BURLINGTON, MA -- This Rosh Hashanah has synagogues pondering their membership numbers for the coming year. For increasingly more synagogues, that means thinking about shrinking attendance and wondering how to keep existing congregants engaged. According to a recent study in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, only one-quarter of all Jewish households currently pay dues to a synagogue.
Traditional tools for holding on to existing congregants and attracting new ones – snail-mail campaigns, printed bulletins – simply don’t attract much attention any more in a Web-centric world.
But thanks to a new breed of open-source Web 2.0 technologies, including a new low-priced service from Talance, Inc., http://talance.com/
“Synagogues need to think of their website as a place to talk to new and existing congregants, staff members and run their general operations,”
“We’ve spent so long looking at bad examples of synagogue websites, we decided to create one based on principles of how people use websites. And because memberships are smaller for many congregations, it was important to make sure this service was affordable.”
The new service, based on the world-class content management system Drupal, lets synagogues choose a design and then customize with colors, pictures and interactive tools, like Twitter feeds, Facebook Connect, e-newsletters, blogs and weekly Torah portion. It is a one-time cost of as low as $1599, with discount. Websites are released within five working days.
