“We want to do better with our digital efforts in 2023. What should we be focusing on to achieve it?”
“Well, what worked for you last year?”
Our client was stumped by this question. With all of the planning and strategic meetings that had taken place about the coming year, it had never occurred to them to take a hard look at their analytics, digital successes, and setbacks that happened last year.
(Either that or they didn’t know how to gather this information in an accurate way.)
This is a very common situation that we see with Jewish organizations of all sizes: they don’t know how to set realistic digital goals for the coming year because they don’t really know their starting point.
That’s what this blog post is all about: How to finally understand how to evaluate your organization’s digital successes so that you know how to accurately plan, set goals, and take action in 2023.
“But Lena, what does digital success mean?”
Let’s start by looking at your total online landscape. It’s broken into three layers, or what we call the Digital Jump:
The Top Layer (What your audience/community sees)
The Middle Layer (What your staff sees)
The Bottom Layer (What your organization sees in its future)
Each of these is essential to ensure long-lasting impact for your organization and life-changing impact for your community.
The Top Layer: Examining what your community sees
Your community sees your public communications and marketing efforts, mainly your social media and email newsletters. Yes, they also see your website, but they’re regularly reminded of your organization by seeing your weekly content (or at least they should be).
Let’s first talk about social media.
Here are the basic questions you should be asking yourself to understand its progress this year:
How many followers did you gain on Facebook, Instagram, and any other regular social platforms this year? Where specifically did these followers come from (how did they find your account and what inspired them to follow you)? How much is this up (or down) from the year before?
What does your social media engagement look like? On average, how many views, likes, shares, and comments did your content receive? Which posts did the best and what is your theory as to why?
What does your social media content calendar look like? Is it organized, consistent, and following a brand guide? You can rate this on a scale of 1-10.
For Email Marketing:
How often is your organization sending out newsletters? Are the schedule and content consistent?
Are you sending out one large, general email? Or are you segmenting it by population and interests?
What are your open and click-through rates? Are you regularly tracking them and making tweaks to improve those numbers?
Are you using email marketing as an opportunity to push out as much information as possible, or are you treating it as a weekly opportunity to deepen your relationship with your viewers?
There are many more questions you should be asking yourself to properly analyze your organization’s digital marketing performance this past year, but these will get you on the right track and thinking about your marketing efforts in a more precise way. With precision comes progress.
The Middle Layer: What Your Staff Sees
Your internal digital atmosphere is just as important, if not more important, than the top layer. And for most organizations, it’s a bigger mess than they realize.
Here are some regular comments we hear from our clients about their beloved coworkers.
“So and so never responded to my email and now the project is two weeks behind. Ugh!”
“I just sat through another two-hour-long meeting and we didn’t achieve anything!”
“If I have to create another strategic plan that goes nowhere, I’m gonna go crazy!”
“I’m so sick of doing this same tedious task over and over again…”
You get the idea. And more than likely, you’ve had a few of these thoughts yourself.
By your internal digital atmosphere, I’m talking about how your organization communicates, creates tasks and projects, sets goals, achieves milestones, and streamlines its progress using digital tools.
Without the proper internal digital systems, it’s extremely easy for tasks to never get achieved, for emails to never get responses, for plans to never come to fruition, and for team members to stay relentlessly annoyed with one another.
While many don’t realize it, this is all fixable with the use of digital, automated, and streamlined digital systems.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to understand your organization’s internal “digital system health”:
How well documented are your team’s repeated tasks? (Do you have standard operating procedures in place?)
How do you delegate and track the progress and completion of projects?
How often does communication get lost or fall through the cracks via email?
How often does someone forget to do something because they just “didn’t write it down”?
How often are deadlines missed or a last-minute rush to get things done?
How often do you feel like you’re wasting time on mundane, repetitive tasks?
How often do you feel like you’re starting from scratch instead of building what you’ve already succeeded with?
How much time are you wasting in meetings talking about general ideas or plans that rarely get fulfilled?
One of the main reasons that organizations don’t succeed with their digital marketing (what their audience sees) is that there aren’t team-based systems in place to make it a success.
It’s time to set your employees up for success with real standard operating procedures, task and project management tools, and automation tools to make things happen faster and more effectively.
The Bottom Layer: What Your Organization Sees In Its Future
I’m often surprised to learn how many prominent and leading Jewish organizations aren’t clear on what their future role is in their community. What do they want to be known for in the next five to ten years? What do they want to achieve? What people do they want to help? What do they want to focus on?
And across departments, it seems that each has a different vision. Some want to focus on social justice initiatives, whereas others want to focus on philanthropy and foundation work. Some want to focus on youth programs and teens, while others on fighting antisemitism.
And with all of these different ideas of what the organization needs to work toward and morph into in the coming years, it becomes harder and harder to make actual progress.
And it will especially be difficult to make progress in 2023 without it.
If your organization is in this position, it’s time to make it a serious priority to get clear on the collective long-term vision so that you can strategically build a brand identity that succeeds in the both Middle Layer and the Top Layer.
Because if your staff members (Middle Layer) are unclear about where you are now and what you’re working toward as a team, they won’t be able to take the steps to build it.
And if your organization is all over the place in its voice, story, values, and priorities and that lack of coherence is apparent to your community (Top Layer), they won’t know why they should be invested in you anymore. And the result of that can be devastating.
So, ask yourself:
Do we have a clear vision for where our organization is heading in the next five to ten years? Is our entire staff on board with that vision and working toward it collectively?
Are our organization’s values and purpose clearly communicated and known amongst our staff?
Do we have an unwavering plan in place to reach our goals that won’t get thrown out the window the second a new leadership team member gets hired and doesn’t like it? Or when the budget changes? Or when you experience turnover? How committed are you to actually following through on this strategic, long-term plan?
If not, what can be done to create this strategic plan and make sure it will get followed through on?
How can we take our values, purpose, and goals and implement them into an online system that will allow true digital success in the years to come?
We call this system the Digital Jump because we know that every Jewish organization has the potential to jump into a new way of operating, growing, and streamlining its success. And it starts with understanding where are right now.
The truth is, while this transformative process might seem complicated now, nothing is stopping you from doing it. In 2023, you have every tool and system available to you. It’s just about committing to upgrading and evolving, and knowing that you have the potential to do and impact more.
Time to take the Jump.
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