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The Story Fundamentals Workshop is a live synagogue-team workshop to help your congregation develop a powerful story to share.
Mission and vision statements are boring and focus on the congregation — instead, you will create a Value Story that highlights your community and inspires others to engage with you.
When you talk about your congregation, are you constantly looking for the right words?
Are you finding yourself tongue-tied when talking about why people should come?
Have you tried putting together a story or a statement, and it doesn’t quite feel right?
Are you frustrated that your language does not accurately describe what you know in your heart?
Are you strategic planning but don’t know which steps are the next ones?
Are you exhausted by repeatedly revising the statement, but it doesn’t get any better?
When you are drawing from the same set of description words, your congregation can’t stand out. As a result, your statement ends up sounding like a word salad of buzzwords that could be from any congregation. On top of that, when you did your strategic planning, there were so many people who had to approve it, and it ended up kind of boring.
There are so many elements to a congregation that describing them all is difficult. As a result, you end up flattening them all, and it doesn’t feel like it represents everyone who is a part of it. Long-time members don’t see themselves, and new members don’t either.
It has been a while since your congregation first wrote the description, and it still uses most of those words to this day. It doesn’t feel authentic anymore, and it turns people away from learning more.
Getting new members is difficult. Building a relationship with them takes time and engaging in their needs. It is that much more difficult if they can’t see themselves in your story.
One of the biggest mistakes congregations make is making their story boring. It inspires only the small committee that wrote it, and most of your congregants will immediately forget it as soon as they hear it.
Instead, you want to excite your people so that they cannot stop talking about your congregation. By crafting a powerful audience-focused Value Story, you empower them to feel good about what you do and inspire them to share.
Let’s be honest: if your congregation’s story felt right, you wouldn’t be reading this.
But if you are, then you know that your congregation’s story should be consistent and that the marketing your organization publishes should feel in alignment with your core story.
For whatever reason, congregations try and communicate every possible thing without thinking about how it fits with the message it wants to send.
Luckily, with a Value Story, you have a tool that you can check your marketing material against to make sure that you’re telling the right story.
Upon signing up for a Story Fundamentals Workshop
The Fundamentals of Story Building Session
This core two-hour workshop will help you draw out all of the important information about your congregation and then pull it back together to create a Value Story. Together we break down the nature of your community, the challenges it faces, and give language to the desires of your membership.
The All in one Worksheet
This step-by-step worksheet goes with the workshop and will contain all of the important information you will gather. We will use it to create the Value Story, but you can continue to use and reuse the material in the future to analyze additional stories and programs.
The Value Story
The primary story you will create through the workshop is the Value Story. It will help you articulate the incredible value you provide to your current and potential members.
This condensed and highly potent story tool is something your congregation can use repeatedly as part of marketing materials, online communications, and even to craft new programs.
Feedback and Partnership
After the workshop, your team will have the opportunity to do the creative work to iterate and further develop your Value Story. But you are not alone! I will work with you, as you craft it to give you feedback and suggestions along the way.
Follow-up session
After the workshop and feedback, we will finalize a version of the Value Story for immediate and ongoing use.
This ebook is a concrete set of principles to help you utilize your time most effectively as a congregation in the digital sphere.
Here’s what you recieve when you purhase this workshop for your congregation.
Many other “strategic planning” workshops will cost you thousands of dollars but you won’t have much to show for it. I am focused on pragmatic and practical approaches that you can start implementing immediately. Right now, the price is $1000 to help you and your congregation get it done.
If you’re looking for a more “do-it-for-you” approach, be in touch and we can discuss your needs.
In the live sessions, we spend about 3 hours together. Getting your team together to iterate a few improved Value Stories could take an hour more (you can always spend more time). All in all about 4 hours total.
At the end of the day, you, the leadership, and your people have to feel the truth of the story and take ownership of it. So the first version of the Value Story will be crafted by you and whoever is a part of this workshop, and I’ll be available to help you write it, give feedback, suggestions, and recommendations.
If you want me to write it in a more “do-it-for-you” approach, be in touch and we can discuss your needs.
This is a tough truth, but I’m going to give it to you straight: the job of synagogue communications is to get people into the room with you, your rabbi, and your wonderful members.
When your community is actively being amazing and welcoming (which I’m confident you are) and offering them things that bring them value (of which membership is an intermediate step and not a final step), that is what helps people join.
Communications alone cannot make people join synagogues because that’s not its purpose.
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