How did Lander~Grinspoon Academy, a school in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with just with ninety-five students, win second place for the popular vote in the nationally run Day School Video Academy contest? How did we beat out much larger schools in much, much larger communities? It was partly abut the product. A group of committed community members (Thank you Julia Mintz, Shana Sureck, Lou Davis, Lisa Mintz, Tamar Fields and Jennifer Rosner) produced a stunning video that told a compelling story about our school. It captures the essence of who we are and what makes LGA so special. I had the privilege of watching other entries in the contest, and many of them stood out as well.
But the other part was that we used all of our resources to get the word out about the contest, encouraging our greater community to send out the link to their friends and family. And it worked! We got creative, and we hit often. Practically ever Jew in the Pioneer Valley (and a lot of non-Jews as well) knew that LGA was participating in this contest.
Once the video was produced and submitted into the contest, another team of people went into action, promoting our video at every turn. Our admissions director, who is active in the local Chamber of Commerce, used her networks to promote the video. We asked parents, alumni, and current students to send out the video to everyone they knew. We used social media -- in our community, the Jewish day schools have a combined presence on Facebook.
But we went a step beyond that and got really creative. I had lunch with a number of colleagues from the non-Jewish independent schools and asked them to promote the video in their faculty communities. One of our sister schools even sent it to all their families! (This takes a lot of nonthreatening relationship building.) Our Federation director wrote her weekly message about it. The synagogues in the community put an attachment in their e-messaging. We learned that our network is greater than we think -- which felt good.
This past summer, LGA launched a very successful micro-philanthropy campaign called Double Chai. We were looking to expand our donor base by asking 1,818 to donate $36 each. While we didn’t reach our donor number, we raised our goal, which was more than $65,000. This time, we went back to each donor and asked them to vote for our video. It felt right to reach out and show them what their money was going toward. Now we’re set up for another success story. We are continuing to build momentum, reaching out to segments of the population who didn’t fully understand what we were about. That feels REALLY good!
Hold onto your hats for the next big idea...it's coming soon!
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