By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
There’s no awards ceremony, no gold statue, no cash prize. But there is something far less tangible that can, in many ways, go even further: Feedback. That’s why three local organizations have expressed excitement about being named winners of Jewish Choice Awards, a new award granted by the two-year-old Great Nonprofits organization.
“The way it works is organizations gather reviews from their community members, volunteers, board members and donors, even clients that have been served,” said Shari Ilsen, director of marketing and outreach for Great Nonprofits. “A nonprofit isn’t formally nominated — people just review them.”
Ilsen said that Great Nonprofits, which is modeled after Yelp.com, a community-based Web site that enables users of any type of product or service to write a review, fills a hole where people interested in supporting a cause might not know how other donors or clients feel about that organization.
So without further ado, the three award winners, out of eight total nominees, are: For small organization, Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue; for medium organization, Hillel at the University of Washington’s Jconnect program; and for large organization, the Seattle Jewish Community School.
“We’re really excited,” said Shellie Oakley, executive director of Bet Alef. “Largely because of the feedback that was given to us through the process, and the really wonderful reviews were a joy.”
Bet Alef isn’t alone.
“It’s obviously exciting to win and be loved,” said Deborah Frockt, director of admissions at SJCS. “But what’s really very gratifying for everyone internally has been to look at all those comments and reviews, how they tell the story of the school so comprehensively.”
Frockt said one of SJCS’ community members alerted the school to the awards, and the school trumpeted the message from there.
“I think people were ready to have a venue where they could just speak their minds, which this obviously gave them,” Frockt said.
Jconnect’s director, Rabbi Jacob Fine, said he was moved by the number of people who commented about his organization.
“It actually was really powerful to see all the folks [who] took the time to write personal statements and to share their reflections on Jconnect,” Fine said. “There’s not so many occasions where we receive feedback in that particular way.”
The immediate benefit, said all the local winners, is in the ability to do outreach to potential new participants.
During the admissions period, SJCS commonly gets several comments every week from prospective parents about their lifestyle, Frockt said: “‘We don’t know where we fit. We’re probably not like other families in your school,’” goes the refrain.
By directing prospective parents to their listing on greatnonprofits.org, she said, they can see that “‘there is another family that might be a little like mine.’”
Fine agreed.
“To have those testimonials is something we can on occasion draw from, [and] send people to,” he said.
Oakley said Bet Alef actually found out about the award process from SJCS — their rabbi, Olivier Ben-Haim, sends his children there.
“They had heard about it when [SJCS was] letting their parents know and asking people to write reviews, and I was like hey, this looks like a great thing,” Oakley said.
So Ben-Haim’s wife Amy took the ball and ran with it. Seeing the show of support while the congregation transitions between its founding rabbi, Ted Falcon, and Ben-Haim was especially gratifying, according to Oakley.
“It was particularly wonderful to get all those responses and know that the support for Bet Alef is strong,” she said.
Great Nonprofits hopes to act as a resource for these nonprofits in more than just the reviews section. It is connected to GuideStar, which maintains a list of all of the 501(c)3 charitable organizations in the U.S. Having access to the philanthropic tools GuideStar offers is invaluable, Frockt said.
The benefit runs two ways, of course: Organizations get feedback about themselves while Great Nonprofits extends its user base, enabling it to become a bigger player in the charitable giving field. The Jewish Choice awards were one of several award campaigns that focus on different areas of philanthropy.
Ilsen acknowledged that because Great Nonprofits is a small organization like many of the agencies it features, it also faced limitations in getting the word out about the award process. So they turned to social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and leveraged their partnerships with such organizations as jgooders.com, a site that connect Jews around the world to Jewish causes, and the JTA news service.
But that’s also the point. For small organizations without the budget to market themselves to their community, using online tools, including Great Nonprofits, is a valuable way to get their message out, Ilsen said.
“Our challenge for each of these campaigns is to spread the word…to let them know this marketing opportunity is out there,” Ilsen said.
The organizations that found out about the award and spread the word got a big response from their supporters: Users posted more than 4,000 reviews of 180 Jewish organizations nationwide between October and mid-November.
“They were just so quick to jump on this and they understood immediately what it meant [and] were quickly able to rally their community members,” Ilsen said.
Any Jewish organization with 10 or more reviews was considered for an award, which was then broken down by budget size and geographical region.
“If Seattle nonprofits were going up against New York nonprofits, that wouldn’t very much be fair,” Ilsen said. “We wanted to even the playing field.”