by Lucy Bernholz and Conan Liu, eJewishphilanthropy.com

Introduction

Every day we hear about new digital applications that make it easier to compare products, find news, animate books, and play games. We also hear from the creators of these tools that they want to do more than just build the next best shopping site; they want to do something that matters. At the same time, most organizations that serve our communities struggle to maintain working technology infrastructures, let alone to experiment and imagine how to achieve their missions in a digital world. Bridging this gap between media innovation and mission accomplishment was the core goal of the Jewish New Media Innovation Fund (the Fund), a pilot launched in 2010 by the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation, and the Schusterman Family Foundation. The funders introduced an online, open application process designed to identify and fund digitally based projects that “enriched and renewed Jewish traditions, revitalized Jewish institutions, and preserved Jewish history.”

More than 300 applications poured in from individuals, nonprofits, and commercial enterprises. Drawing from their networks, the funders quickly built a team of 75 volunteers to review and score these applications across a range of criteria. The 30 highest-scoring applications were advanced for review to an advisory panel consisting of six experts, and nine projects were ultimately chosen as winners, receiving a total of $500,000 from the Fund. The portfolio of winners included a wide range of innovative technology projects: virtual communities, mobile applications, a digital music platform, videos series, liturgy translators, and more.(1) These projects were designed to engage individuals in Jewish life by using digital tools to re-imagine Jewish history; strengthen Jewish identity through music and the arts; connect Jews with religious services and communities; and change the ways traditional Jewish education is delivered. The very act of establishing the Fund has already helped prompt conversations around technology and social innovation in organizations that may not have otherwise occurred. These conversations will only continue to grow and deepen as we watch and monitor the types of impact that these projects have on Jewish communities and individuals.

The ultimate outcome of the JNMIF will rest as much on what the community learns from this experiment as it does on the results of the individual projects. To spur discussion about the experiment, we reflect below on three questions:

    What is the state of new media innovation in the organized Jewish community?
    How can the JNMIF process be improved?
    What might come next?

What is the state of new media innovation in the organized Jewish community?

The community could use a digital upgrade – or so the pool of applicants to the Fund suggests.

While the applicants to the Fund demonstrated clear excitement and enthusiasm for the potential that digital innovation could play in enriching Jewish life, the project also revealed a wealth of opportunities for funders to help build core digital capacity within the community. Naturally, many digitally strong organizations and individuals appeared in the applicant pool, but other applicants were not as well equipped for digital innovation: they need stronger technical capacities and deeper experience working with and integrating digital and social media tools into their practices.

Six months after the Fund selected its first round of winners, The Natan Fund ran a similar digital media application process that led to a similar realization. The applicants for that pool confirmed a strong need for digital media upgrades among Jewish organizations.

Individuals steeped in digital and social media may be best positioned to understand how these tools can radically transform education, community building, or art in the Jewish community. If these individuals are already inside community organizations, they will need support for experiments that, at their most innovative, challenge and ultimately improve upon existing operating practice.

How can the JNMIF process be improved?

The Fund may be able to identify even more innovative proposals and opportunities going forward by adjusting its criteria, expanding its outreach, and attracting more thinkers and makers.

We found that the applicants demonstrating highly innovative ideas were not always well-poised to implement them. The fact that these two criteria – innovation, and the ability to implement a project – were not always in sync suggests that we may have advanced only those proposals that scored well across both sets of criteria, potentially leaving some of the edgier proposals out of contention.

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