Spotlight: A Newsletter Devoted to Jewish Community Studies
May 2023 Issue
Turning community studies data into strategic planning: The experience of Jewish Long Beach
We are excited to announce the release of the 2021-22 Long Beach Area Jewish Community Study. In planning for the study release, Richard Marcus, new Jewish Long Beach president, told Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies (CMJS) that
"If ever the Cohen Center needed to give an example of immediately putting its investment in a community study to use in strategic planning, Long Beach is a good one!"
CMJS followed up with a series of questions in the hope that others who are thinking about the next step in moving from research to action might find Long Beach's experience helpful. Below is our interview, slightly edited for clarity.
Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies (CMJS): The Long Beach report is about to be released after two years of data gathering and analysis and will now begin to be incorporated into your strategic planning. Can you describe how you expect to do that? What are some of the priorities you have identified?
Richard Marcus: Our strategic planning process began just as the data analysis was being completed. We decided we would work directly with the numerical data provided by Brandeis even before we had a final report. From the outset, we saw the community study as important to our strategic planning, but, as the report and the planning developed alongside each other, we found that these two processes became intertwined.
Our highest priority in employing the community study for strategic planning was to use it as the foundation (along with conducting focus groups with key stakeholders) of our knowledge base. This approach would allow us to align our programming with the findings. For example, the data led us to increase our focus on the types of personal experiences of Judaism that many in the community engage in, including talking Jewishly, absorbing Jewish content (e.g., TV, movies), eating Jewish foods, and practicing Jewish life at home. We didn’t come up with all of the answers in our strategic plan, but we did use these findings to guide committees in coming up with new program strategies and innovations. It also was a decisive factor in our decision to create a specific Strategic Planning Committee tasked solely with ensuring the measures of success in implementing the innovative strategies in the strategic plan.
Another example of using the study data was our effort to address the finding that lacking a personal connection/knowing someone is one of the largest barriers to participation. We are extending our efforts to identify and create connections among Jews who are already engaged in our broader community.
The findings demonstrated that we do many things well, there are areas where we need to scale up our efforts, and there are areas where adjustments need to be made. Improvements in these efforts will require modest effort. However, we also learned about many of the gaps where we do not serve our constituent base well. Addressing these areas requires significant efforts. The strategic plan created specific task areas for committees to come up with ways of addressing some of these gaps.
Finally, we are a newly integrated agency that includes Jewish Federation of Greater Long Beach and West Orange County, Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Long Beach and West Orange County, and the Alpert Jewish Community Center of Long Beach. The strategic planning process was challenging because it needed to, for the first time, bring together core organizational functions that include leadership development, fundraising, convening, grantmaking, stewardship, programing, and campus life. The community study helped drive a robust conversation about how to best work together in terms of our physical space and other needs within our community.
CMJS: Community studies tend to be detailed and comprehensive—a lot of data and information to sort through. What was your internal review process that helped you identify those areas in the report that were ripe for communal investment or priority? Who was involved and how did they do their work?
Richard Marcus: We are fortunate in Long Beach to have several large universities in the area with affiliated faculty in our Jewish community. Before even writing an RFP, we created a Community Study Working Group composed of five PhDs. Each is from a different discipline, but four out of five work with data, and two out of five have been PIs for community studies as part of their research within their profession. This brain trust proved crucial. Each member was highly engaged through the process and asked difficult questions about the findings and the methodology. With a team of people accustomed to analyzing and sorting data on a regular basis, it became possible to distill that information for the Board and the Strategic Planning Task Force. The Community Study Working Group was crucial in helping calm Board concerns and highlight areas where the Strategic Planning Task Force might want to take a deeper look.
Moving forward, we expect the Community Study Working Group to continue to play an important role. The Community Study Report is very robust, but it is not possible to answer all questions in one report, and there will always be follow-up areas where we will need to dig deeper. The Working Group can utilize the dataset to unpack more detail as needed.
CMJS: Were there any study findings that particularly surprised you?
Richard Marcus: Speaking for the Strategic Planning Task Force and the Community Study Working Group, it seems the most surprising finding was around age groups. We knew we had a disproportionately large senior generation, but it is much larger than we assumed. There were marked differences in perceptions and needs across generations and more differences in these in perceptions, needs, and demographics than we anticipated. We knew that the ways in which our population negotiates its identity was changing, but we were surprised by the speed of ethnic and racial diversification as well as movement toward personal activities at the expense of community engagement. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised that Jewish identification was, in a number of ways, increasing. Even while the number of intermarried families is increasing, Jewish identification within these families is standing firm.
These “surprises” pushed us to accelerate some of our programmatic changes and, particularly, the ways in which we serve the community across the lifecycle. While our new fundraising and development plan is still in the works, this finding is also likely to impact both our fundraising strategies (such as the direction of our capital campaign) and the ways in which we diversify our funding streams.
Want to learn more about Long Beach's experience? Contact Richard Marcus at richardmarcus@yahoo.com or Interim CEO, Deborah Goldfarb at dgoldfarb@jewishlongbeach.org