by Joe Berkofsky We always welcome constructive dialogue about JFNA and promoting Jewish Federations and our values. But your commentary is nothing more than erroneous speculation based on supposition and a lack of facts. We hope you will agree that any strategy, PR or otherwise, must be measured by whether it delivers on its goals. So let’s discuss what JFNA’s PR efforts actually achieve. Benefitting from an actionable strategic communications plan, in the past year alone, JFNA has generated thousands of news stories on important Jewish Federation initiatives, from the annual GA to the newly created TribeFest for younger Jews to our Israel advocacy work to the life-saving projects we support in Israel and around the world. Throughout the year, JFNA appeared in The New York Times, … Continue Reading
MIA: Jewish Federation’s Media Strategy
Every organization - regardless of size, regardless of mission - needs a PR/media strategy. It is needed not only to convey the work of the organization to the broader audience, but, as last week's Komen/Planned Parenthood disaster showed, it is needed to effectively counter the unexpected crisis. And here, unfortunately, some of the most important brands in the Jewish world fail miserably. For example, one such organization is Jewish Federations of North America, (JFNA) - a point I have privately made more than once to their senior executives and communications professionals. In addition to broadly promoting the work of the federation system, JFNA frequently has "issues of importance" to convey. But the only conveying they do is to their own internal stakeholders, those who receive … Continue Reading
The Komen Fiasco: A Branding and PR Disaster
The dust has barely settled in the Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle, but the one thing that is clear is Komen - founded in 1982 - has in one brief moment, jeopardized thirty years of positive brand-building; Komen's brand today is just not the same brand it was only one week ago. And if you care about the causes Komen supports, this is not a good thing. The lessons for other organizations to absorb are numerous. The story begins just days before Christmas where, as The New York Times reports, Komen informed Planned Parenthood (PP) of their decision - one which they had actually been discussing for months. At the same time they notified PP, Komen decided not to speak of the decision - not to other grantees, not to their donors and not to the media. Komen's strategy was if they didn't speak … Continue Reading
State of Her Own
by Erin Kopelow and Ariel Beery for Tablet Magazine If all goes according to plan, this March we’re going to bring a daughter into the world. Specifically, we’re going to bring her home to our apartment on Chen Boulevard, in the center of Tel Aviv, the city we’ve made our home, though we were born in the United States and Canada. Had you asked us six years ago where we dreamed of raising a family, we’d have answered “Israel” without hesitation. But recently we’ve begun to doubt whether we should raise her in the Jewish state. It’s not the escalating situation with Iran that gives us pause, or the fact that our daughter will one day serve in the army: We decided to live in Israel with full knowledge of the security threats it faces. The reason we are concerned about raising … Continue Reading
Two Years Later: JDC in Haiti
For 8th grader Fabienne and her fellow students at the Zoranje educational campus, learning is the order of the day at a new, state-of-the-art, handicap-accessible middle school built and opened by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). That's because two years after the earthquake, JDC has focused its relief work on children’s education and disabilities-related programming in collaboration with its Haitian, Israeli and other NGO partners. Through $8.6 million dollars in donations from the Jewish Federations of North America and tens of thousands of individual donors, JDC’s projects, including the middle school, have impacted nearly 300,000 Haitians to date. The middle school, which was funded by The Bonita Trust and JDC, is located 30 miles outside of Port-Au-Prince on the … Continue Reading
Leveraging Networks: From Commitment to Action
by Andres Spokoiny and Jay Ruderman On December 6th, nearly 175 leaders - funders, academic experts, and program leaders - came together in New York to explore ways that our community can do more to be fully inclusive of people with disabilities. With the collaborative leadership of the Ruderman Family Foundation and the Jewish Funders Network, the conference showcased two important lessons for active philanthropy. The Jewish Federations of North America, its Boston affiliate Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee all played important supporting roles. First, and most obviously, disabilities is a critical issue: no community, let alone one the size of the Jewish community, can afford to exclude people on the basis of what Tim Shriver, CEO of the … Continue Reading
Internalizing Innovation
by Evonne Marzouk Our recent investment in Jewish innovation has caused a proliferation of small, scattered non- profits organizing individual programs and competing against each other for scarce funding. Caryn Aviv and Shawn Landres have recently written important articles about this Jewish innovation landscape. Shawn Landres argues for impact investing as a new paradigm. Caryn Aviv suggests the possibility of “for-profit” organizations. Both of these are valuable potential models for future Jewish innovation. In this piece, I’d like to suggest another potential model for bringing innovation into existing Jewish institutions. One of the challenges of this burgeoning innovation sector is that, as a Jewish community, we’re losing focus. Young Jews are connecting to smaller and smaller … Continue Reading
A Different Slant on the Global Planning Table
by Carl Sheingold, Ph.D The decision of the JFNA to create a Global Planning Table (GPT) has been greeted with a good deal of skepticism in the press, including several pieces in eJP. Many observers have asserted that it will be a bureaucratic anachronism, out of step with the culture of a new era in which decentralized philanthropy and innovative start ups are replacing a system of large institutions seeking to set or reflect communal priorities. Some within the system have expressed the opposite concern built on the assumption that the GPT will lead, as a likely if not intended outcome, to a withering if not destruction of the long standing relationship of the federation system with JAFI and JDC. The values of Jewish peoplehood, collectivity, and mutual responsibility are indeed … Continue Reading
On Leaders and Lions
by Idit Klein I’ve often said that being a plenary speaker at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly (GA) is the closest I’ll ever come to being on an Oscar stage. When I spoke at a GA plenary in 2007, a federation representative explained that music chosen carefully for me would play in the background as I walked onto the stage under the bright lights. Between my own dramatic score, the booming voice that welcomed me to the audience of several thousand, the jumbo screens, and teleprompters, I felt detached from the highly produced, performative nature of each and every moment. At the same time, I felt honored to be addressing the largest annual gathering of Jews anywhere in the world. Four years later, at the recent 2011 GA in Denver, I felt this same mix of … Continue Reading
Where Goes the Collective?
an editorial from The Jewish Daily Forward The old way of collecting and disbursing money from American Jews to Israel and other communities overseas has finally collapsed under the weight of philanthropic trends and communal distrust. That historically beloved bureaucracies have lost their attractiveness to donors is not just a Jewish story - across the giving landscape, it is no longer enough to send contributions to a central clearinghouse and hope the money is used well. Donors, large and small, want transparency and results; many also crave the personal satisfaction of seeing their names and their imprints on their contributions. So it was inevitable that the historic formula used by Jewish federations to distribute non-domestic funds would go the way of the pushke and be replaced by a … Continue Reading
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