The power of customer insights in this Jewish moment

The case for investing in best in class techniques to talk to customers to address the growing mismatch between customer needs and the value our Jewish institutions provide today.

There is a concept in the startup world called “product market fit” (“PMF”) that I believe can be applied to many of the modern day challenges of struggling Jewish institutions. There are many definitions of PMF out there, but this one sums it up well: “Product Market Fit describes a product or service that effectively fulfills the underserved needs of the target market in a way that can sustain growth and profitability.” Finding PMF is the process of having a hypothesis about how you can serve a particular customer, and then tweaking that product again and again to refine that fit.

Here are some typical characteristics of a company that is still looking for PMF:

1. Does not have a lot of customers

2. Does not have a lot of data to measure traction with the customers they do have

3. Needs to make substantial changes to its product and/or the customer it serves in order to make progress.

For a pre PMF company that fits these characteristics the currency of insight are qualitative observations because they have no other choice. These companies are forced to go out to the market and either observe how their target customer interacts with the world or better yet observe how their target customer interacts with their product in the world largely absent of a large amount of data.

A pre PMF company I recently worked for in the mortgage space, short of having a developed product, was forced to better understand the preconceived notions that customers had about mortgage companies, the emotions new homeowners carried with them when buying a home, and how they did or didn’t understand the impact of higher interest rates. These were all topics where we had a hunch about how customers felt, but where qualitative research helped us shape the product we were creating to match our customer’s needs. We had an existing minimum viable product to serve customers, but also knew that rapid growth would require radical shifts in our approach to grow in a way that met our ambition.

One can make the argument that many of our challenged Jewish institutions effectively function like pre product market fit organizations. Synagogues with very low engagement in specific demographics, Day schools with stalled new family growth, Community centers struggling to create regular interaction with a diverse set of constituents, and federations with an aging donor base all suffer from a lack of fit between the customers they serve and the product they provide. Although some of these institutions continue to operate at semi-scale and have pockets of customers who value their existing product or service, there are current trends or those on the horizon, that are going to require each organization in these spaces rethink core elements of how they serve customers in the future.

If the diagnosis of these institutions is a lack of fit between their customer and the product they provide, it’s worth articulating how they might go about the work to talk to prospective customers in a way that sheds appropriate insight. While it’s tempting to say “just go talk to the community” there can be some nuance associated with how to do this effectively.

Jewish community-specific solutions

As we approach the worthwhile work of talking to our customers in order to form new perspectives on creating value for them, here are a few things to consider.

1. Understand Jewish choices in the full context of the person

Our institutions are ultimately in a battle for the time of their prospective constituents. Most non orthodox synagogues that are not attracting congregants on weekends are not losing out to other synagogues, but instead are shedding customers to other activities. In many cases there is a rich context why other activities win out or perhaps why Jewish activities don’t win out. Thus, it’s contingent upon the interviewer to gain a holistic understanding of the person to figure out why they spend their time as they do.

Here are a few example questions that stem from particular hypotheses about why someone might favor other activities instead of attending synagogue with their young family.

• Hypothesis: A person’s childhood synagogue experiences impact their preferences as a parent

  • Tell me about the synagogue you attended as a child?

  • What were the best/worst things about attending synagogue as a child?

  • What elements of your childhood synagogue experience would you like your child to experience? What would you like them to avoid?

• Hypothesis: Weekend and Shabbat experiences solve for particular logistic and emotional pain points

  • Tell me about what you did the past 2 weekends?

  • How did you or your spouse decide on those plans?

  • What made you prioritize these activities? What was appealing about them?

  • How did you think these activities would make you feel?

  • At what point in the week did you hatch this plan?

The two hypotheses above ultimately address the question of how decisions are made to attend or not attend synagogue, but they go beyond how discrete decisions are made on Saturday morning. They explore how personal history informs synagogue attendance as well as the pain points parents are trying to ‘solve’ for on weekends through the lens of the other activities they conduct. This example illustrates the wide range of contexts that might be productive to explore as you begin to understand how the whole person examines decisions of how they spend their time.

2. Talk to appropriately narrow audiences that reflect your hypotheses

The example above exposes a couple hypotheses around areas that might inform how families make decisions on weekends. That said, the hypotheses we generate on families with young children versus families with older children might vary drastically. Parents whose kids are in high school likely have far less license to inform their children’s weekend decisions relative to a parent who has a much younger child. Thus it’s worth being very deliberate around the audience you seek to learn more about and design the scope of your exercise accordingly. In this example, if you’re seeking to learn about weekend behaviors across parents with kids ages 0-18, it’s worth both deliberately recruiting families from different attitudinal demographics and then generating a set of questions that reflect hypotheses that are unique to that population. It’s tempting in exercises like this to allow the scope of your inquiry to go more and more broad. Sometimes this is OK, but it’s worth acknowledging the complexity associated with this breadth and making that decision in a strategic way.

3. Invest time in information analysis and presentation

Unfortunately the best information collection and analysis can be useless if not stated in a way that resonates with an audience. Consider the challenge of families with young children feeling like Jewish practice is out of reach for them because they don’t know where to start and they want to do it on their own terms. When CJP commissioned research on FWYC a few years ago the firm they worked with framed the output in this way.

“Headline: There’s a need to demystify without devaluing.

Judaism is an ancient practice rich with rituals and requirements that can feel hard to access. Our ability to maintain the vibrancy of our small tribe hinges on our ability to warmly welcome our people into these practices and spaces. At the same time, it’s important that we don’t lose what’s special about our legacy. People need to feel that, regardless of what they know, how they practice, or who they’re married to, our ancient tradition is for them too.”

Quotes (accompanied by pictures)

• “We’re not Mormonism. We go back 6000 years of making it hard for people to join. Now, we’re trying to give people inroads without a legacy of doing that.”

• “I think it’s going to be hard to find a place that’s accessible for him and enough tradition for me... he just doesn’t want to feel like an idiot.”

Consider the power associated with this personalized framing of what real people feel on this topic. For the 150 words described above there may have been 5,000 words collected over 30 interviews. It’s quite a skill and it takes a good deal of time to narrow down all of that ‘data’ and frame the information in a way that resonates. This is hard work, but often the words the researcher uses and the format of the output really matters. I’ve found that oftentimes quotes bring out the ‘realness’ of the people you interviewed and ‘hit’ in a much more impactful way than descriptive statements of what you found. 

4. Build and maintain communal and national recruiting pools

One of the harder parts of high quality research is not only identifying what type of person you want to talk to, but also actually finding them in the first place. In Boston we recently conducted some research on parents who decided not to send their kids to a Jewish Day School. We were fortunate to have a willing partner in our local PJ Library and a productive partnership with local early childhood centers, but coordinating an email to the appropriate set of people, screening them, and then scheduling them was an arduous process.

We might think about ways as a community that we can reduce this friction. In the secular world I’ve often used a company called userinterviews.com that has recruited a panel of hundreds of thousands of willing participants. Companies who want to talk to customers can post projects and have potential participants fill out a survey to make sure they are a good fit for the study in question. In addition to a third party panel, many companies maintain a panel of their own customers that they can go back to again and again if they have questions. 

What if our community had a willing panel of participants? What if we came up with a centralized way to store the names of individuals and families who were willing to sit for studies and appended that data with information on them that would allow interviewers to more easily locate study participants? This is not simple, but I suspect there is a place for regional and national federations to play, or perhaps third party researchers who specialize in Jewish communal studies.

5. Leverage the experts in our community to up-skill everyone else

Conducting good customer research and establishing subsequent insights is a unique skill that can be taught and honed with practice. Fortunately we have third parties in our community including experts at Brandeis’s Cohen Center and at Rosov Consulting, among others, who are well steeped in this type of work. Organizations like these currently spend the majority of their time as consultants partnering with clients and doing the work. There is a model where in addition to leaning on them to do the work they are hired by federations and specific institutions to train others on how to do this important work. 

Conclusion

In the pre product market fit world people who would otherwise not consider themselves to be hack social scientists and researchers are asked to step into that role. Entrepreneurs who want to hatch new products into the world spend most of their time with prospective customers studying their habits and understanding their preferences. What if leaders at Jewish institutions that have products that don’t resonate with particular customer demographics considered themselves to be entrepreneurs of sorts? What if they shifted their time and their team’s time toward more deeply understanding these individuals? What if they invested the time to learn the skills necessary to do this in a way that sheds new actionable insight? These are hard muscles to build, but ones that are worth considering given the state of many institutions in our ecosystem.