SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 2010

10:00 AM

According to the Bylaws, Article 5; Meetings of the Congregation

Every March the Congregation shall meet for the following purposes: To approve the 2010 – 2011 Budget

Please make every effort to attend this important meeting.

I am happy to report that the team has completed the first phases almost two months ahead of plan, and significantly under the anticipated cost. Also, we have already been able to quantify some of the benefits of the changes.

As you know, TBA had been producing a printed monthly bulletin for many years. Creating the bulletin was a intensive manual process, where the work fell on a one or two individuals who solicit, collect, edit, format, print and then mail not only to the congregation, but to interested parties in the community. The process took dozens, if not tens of dozens, of hours every month. Over the years, we have been very fortunate to have the talented and committed people within out congregation volunteering to do this work. For the past several years Anita Freed has been doing the bulk of this work. We all owe her our appreciation for going well above the call of duty to make all of this happen.

When email and digital document formats came into wide use the bulletin was transitioned from paper to a digital rendering of the printed document. This change addressed three issues with the physical mailing of the bulletin; first the cost of having to print and pay the postage; second the time to collate and deliver the printed material to the post office; third the delivery delay associated physically mailing our publication.

Unfortunately, the processes that remained still required centralization within the hands of a small number of people. The significant amount of work that was required to put together the monthly bulletin and get it out to interested parties necessitated that the bulletin only be produced on a monthly basis. And the burden only increased as the activities at the temple expanded in breadth and frequency.

The new publishing process also brought with it new issues. Most significantly, someone at TBA had to take on the responsibility of manually maintaining the list of email recipients to receive the digital bulletin would be sent. Anyone who uses email knows that keeping a personal address book up to date can be an almost impossible task. The complexity expands significantly when you are trying to maintain the address book for an organization the size of TBA.

Trying to keep the synagogue’s email address book up to date was much more problematic than was anticipated. There were several reasons for this, but at the core a couple of issues had the greatest impact. Because we have so many distinct groups within our congregation, many people were keeping copies of email lists. Because there were periodic changes in each groups leadership, sometimes lists were transitioned from person to person effectively, sometimes not.

As one example of the problems that ensued, if a message was authored and sent by the sisterhood to the sisterhood’s email list, there wasn’t any guarantee that an interested party who was on the school’s email list would also get the message.  This problem was a significant administrative burden, and because it could never be fully addressed within the established workflow there isn’t any doubt that some information was not reaching some interested parties.

The second notable issue was caused by how often personal email addresses where changing. These changes were so frequent that the email addresses that the temple had were always out of date. In fact, after we consolidated the email lists for the various constituencies, we learned that more than one-third of the email addresses we had on file were incorrect or obsolete.

The first two phases of our plan included creating a centralized repository of email addresses, a standard method for transmitting broadcast email messages from TBA to interested parties and the ability to have one email address that appeared on more than one TBA email list. It also included upgrading the temple’s email system so the Deb Vozella, the Rabbi and select others have reliable email service to use for temple business. This work was completed in September and early October. The attractively formatted broadcast email messages from Deb Vozella containing information about events and activities at the Temple are a direct result of this work.

The system we put in place includes features that allow subscribers to easily add or update their own information whenever necessary. It also has procedures to prevent TBA from being labeled as a spammer, and report back to the temple office whenever someone does not receive the email that they requested.

Since we have put the new system in place we have measured dramatic improvements in the process. There are two statistics that best sum up the benefits. The number of non-deliveries resulting from sending any individual email message has dropped from more than one-third of the email addresses to less than five; and the number of people who are subscribing to TBA’s emails has nearly doubled.

What this means is many hours saved for Deb Vozella and all of the volunteers because they don’t have to chase down broken email addresses several times every month. Even more important is that the information is reaching more and more people every day. This will ultimately result in improved participation, and possibly increased membership, for our congregation.

The next phases of the plan were much more ambitious. They included a complete redesign of the congregation’s web site. The redesign was intended to address very specific needs and concerns:

· Information to be available to the congregation and the community in a timely manner, rather than having to wait for the next monthly bulletin cycle.

· Improve the workflow so that the amount of effort to collect, edit and then publish information can be reduced.

· Make it possible to spread responsibility and activity of collecting information to more people than only the Bulletin Editor and Executive Director, but still maintain positive control of the timing and coordination of the messaging.

· Ability for individuals/committees/functions to make relevant information directly available to the congregation.

· Interested parties to be automatically notified that new information becomes available.

· Mechanism for feedback and conversation from and between interested parties.

· Archive of TBA related information accessible to the congregation and other interested parties.

· Create a ‘brand’ presence that accurately reflects the values and vibrancy of the Temple B’nai Abraham community.

Over the past two months the redesign and re-launch of the web site had been completed. Our new web site is at www.tbabeverly.org and is accessible to not only the congregation, but also to the community at large. The old web site www.templebnaiabraham.com automatically redirects anyone who visits it to the new site.

With the new web site and new publishing processes comes a lot of change for those of us who are used to reading a periodic publication like the monthly bulletin. After you understand the biggest of the changes, and the benefits of the new workflows, you should become more comfortable that you have not lost access to any information, and have gained much more visibility into what’s happening at TBA.

You have probably already noticed the most important change. Because all of the information that would have normally been saved to make up the December bulletin was published as soon as it was available there wasn’t anything held back to put into a monthly bulletin PDF. When the time of the month came to create the monthly bulletin file all of the information was already on the web site and accessible to anyone who needs it.

It is at this point that I need to note that sometimes we share information among ourselves that we don’t want to share to persons that remain anonymous. In the past some this information was within the computer file that contained the other monthly bulletin information. In the past, even though this information was shared with anonymous users when the bulletin file was emailed and posted on the internet, we took this opportunity to change the procedure. Today, for a person to access the acknowledgements sections of the web site, or the photo and video galleries, and a couple of other places on the web site, they must be registered and verified users.

Registration on the web site is easy. To register you have provide a first name, last name and an email address. The email address is automatically verified by the web site. After verification registered users can view the restricted content, and also post comments. We encourage and hope that all TBA members will register on the web site.

The web site is about more than an easier way to publish the bulletin. Because the constraints of column space and of publishing deadlines have been removed we don’t have to make choices on which committees can highlight their events in the bulletin and which have to find other ways to communicate their activities. When any committee or individual has something they want to share they can publish their information onto the web site and it will be immediately accessible to the TBA community. The most recent example of this valuable asset is that the TBA school teachers have started posting updates on what they are doing at school. You can find these updates in the “Youth” section of the web site.

Prior to starting the effort to accelerate and broaden TBA’s communications capabilities we did made note of some important metrics that would help us understand if we were successfully reaching the people we wanted. Even in the few short weeks that we have been using the new web site the results have proven to be more dramatic than we could have ever expected.

• More people are getting the information than ever before. We were able to measure that of all of the people that were emailed the monthly bulletin, less than 30% opened the file to read it. As of December 3^rd, we were able to measure that more than 10 times that number of people read the same information on www.tbabeverly.org.
• People are coming to the web site to learn about TBA. We know this because as of December 3^rd www.tbabeverly.org had more than 10 times the number of unique visitors than we had ever mailed to bulletin to. This means our congregation has greatly extended knowledge of its activities beyond the relatively small number of people who were receiving and reading the emailed or printed monthly bulletins.
• We have significantly increased the amount of information available to the congregation and the community. We counted that a typical monthly bulletin contained about 30 items making up about 4000 words of articles, notices and other tidbits. In the last month there were over 85 new articles published by different authors, and over 50,000 words of articles and archives are now available on the web site.
• The reach of TBA has also extended beyond the immediate localities. In just the past week we have received at least two relevant inquiries about TBA and our congregation from outside the country. One from Mexico inquiring about the Jewish community for someone who is considering coming to Endicott College, and the other researching a past congregant.

Please make use of and enjoy the new resource.  Share with use any ideas you have on what else we can add to the site.