Double Down on Building Your Digital Brand
The COVID-19 pandemic has, in some ways, made Jewish community more broadly accessible than ever. In 2020, nonprofits and synagogues quickly began offering Jewish content in virtual spaces to compensate for the lack of in-person gatherings. In the process, some discovered that producing high-quality digital content could not only sustain, but grow their communities, and even generate some much needed revenue in return. As we move forward into 2021, many communities will be faced with a choice of whether or not to continue producing digital content and building spaces for virtual community.
Before the pandemic, few Jewish communities were seriously investing in technology to allow online streaming of in-person services, classes, events, and other forms of virtual community. Those that had were able to transition more smoothly to a purely virtual environment. Others quickly caught up and soon the Jewish world, like the secular world around us, was awash in new digital content. In 2020 the digital content landscape grew astonishingly fast. Zoom stock soared by over 400% as more paid users than ever signed up for the platform. The number of active podcasts grew by over 50%, while the number of YouTube channels grew by over 23% overall and the number of channels with over 100,000 subscribers grew by over 40% alone.
My own synagogue launched a YouTube channel during the pandemic. It may not directly drive membership growth, at least not currently, but it’s had almost 4,000 views to date, as many as most start-up podcasts, YouTube channels, and blogs in their first year. The channel exists alongside other, complementary digital content like the senior rabbi’s e-dvar newsletter, the assistant rabbi’s social media posts, and the sermons delivered virtually every Shabbat. Collectively, these digital content offerings are a portal for people to engage with our Jewish community at a level and in a manner of their own choosing, a critical component of our community’s brand whether it’s online or in-person.
Branding and engagement go hand in hand, and as we move slowly but surely into a post-pandemic reality, and return to more tried and true in-person engagement methods, synagogues and nonprofit communities will need to decide how to incorporate these newly discovered virtual spaces, and whatever digital content they have produced to engage their community online during the pandemic, into their established pre-pandemic brands. This is especially true for organizations who had little to no curated online presence before the pandemic, and who will need to decide if resources should be allocated to building virtual communities with new digital content, or even maintain old content.
Vaccines hold the promise of slowly returning us to a more normal reality in 2021, but demographic trends from before the pandemic began suggest that digital content will continue to be a vital tool building Jewish community for years to come. In 2019, according to Nielsen, adults age 38 or less (roughly 25% of domestic consumers in the United States) spent up to 18 hours a day consuming media of all types. A third of that time was exclusively focused on user-generated content such as social media, blogs, podcasts, online videos. The pandemic has only intensified these trends, which look to continue well beyond this moment in history.
The bottom line is that if your community is producing digital content of some kind—be it an online service stream, a podcast, a YouTube channel, or other form of online community—you should continue offering that same content even after the pandemic, or you’ll be missing a golden opportunity to build your corner of the Jewish community. Now is the time to double down on these digital offerings, to invest time and resources in providing the best looking, best sounding, best curated content you can to your community.
