Intimate, Bingeable Jewish Community
Intimacy is the new gold standard of community building for 2021. Every week, I receive an e-dvar in my inbox, from one of the rabbis at my synagogue. Most weeks I read it, and it helps me maintain a more intimate level of connection to the synagogue, especially on weeks that I don’t attend services. Similarly, I look forward to reading personal emails from the leaders of my favorite Jewish nonprofits, about their work and their perspectives on our world. This was true long before the COVID-19 pandemic placed these e-dvars and emails among the most important engagement tools my synagogue and favorite organizations had available in a virtual world.
While these emails and other forms of engagement do help me feel a more intimate connection to the mission and work of my favorite Jewish communities, the tactics are firmly entrenched in old-school models of engagement. My rabbi’s e-dvar is a meaningful read, but I often can’t find the email when I want to revisit it a few weeks later, and my ability to share it with others is limited to forwarding the email. I certainly can’t binge-read e-dvars, which sounds like a joke, but is a critical way people consume media today. What I can do is binge watch my synagogue’s YouTube channel and binge listen to my favorite Jewish podcasts, just like I binge watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Shtisel, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Podcasts, in particular, offer people intimate and even binge-able opportunities to engage with Jewish community and build trusting relationships with that community along the way. Social scientists have long established the link between the sound of someone’s voice and our first impressions of them, including how trustworthy they are. Podcasting, as a medium, taps into this connection to build trusting, intimate relationships between hosts and their community of listeners. In the words of a podcast coach Pat Flynn, whose virtual community I’m proud to be a member of, “podcasting is the best way to scale intimacy.” Your community might be based around an organization like a synagogue or nonprofit, or like Pat and other online personalities, it might be based around your personal brand. Either way, podcasting can help you reach more people and connect more deeply with them.
Podcasts also open a door for others to explore and embrace your community. A well-produced YouTube channel can be as valuable to a synagogue as their weekly kiddush lunch in helping attract new members. Alternatively, a large synagogue could choose to produce a limited-series podcast, one focused on the synagogue’s history and culture, and used it as a resource for welcoming newcomers to the community. The possibilities to engage your community and build your brand through podcasting are limitless.
It’s not too late to start producing engaging digital content for your brand. Low-budget tools exist to get started today if you wanted, and the best time to start has always been right now. But, if your goal is to create binge-worthy content to serve as a cornerstone of your online brand, you need to invest resources to produce the best quality, most engaging content possible. That might mean microphones, editing software, and staff time, or it might mean working with a content producer who truly gets your brand, and the story you’re sharing with your community. Either way, you can expect podcasting to dramatically deepen your relationship with your growing community.
