Yaffa to help out with administration.
Shira and Yaffa have resisted the temptation to take over the solution with their own agendas and they actually spend very little time monitoring it. They have rightfully observed that 20 and 30 somethings are savvy observers of the perceived bias of the source of information. Traditional media outlets like the NYT, Wall Street Journal, or the Boston Globe have brands that are perceived in a particular way which tilts their readership and impacts the way their readers are impacted by their words. Even some social media platforms, like Twitter/X have evolved a reputation for content that is perceived in a particular way because of its source.
With JFGB, on the other hand, Shira and Yaffa don’t broadcast their professional or personal affiliations. They show up as themselves and as a result the group has a feeling that it isn’t governed by any organization with any kind of agenda. It is as if thousands of Jewish parents were invited to a mixer to spontaneously share with one another in a totally unguarded way.
Mechanisms to focus its demographic and very lightly moderate content
Shira and Yaffa are smart about the way they control the group’s content to keep it focused and appropriate. The questions for joining are quite simple and really just seek to confirm people’s intent: 1) If you have children, how old are they? 2) What do you hope to gain by being part of this group?, 3) Do you agree to abide by the rules of this group, including only sharing marketing/promotional posts on Monday’s? They allow in 98 out of 100 people who apply and really only keep out individuals who seem like they have alternative motivations. Until the crisis in Israel started there was no proactive gate on content. Since then, in order to de-risk the possibility of hate speech, they personally review posts daily, and end up letting in almost everything. Because they are neutral low key observers and no organization ‘owns’ JFGB they have avoided the scrutiny that a more ‘official’ source might solicit.
Conclusion
Having spent most of my career building online experiences I can vouch for how hard it is for a new online application to gain traction. Even well financed startups with top tier talent fail 9 out of 10 times. This lack of track record should be taken as a cautionary tale for Jewish organizations trying to create new destinations for their constituents. Not only is it hard to build customer-centric digital applications from the scratch, but it’s just as hard and is financially taxing to continuously iterate on them to meet customer standards. JFGB has proven its possible to create a lot of value with a relatively simple solution that skirts both of these challenges. The Jewish community will need to continue to find ways to leverage online experiences to build value for their constituents, but individuals should do so understanding the nature of the challenges associated with gaining traction.
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The Business of Jewish is a free bi-weekly newsletter written by Boston based Jewish non profit consultant Ari Sussman.
Read his other articles here:
Collective purpose: Lessons from Jewish organizations during crisis
Day camps: The trickle down impact of Judaism’s most profitable business
The art of hospitality: What Jewish organizations can learn from fine dining
Deriving productive insight from Jewish organizational benchmarking
How price transparency could spur demand for Jewish institutions
Great article and it's amazing to see the ways in which the Facebook page is used. Another lesson to me is the importance of this forum existing prior to October 7th. I've seen people/orgs trying to set up new organizations or programs to help during this crisis, but their success rate is much lower than groups that are leveraging existing infrastructure. There are some places where the community was really well prepared (e.g., leveraging JFCS to provide food and other items of need and Jewish day schools providing space for students seeking Hebrew-speaking teachers), while in other areas it surfaced gaps in our preparedness (e.g., a group prepared to help parents at schools that either struggled with or failed at communications). It highlights the importance of having a strong ecosystem that works together to address challenges. Thankfully, Boston has incredible organizations in place already and I think learned a lot dealing with past challenges (e.g., COVID) and I'm confident will only continue to grow and learn as we move forward.