by Rachel Levin, Josh Miller and Adam Simon
Back in 2010, when Facebook had but a meager 300 million users and the concepts of Google Plus and Pinterest were not yet on the horizon, there was a desire bubbling up within the Jewish community to capitalize on the new media and technological innovations happening across so many facets of our lives.
How could we channel all of these new platforms to strengthen innovation within the Jewish community? How could these tools enable Jewish communities spread all over the world to reach, teach, learn, create and affiliate in unprecedented ways?
With these questions in mind, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Jim Joseph Foundation and Righteous Persons Foundation joined together to design and unveil the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund. Our goals were simple: to create a collaborative funding experiment that would seed technological innovation to enhance Jewish life, learning, culture and community while also facilitating a process from which we and others interested in supporting this space could learn.
One year later, we are pleased to offer some reflections on the process and invite the broader community to join us as we continue the conversation about how to best invest in and promote the creative use of technology to advance Jewish life.
In creating the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund, we wanted to see if we could challenge individuals and organizations to develop creative applications of existing technology that would help people engage with our Jewish traditions and with each other.
Working with Lucy Bernholz and her team at Blueprint Research + Design (now Arabella Advisors), we issued an open call for applicants and developed a model similar to those used by the MacArthur Digital Media & Learning Contest and Knight News Challenge to select award recipients from more than 300 applicants. Receiving a total of $500,000 from the Fund, the projects ran the gamut from virtual communities and mobile applications to digital music platforms, liturgy translators and more.
As a starting point for reflection, we invite you to read Lucy Bernholz’s paper on the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund process and the state of new media innovation in the organized Jewish community. We also offer three key lessons below. These are not meant to look at the individual projects themselves – the awardees will be providing their own reflections here in eJewishPhilanthropy in the coming weeks – but rather to reflect on some of the successes and challenges we faced throughout this process.
1. There is a tremendous hunger to bring new media tools to Jewish spaces. It is clear from the enormous response to our call for proposals that our community recognizes the importance of technology. The 300-plus applicants came from eight countries and requested a total of about $18 million. Many put forth worthy ideas and compelling projects that did not make the cut for the Fund due to the specific criteria we prioritized, but we believe they would contribute to Jewish life and are still potentially deserving of Jewish communal investment. More than half of the Fund’s applicants agreed to have summaries of their ideas made public, and we will be sharing them on JewishNewMedia.org in the coming weeks.
That is the good news. The challenge is to tap fresh perspectives and a non-traditional applicant pool that could offer novel approaches for how Jewish life could be enhanced through social media. The Fund was set up so that for-profits, not-for-profits and individuals could apply, which was in itself a new way of approaching grantmaking for each of our foundations.
We found, however, that very few organizations and individuals beyond our foundations’ existing networks applied for funding, despite an aggressive marketing effort into secular technology communities. While we do not know the exact cause, it is clear that the Jewish community’s efforts to use technology effectively will benefit from tapping into new talent and creativity. One possible solution may be to work directly with the commercial technology and media communities on appropriate incentives, platforms and outreach to technology experts.
2. Funding is not the only reason the Jewish community is underutilizing technology. While lack of financial resources is among the key barriers, we discovered it is not the only one. In our search for imaginative projects, we saw a lot of enthusiasm, but we found that many Jewish organizations need help broadening their basic understanding of new media tools and technologies and, subsequently, how to best use their resources to leverage them. This kind of investment is about capacity building – connecting organizational leaders to the right people and training resources, and then giving them the time they need to learn, plan and implement new strategies.
While this was not the goal of the Fund, it did surface an opportunity for Jewish funders to help their grantees bring in experts to assess their current new media and technology capacity and provide them with the support they need to use the right mix of tools strategically and effectively.
As we move forward, we must also create opportunities to increase our communal knowledge around the use of digital media tools, to examine with greater sophistication the obstacles to improved innovation and to determine the most pressing needs to address. Under the leadership of Lisa Colton at Darim Online, we are seeing this start to happen with gatherings of Jewish professionals at conferences like the Nonprofit Technology Conference. Last year, more than 70 Jewish professionals joined the conversation and interest in this year’s gathering in San Francisco is even greater. We must also take advantage of the great opportunity these conferences provide to learn from, connect and share with our counterparts in the non-Jewish world.
3. There is a disconnect between those with the most innovative ideas and those with the aptitude to develop them. One of the greatest challenges in this project was that many of the organizations and individuals with the game-changing ideas lacked the capacity, even with additional funding, to bring projects to fruition. We selected recipients using a system that evaluated both the quality of the idea and the potential for success and implementation. Moving forward, we must explore how we can create support systems and linkages between the individuals with the ideas and the teams of designers and developers that have the skills and resources to turn them into reality.
While we are still exploring future plans for our collaboration, our foundations remain committed to building on what we have learned from this experiment. We believe that among the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund’s key contributions is the conversation it sparked within our foundations and with our grantees and partners about the opportunity for us to leverage technology and new media more effectively. It is critical that we all take responsibility for continuing the dialogue, and we hope you will share reactions, insights and perspectives based on what you have learned from your own experiments.
Ultimately, if we continue to take risks, to experiment and learn in this area, it will lead to innovations and collaborations that will ensure Jewish life, learning, community and culture are primed to thrive in the 21st century.
Read Innovating on Tradition: Reflections on the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund, by Lucy Bernholz and Conan Liu.
Rachel Levin is the Associate Director of the Righteous Persons Foundation. Josh Miller is a Senior Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. Adam Simon is the Associate National Director of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
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I agree with some of your findings; however I think the difficulty is inherent in the selection process of the Foundations. When business and venture capital look to invest in capitalizing on and developing the latest innovative media tools, platforms and ideas they realize that they have to look out for the latest idea that has potential. They are willing to take a risk to support something new and innovative. The Jewish Foundations at present are too timid and willing to invest in an unknown that has great potential. Don’t expect to produce, support and develop innovation if you aren’t prepared to take the chances that innovators are taking in order to produce those potential winners!
Thank you for sharing these insights, which I think are spot on. In my experience, while many are eager to jump on the technology bandwagon, few are deeply considering how to integrate these tools into the strategy, rather than laying on new widgets and gadgets on top of how they are already do business. The few who are advancing to this next level of integration are doing so with strong leadership, savvy professionals, and with one foot outside of the Jewish world to learn from the best in nonprofit and for-profit business. I think it’s very wise to engage those outside the community of Jewish professionals to inform, inspire and ignite our thinking.
This exposure is one of the big reasons I’ve been working to convene Jewish professionals at the Nonprofit Technology Network Conference (NTC) rather than designing a Jewish technology conference of our own. By using NTC as a platform we’re able to expose Jewish leaders to the best in nonprofit technology, strategy and leadership, and to tap the wider field to bring their expertise into our community. Here’s more insights about the conference and details on the gathering of Jewish professional, lay leaders and NTC participants for those who might be interested in joining us: http://jewpoint0.org/2012/03/and-we-gather-again-at-12ntc/
If we imagine that the lack of skills and technology is the problem, then we’ll be offering incorrect solutions. The real problem is the power imbalance between those with status power and those with expertise. Institutions, including Jewish ones, have real trouble with this. So you have plenty of talent in the hands of staff who can’t or won’t stick around for years or play the guru game.
Three questions for leaders looking to embrace new tools:
1. What are you willing to do less of, so you can excel in new areas? Remember, you only have 100% of mindshare to allocate at any time.
2. What power will you give up to your organization’s edges? How do you institutionalize it, without making it about your personal flexibility?
3. How does your system adopt ideas and leadership models that flow up instead of down?
If you love these questions, you win. If they come off like a headache, expect to lag behind.
In my opinion #3 is the key… The ideas are there, the tech people are there. But with the ‘make your idea a reality in just 5 steps’ model, which has a new org springing up every day, the techies and the idea guys are often too busy pursuing their own project with half a brain, unable to make a full head. With Bible Raps we do so many things in house bc its cost effective (we havent hit the Bikkurim minimum budget for successful start ups for our first 5 years) but learning how to do all this tech is not my strong suit however many of our products demand it so I spend 15 hours doing what another person could do in 3. Its been great to get better at for sure, but i’m going from bad to average. To allow an organization to utilize its strength by pairing them with a techie or vice versa would allow orgs to go from Great to Bringing Moshiach. Maybe their should be a new type of training – train techies in ways that they can go pair off with a few successful Jewish ventures. It’s less sexy in that a new idea won’t spring into the world, but more impactful bc existing orgs will be thoroughly enhanced. And these new techies trained for jewish orgs can choose the orgs they think they have passion for and help the most. Just a thought. Thanks for the study. Good work guys!
Having worked in technology and particularly within the Jewish community for many years now, my experiences have been only a handful of people are willing to take the great leap of faith that is required to change their business model. As many senior staff at organizations are beholden to the wishes of their lay leadership and the drive for greater fundraising, it’s often a challenge to sell in the benefits and huge potential of technology to not only streamline their businesses, but also raise awareness in more innovative ways. As the donor base at most organizations has steadily increased in age, it takes courage and commitment to dedicate resources away from tried and true methods…particularly during a tight economy.
Reading this blog post makes me feel as though we are on the cusp (if we are not there already) of expanding our understandings of digital nativity. It’s beyond being good with buttons or screens, and it is not just having a digital face or space. It’s not only navigating relationships through clicks of the button or dropping assignments in a teacher’s inbox. Invitations to become more than one believes oneself to be through rivers and hikes of digital landscapes will help us grow the Jewish nature of existence, if we find the right ways to put good content and dynamic platforms to good use. Sharing thought and reflecting through visual and video and written feedback is happening on VoiceThread, for instance, and we know that Jewish schools and organizations can grow our connections by engaging one or another of the tools.
Imagine – a teacher who understands the power of putting a G-dcast spot in the middle of a screen where everyone in a class or community or in an open spot finds their voice in Torah. Students in Israel are tracking the weather and data about wind, as are day school students in Arizona. Then they learn about sustainable desert architecture, and they have to design 3d homes based on principles of environmental and architectural science. Kids or adults in sister communities around the globe are photographing each other and telling their stories about how they got where they live, so that deeper senses of finding ourselves can resonate. People who just talked with others half way around the globe turn to one another at tables, for some face time with tablets, to sketch solutions to community-based challenges brought forward by community leaders, and then they tweet and post and host about what arose in the conversation, so that the problem can be crowd-sourced.
So, even those natives are in for a real treat, when the people with the tech power and the engagement strategists – blended learning and community organizers (non-profiteers, teachers, organizers, mission based pilots of the tech-based tools, etc.) start working together. I agree with Rachel, Josh and Adam that the power needs to be harnessed with the right people creating the new dashboards, refining the apps, creating the scaffolding to use around what exists that engages in a whole new way. Driving instructors teach everyone how to step on the gas and how to break. Trainings like Lisa’s and the Fund’s have introduced so many to wonderful ways to make the best use of the tools out there. I believe that when we start to imagine and dream more about building and growing Jewish identity, righteous giving and one’s own purpose and cyber-soulful engagement with the world (including that tech at the fingers) we will be onto fulfilling the deep desires of the Jewish community to introduce and adopt the media.
Thanks for opening the doors to deeper thinking on all this and encouraging responses. Your posts definitely resonates with me.