Mishegas

Congregations 2.0: Interfaith Event for Synagogue Techies

Every synagogue or congregation has them: the folks responsible for the membership database, email lists, IT services and so on. Unfortunately, very few of them see themselves as specializing in the technology of faith institutions. Yes, there are associations that specialize in synagogue administration, but if we were to compare a representative set of temple administrators with your average 22 year old college graduate, the college graduate is probably much more fluent and comfortable engaging in online space, software as a service applications, social media, video and online campaigning.

Yes, this is what faith institutions are called upon to do if they want to engage young people. (Or rather ‘people’, based on the demographics of Facebook users…)

So Charles Lenchner of ‘Organizing 2.0’ and former administrative staff at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun is putting on a day long  training called ‘Congregations 2.0’ in partnership with Judson Memorial Church, on January 14th. (www.congregations20.org)

If you work for or with a synagogue, temple, or havurah – consider going. Perhaps you consider yourself to be a fairly savvy techie already. Wouldn’t it be cool to learn from your peers? In any case, not that many of us can really say that we know how to choose and migrate to a new donation system, or advise our rabbi on the best methods of Facebook conversation starting, or suggest appropriate peer to peer networking tools for committees and lay leaders.

Check it out here: www.congregations20.org. If you already work for a congregation, answer below – what kinds of sessions and learning would you like to see? Charles is still adding workshop proposals, and I know he’ll be looking….

3 thoughts on “Congregations 2.0: Interfaith Event for Synagogue Techies

  1. So let me get this straight. This is an in-person conference which doesn’t give any access to online participants (real time or delayed). They want you to email someone to make a donation instead of having an online donation option. If you click to comment on their first blog post you get a “page not found” error. This is the peak of web 2.0 social media for congregations?!?
    I’m mostly joking. Mostly.

  2. Focusing on machines instead of people is great for shrinking congregations like Judson (which had to shrink its building space in 1999 for ‘financial’ reasons). That way when the last congregant dies out, the computers can be preprogrammed to do all the praying.

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