Marketing Masorti

Masorti is the smallest stream of Judaism in the UK with the potential, many of us believe, to be one of the biggest.  The challenge is how to get the message out to people who might want to join us. 

Challenge number one is to define our message.  We’ve got quite good at that over the last three years: Masorti Judaism has a genuine, soundly anchored ethos and set of values which generates amazing levels of unanimity among our rabbis, professionals and lay leaders.  They’re about the synthesis of tradition and modernity (‘traditional Judaism for modern Jews’ as we put it), warm, welcoming communities, and intellectual openness.  As these values are embodied primarily in the experience of our communities (rather than in intellectual or ideological statements) we’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate them is by sharing Masorti people’s personal stories and journeys.

But even if we’ve made progress towards honing our message, there’s a second challenge which has so far left us stumped.  It involves a chicken and egg situation – how to communicate with people who by definition are not on our membership database and who we therefore have no way of contacting directly.  We can’t advertise on television (not only because of the expense – even if we had unlimited budgets, we’re trying to reach such a specific demographic that mass advertising would be 99.9% useless).  And social media, often touted as a marketing panacea, can only connect you to people with whom you already have some kind of… connection.

Last week I participated in a training session on marketing for charity chief executives (it was organised by Ella forums – recommended for charity leadership training and coaching).  The trainer said that modern marketing is not about getting your message to your intended audience.  Instead, it builds on the idea that the most convincing way of getting someone to buy a product or a service is through personal advice from someone they know.  I’ve just been decorating my house so I know this is true – I want my friends to recommend good builders they’ve used and I talk to them at any opportunity about this in order to get their advice.

A colleague from the United Synagogue once told me that they’re jealous of Masorti for this reason: our members always talk in a positive way about their shuls.  Masorti Judaism has lots of potential ‘recommenders’ – our challenge is how to enable them to get into conversations about their positive experiences in our communities with their non-Masorti friends who might be interested in trying us out.

At the training session, we learnt a good model for working this out.  It involves answering five questions: who are our potential influencers?  What is the ‘conversation moment’ – ie. who will the influencers be talking to, where and when?  What is the desired conversation – what will they be talking about?  What is the content we want them to be dropping into these conversations?  And finally, what are the accelerators – what means do we have at our disposal for making more of these conversations happen, faster and more effectively?

Here’s how I provisionally answered the questions.  My thoughts are based on anecdotal evidence at best, we’ve done no research on this, and I’m happy for people to disagree, suggest alternatives and prove me wrong.  Please let me know if the following rings But this is my starting point.

Influencers.  It seems to me that our most important target audience is young adults who are forming relationships, getting married and having children, who want to join a synagogue (or find one to get married in, or study for conversion, or where their kids can go to playgroup or nursery), but haven’t decided which one.  (By the way, I don’t mean to ignore the many people who are not in relationships and are also looking for community life.  Jewish communities often fail to cater to them and we need to try harder.  For the purposes of this article, I’ve simply chosen to focus a demographic which seems to reflect our main source of new members).  They might have grown up in Orthodox or Reform congregations and been dissatisfied there, or they might simply have moved to a new city and be shul-shopping with no particular agenda.  The influencers for this group are their friends who do happen to be members of our communities – maybe people who’ve grown up in Masorti and who have non-Masorti friends, or maybe those who are a few years (or months) ahead in the shul-shopping process.

Conversation moment.  I’m imagining a group of friends having dinner together, either at home or in a restaurant, maybe at a wedding or another event.  The conversation could also be happening between colleagues at the office.

Desired conversation.  The influencers and their friends are all at a similar stage of life – maybe approaching marriage, perhaps thinking about having babies, maybe already pregnant.  The desired conversation they’re having might start from these topics (I remember talking about them a lot when I was at that stage) – how’s the wedding planning going?  Where are you thinking about getting married?  Do you know of any good rabbis – I’m not so happy with the one from my parents’ shul?  Have you started thinking about nurseries and schools?  Which ones are good?  How can we get into the nearby Jewish preschool or primary?  A sub-species of desired conversation might be relevant to people in mixed-faith relationships.  How’s it going, what do your family think about it?  What are you planning to do about the wedding – have you thought about conversion?  What experiences with shuls, rabbis etc. have you had so far?  Are they friendly to non-Jewish partners?

Content.  What do want our influencers to be feeding into the conversation?  Here are some potentially important messages.  My (Masorti shul) is really welcoming, friendly, non-judgemental.  We were made to feel really welcome when we showed up.  My (or my friends’) kids love it – the children’s services/playgroup are really fun.  The rabbi seems nice – really approachable and interesting, not the kind of judgemental old man I remember from my shul growing up.  A second set of messages might be about addressing people’s concerns: it feels like a proper, familiar shul, but more open-minded.  If you get married there, your children will still be recognised as Jewish.  No, most Orthodox rabbis won’t recognise a Masorti conversion, but we decided the Orthodox process was too hard to go through, and this way we’ll still be able to have a proper Jewish wedding.  And so on.  The goal here is less about messages, but about having people give honest advice which comes out of their own experience.

Accelerators.  Whether or not I’ve got it right about the identity of our potential influencers and the content of the conversations we want them to be having, there’s one final question we have to address: how can we encourage more of these conversations to take place?  This means both ensuring the influencers know what to say, and to create a culture within which they’re prepared to have the conversations.  This is something of a challenge, since many of us naturally recoil from anything that smacks of missionising.  It also means letting go of any idea that we can tightly control the process or the message: encouraging people to talk means trusting them to talk about the right, relevant thing.  I want to suggest five ideas (none of which might be any good) which might accelerate the process:

1.       Most fundamentally, we need to put the idea into our members’ heads that they can and should talk about their positive community experience with their friends.  I think this should come from the rabbis and leaders of our communities, as they have direct relationships with their congregants.  If we can get our rabbis to become ‘influencers of influencers,’ creating the expectation that members reach out to their friends, it could be very powerful.  The networks of relationships already exist – the question is how to motivate people to get involved.  It strikes me that there are two potential motivators – and neither are about religious evangelising: one is a desire to help your friends by giving them good advice; the other is the desire to help your community by getting good people involved. 

2.       Giving potential influencers the confidence they need by providing information and messaging – via direct marketing.  Since they’re already on our membership database, it’s easy to reach them.  The trick here is getting the content right – but that’s a solvable problem with the right combination of research, hard work and creativity.

3.       Stimulating conversation at events – lots of guests come into our communities for weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and the like.  Often the experience acts as a trigger for conversation.  What can we do to stimulate and focus these conversations?  One idea is to have effective, thought-provoking marketing materials available at events.  Another is to encourage community leaders as part of their sermons or announcements to explicitly invite these conversations to take place.  Maybe we could even follow up with event hosts afterwards, providing information and encouragement to continue the conversation with any guests who expressed interest.

4.       In the same spirit, perhaps we need to gather some data – who recently joined our shuls, got married, converted, had a baby.  These people are likely to have friends in the same situation.  We can then nurture them as potential influencers by targeting them with information and marketing which is relevant to their stage in life.

5.       Since conversations are about sharing personal stories, could we stimulate this by encouraging people to share personal experiences of our communities in an organised way?  This needs a bit of creative thinking, but maybe through an effective social media-based competition, backed up by some more traditional marketing.  This is about strengthening the positive culture we already have of people talking about their communities.

This time more than ever, I really welcome feedback.  Please tweet @MattPlen, tag me in a Facebook comment, or email me – matt@masorti.org.uk – with your ideas and especially if you think I’m wrong.