Synagogues Can Address Shrinking Memberships Through Affordable Technology

Aug. 26, 2009 - PRLog -- 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/websites-123 synagogues can start using their websites as recruitment tools rather than online brochures.

“Synagogues need to think of their website as a place to talk to new and existing congregants, staff members and run their general operations,” says Monique Cuvelier, chief executive of the Boston-based Web development and design company. She says they should be tools of communication, so people have a way to interact with the synagogue when they’re not sitting in services.

“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.

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About Talance: Talance builds websites, provides technology consulting and teaches social media skills to synagogues and Jewish non-profits across the nation. Since 2000, Talance’s knowledgeable, helpful staff has specialized in making sites developed around human-centered design, systems that behave the way people expect them to. Talance’s goal is to make user-friendly websites available to synagogues at a low cost. For more information, please visit http://talance.com/websites-123 or join our blog at http://talance.com/blog.