14. Jewish CMS/CRM & Hosting Platform
As a Web designer working in the Jewish community for over a decade, one of the issues that has arisen repeatedly in my work has been the need for a Content Management System (CMS) and basic Constituent Relations Management (CRM) platform tailored to the needs of Jewish organizations. Whether the client has been a community center, a synagogue, a camp, a cultural institution, or what have you, the need is always generally the same:
- Static page management
- Media upload
- Blogging
- Member, staff & board-only pages
- Forms management (contact, applications, etc.)
- Event calendar with registration & ticketing
- Membership registration, renewal & cancellation
- Store, shopping cart & online payment processing
- Online donations processing
- Staff phonebook
- Polls
- Advertising management
- Email marketing
- Traffic statistics & analytics
Add to that the fact that they wanted it all for next to nothing, and you might imagine just how pie-in-the-sky such a platform was, when the need for it first became apparent to me in 2001.
Nonetheless, while at the JCC in Manhattan, I spearheaded the development of one such joint CMS/CRM, an advanced system poorly titled “Program Manager” which has since been licensed and resold as an add-on to a popular membership management application called iMIS and is now in use by organizations around the country. However, the robustness of that particular software product and its attendant costs were far beyond the needs and means of most of my clients, which, by-and-large, were small Jewish organizations. I therefore set out to create a lightweight, open source alternative.
Built with the help of my friend James Moore, Spectacle was a free, open source CMS that incorporated most of the features above (sans membership management), and which had a low attendant overhead because of its LAMP architecture (LAMP Web hosting can costs as little as $5/month these days). I would eventually use Spectacle on dozens of Web sites, including Congration Tehillah of Riverdale, the Jewish Women’s Foundation of NY, JDub Records, Matisyahu, the Educational Alliance, the National Havurah Committee, Blogs of Zion and many, many more. However, maintaing the project by ourselves eventually became untenable, and after about six years of constant upkeep, James and I abandoned it and it is now no longer in use in most cases.
That said, while Spectacle was in its prime and I was still at the JCC in Manhattan, I was invited to join the UJA Federation of NY’s Web committee, which was focused on exploring the Web technology needs of the Federation’s beneficiary agencies. During my conversations with the Web committee, it became apparent that the needs my clients were expressing were no different from the needs of the Federation’s many beneficiaries. But what totally surprised me, was that the Federation was more interested in disbursing grants to each of its agencies to develop their own Web sites than it was in creating a unified solution and simplified hosting platform that would address all of their beneficiaries needs, for far less than the cost of disbursing those numerous grants.
I pleaded with the committee to adopt Spectacle, to invest in its development, and to partner with a Web hosting provider that would assist them in creating a turnkey solution that would allow them to flip a switch and have a Web site deployed for a beneficiary agency, similarly to what UJC had done for Federations with UJCWeb. But it was a no go. They just couldn’t wrap their heads around it, were for some reason resistant to “competing” with FedWeb (despite it not being available to non-Federations), and I eventually resigned from the committee, seeing that I was likely to get nowhere and was not particularly interested in promoting band-aids.
At any rate, here we are now seven years later, and the landscape of the Jewish Web has completely changed, while the needs have not. I personally moved to adopt the eminently popular Wordpress as my CMS of choice, as have many others in the Jewish community, and thankfully, due to its robust plugin architecture, most of the functionality needed by most Jewish organizations can now be obtained by using free extensions for Wordpress. Also, the ease of developing templates for Wordpress has created an extensive market of free and premium Wordpress themes that can help even the shabbiest organization look exceptionally professional for free or as little as $35-$100.
But, none of these templates or plugins work adequately out of the box, in my estimation. They need a great deal of tweaking and customization. And for most Jewish organizations the tech know-how is simply not one of the in-house resources at their disposal, nor frequently is the cash needed to hire outside help. I have had dozens of potential clients approach me asking for help, only to balk at the price I offered them for my time, which was already well-below market rate.
Thus, the need for a turnkey solution that incorporates all of the necessary functionality at an affordable price still presents itself. And so I propose the same solution I proposed to the UJA in 2003, but with some modification.
Instead of creating a new CMS from scratch, and most certainly, instead of using the now-defunct Spectacle, I would base the product on BuddyPress, an adaptation of WordpressMU, the multi-user edition of Wordpress, which allows hosting and management of thousands of sites from one installation. BuddyPress incorporates advanced social networking features into the core of Wordpress’ functionality, which could a de facto “JMetros” for participating organizations.
I would then extend Wordpress with custom plugins for forms management, event management and registration, membership registration, online shopping and payment processing, online donations processing, and so forth. Many of these plugins already exist in some form, and can be modified to provide end-users with the ease of use necessary for non-tech savvy staff members at old school non-profits. User interface (UI) design is key here, which is why I would not under any circumstances recommend trying this with Drupal or Joomla, two other popular open source CMS platforms, which are both UI retarded.
Likewise, I would create a number of default templates from which users could choose, that were customized to the design needs of most organizations and which had a settings panel, like many of the more advanced premium Wordpress themes offer today, to simplify user customization.
I would then deploy this on a cloud server like Amazon Web Services, providing the necessary capacity in terms of processor power, disk space, and bandwidth to support a limitless number of Web sites. You could then deploy instances on the fly, with the CMS and hosting platform already configured.
I believe that either a national Jewish organization such as the Jewish Federations of North America, a private company or a new non-profit would find much success and profitability in creating this platform. You could charge a one-time setup fee to each organization and then a moderate monthly fee for ongoing hosting and support. Hundreds of organizations would sign-up for such a system virtually overnight. You could also charge premium fees for custom template design, and outsource the coding to low-cost Wordpress theme shops. Several such services already exist for the Christian market, like Ekklesia 360 (which, sadly, nastily rejected my idea of offering a Jewish imprint of their platform).
Such a platform would lower the barriers for Jewish organizations looking to build state-of-the-art Web sites that functionally address their institutional needs to virtually none.
