Three articles this week of particular interest to important themes on this blog.

What’s Next For Birthright Alumni an editorial by Gary Rosenblatt

Michael Steinhardt is never satisfied.

That’s what drives some of those who work with him crazy at times. But it’s also what drives his success as a businessman and major philanthropist.

While much of the Jewish community, here and in Israel, has been heralding birthright israel — the audacious project he helped found to give every young Jew in the world a free trip to Israel — as the most exciting and successful of efforts to increase Jewish identity, Steinhardt has been grumbling that it’s not enough.

Leveraging Funds and Passions

from the Spring 2008 issue of HaYidion: The RAVSAK Journal

Philly Jewish paper accused of kowtowing to its funder

A controversy over the renaming of a Philadelphia-area day school is raising questions about the delicate relationship between the local Jewish newspaper and the federation that funds it.

(eJP note: while this article was originally published in The Forward, we find it significant that it has been picked up by Haaretz. The issues raised from this gift have been reverberating in Philadelphia for about a year and are relevant to all organizations in the Jewish communal world).

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A few selected links we think you may be interested in. Continuously updated.

Peres: Conference ‘promoted Israel around the world’

Peres sees the conference’s success, above all, in the image boost he said it gave the state. He also praised the value of the networking that went on at the conference.

Jewish Demography and Peoplehood: 2008

Sergio DellaPergola’s position paper.

‘Elitist’ leadership alienating American Jewish community, says prominent sociologist

Listen up, y’all: The perception that the American Jewish leadership is “elitist, parochial, self-serving and resistant to innovation,” is fueling a decline in Jewish communal participation in the U.S., a leading sociologist said this week.

In a policy paper prepared ahead of the President’s Conference, “Facing Tomorrow,” Professor Chaim Waxman asserted that a sense of “too much overlap, duplication, and non-cooperation” among organizations in the American Jewish establishment is also disillusioning, especially among the younger generation, in regards to Jewish organizational life.

Digital world leaders foresee ‘personalization’

According to leaders from the Internet and media world, the fast emergence of the on-line world is changing the way we relate to information, and in the future will provide a much more open, social and emotional experience.

So who’s paying for Peres’s big bash?

Big donors - and what’s wrong with that?

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Listen up, y’all, in our Jewish communal world; you know if your organization is guilty.

“The perception that the American Jewish leadership is “elitist, parochial, self-serving and resistant to innovation,” is fueling a decline in Jewish communal participation in the U.S., a leading sociologist said this week.

In a policy paper prepared ahead of the President’s Conference, “Facing Tomorrow,” Professor Chaim Waxman asserted that a sense of “too much overlap, duplication, and non-cooperation” among organizations in the American Jewish establishment is also disillusioning, especially among the younger generation, in regards to Jewish organizational life.

“There is a sense among some that the older established organizations are incapable of making the changes necessary to accomplish what some non-establishment organizations have been able to achieve.”

(eJP note) Daphna Berman from Haaretz did a great job summarizing this presentation. For those of you interested, we have both a recording of the complete session and Dr. Waxman’s policy paper coming shortly)

Read Daphna’s complete article here.

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C’mon guys, you need to do better than this…

According to the JTA, The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews suspended its May 1 payment on a $45 million commitment made to JAFI late last year.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, IFCJ Executive Director, said the agency has not lived up to its commitment to become a “strategic partner” with the IFCJ. A key issue, he said, is that Jewish Agency stationary still only lists the organization’s historic partners, the United Jewish Communities and Keren Hayesod, but fails to mention IFCJ.

Read more from the JTA.

Here for the December announcement.

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“Most countries mark big celebrations with music and fireworks. Here in Israel, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary, they are also celebrating with talk.

At mid-afternoon Wednesday, the center of the Jewish universe was almost certainly the modern-looking convention center here. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was kibitzing with former White House domestic policy adviser Jay Lefkowitz. Ron Lauder, the former ambassador who now heads the World Jewish Congress, was holding court on a couch nearby, and Leslie Wexner, founder of the Limited clothing chain and one of richest men in the United States, was spotted crossing the room. A crowd, meanwhile, was forming to hear Dershowitz discuss the moral dimensions of foreign policy with Václav Havel, Mort Zuckerman and Efraim Halevy, the former director of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.”

Read Micheal’s complete story here.

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Facing Tomorrow, the first annual conference of Shimon Peres’ presidency opened Tuesday afternoon; and only Shimon Peres could have organized this!

The Conference is examining what the future holds for the global community, the Jewish people and the State of Israel; also recognizing Jewish and Israeli contributions to humanity. You can read more on a previous post, Tomorrow is Today.

On the opening evening, my wife called this “one big party” and to some extent it is. But, I’ve been involved in the Jewish communal world for a long time and I have to say, this Conference, by far, is

the largest and MOST INFLUENTIAL networking event that has taken place in decades.

I do not want to downplay the GA’s, WZO’s, or any other organizations’ valuable conferences. However, they do not hold a candle to who was here, how they interacted in the sessions and hallways, and I’m certain also in private.

A senior JAFI executive told me, he does not have the same optimistic opinion; he indicated speakers are all over the place and not focused. Immaterial. The fact is President Peres pulled off what no-one else has ever done: having this diverse and international crowd under one roof, discussing a host of challenges, problems and opportunities, and more important meeting each other.

This is the final day and I have found the Conference informative and exhilerating. Also tiring; the days are long and I have been unable to post as I would have preferred.

This morning, though, I am reaping the benefits of our new technology and blogging directly from a particularly relevant presentation, The Revolution of the Internet and the New Media.

This plenary focuses on how society is dependent on the Internet and mass-communications, and guided by them. Where is it all going? How will future developments in this field further affect our lives? Are there perils along with the blessings?

We have just heard Susan Decker, Yahoo’s President, give us two key take-a-ways:

• The Web is becoming more open and social with trusted relationships very important to the future.
  
• In the future we will also see stronger connections between the on and off-line worlds.

As to Yahoo’s future, according to Susan, their next challenge is to focus on three targets: creating open platforms where consumers define how, when and where they consume content; highly personalized content; and establishing stronger connections between on-line and off-line worlds.

So, if you are interested in technology and where it is headed, along with being introduced to key innovations players from Israel’s world of technology, I recommend checking out the entire plenary, hear what Susan has to say along with Google’s Sergey Brin; Maurice Levy, of the Management Board, Publicis Groupe; News Corps Rupert Murdoch and Yahoo’s former executive, Terry Semel.

To read about other Conference sessions, please check my friend Esther’s blog posts this morning on My Urban Kvetch.

And this, perhaps contrarian view from from the Jerusalem Post,

“Jewish conferences are not necessarily pointless. Some gatherings have dramatically changed Jewish life, and even deeply impacted the rest of the world…

The individuals involved in the JPPPI conference are intelligent and important figures without exception. But, as over a dozen told The Jerusalem Post, they are participating this week in a conference that has no clear direction, has discounted culture and Jewish educators and has conducted a gathering that was a confused combination of Davos-like cocktail lunches and repetitive lectures.”

Read the complete JPost article here.

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We’ve written about the new Avi Chai Fellowships, the Bronfman prize and other new fellowships that have premiered in our Jewish world recently. Here, ia an article from Gary Rosenblatt in today’s Jewish Week we would like to share.

Individuals, not just projects, emphasized as Avi Chai names its first six fellows.

“Continuing a trend among philanthropies to highlight and support the creative work of individual thinkers and activists, the Avi Chai Foundation this week announced the first winners of its new Fellows program.”

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Picture two nonprofits. The first has a donor database that is full of bad information. Donors are getting the wrong receipts or no receipts at all. The organization cannot use the database to plan their fundraising strategies or track their effectiveness. The few reports they can get are useless. Staff members complain that no one trained them, and they get no technical support. For obvious reasons, they hate the system.

The second organization loves its database. The data is clean. Donors get timely, accurate mailings. The organization has a good handle on its fundraising activities, and staff members get the reports they want. New personnel are trained on the database before they ever log in. And, someone on staff helps them resolve any problems and questions that come up.
Both nonprofits are using the same software package.

How can this be? Perhaps the first organization has outgrown its old system. But it is quite likely that the organization never had the right software to begin with used it incorrectly. They made a series of bad decisions and have been struggling with them ever since.

Selecting and managing a donor database is never easy, but if you avoid the mistakes on this list, you can start out on the right foot.

Read about the 10 Mistakes here.

This article is from NPT Instant Fundraising, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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Economy Hobbles Giving by Some Wealthy Donors

Many wealthy baby boomers have cut back their gifts to charity in the last six months — another sign that the nation’s bad economy is starting to hurt charitable fund raising.

How Little Do Users Read?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. We’ve known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don’t read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding.

Secret Social Media Agent Man: A Guide to Going Under the Radar

Want to move your organization out of the 90s? Work the backchannels. Identify other employees who are open to new ideas and already experimenting with new technologies. Search online networks like LinkedIn and Facebook for the digital breadcrumbs of colleagues, senior managers and key gatekeepers in your organization.

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