Advancing the Conversation

One of our prime goals at eJewish Philanthropy is to advance the conversation. We do this by publishing a range of pieces on topics of interest to our professional readership, by making social sharing (through facebook and Twitter) easy to use and by providing a discussion forum following following every post. And yet, as Eitan Gutin recently pointed out, many readers ignore the comments section. This is easy to understand as we are all pressed for time. After reading a post, and perhaps even adding our own comment, we generally do not return to follow the discussion. And this, unfortunately, tends to limit the conversation.

As an example, let’s take a look at last week’s post by Mark S. Young, The $54,000 Strategy: A Bold Solution to Undervaluing our Jewish Professionals – a post that struck quite a chord with our eJP audience. The social share numbers tell only a small part of the story including 42 Tweets and 1135 facebook shares! But to us, besides the impressive 5000+ who have read the article, are those who have taken the time to add to the discussion – including communal professionals such as Eitan, Rhoda Weisman, Esther Kustanowitz, Daniel Fast and many many others (including Mark himself responding to some of the earlier comments). So while today we have a solo response from Ken Gordon, we encourage you to also return to the original post, read the comments, and join the conversation, if you are so moved.

As an aside, we note that of all those commenting, not one is a senior professional in an organization employing (directly or indirectly) hundreds of the communal professionals who are so important to our long-term sustainability. One can’t help but wonder where they stand on compensation, and value, for/of those below the “C” suites.

While we all have much on our plates, if a topic is of particular interest to you, even if you do not add a comment yourself, bookmark the post and check back a few days later. You just may find a fascinating conversation in process.