PlanitJewish brings entire
community to one site

By Austin Greenberg
of The Chronicle staff

Last week, The Milwaukee Jewish Federation launched PlanitJewish, an interactive online Jewish community calendar.

With PlanitJewish, which can be accessed at www.jewishmilwau kee.com, “there is a single destination where anybody can go to find out what’s going on in every nook and cranny of the Jewish community … in an easy to navigate place,” said Simmy Ziv-el, co-chair with Eric Crawford of the subcommittee that developed PlanitJewish for Milwaukee.

“If you’re in your 30s and have two kids, it will point you towards activities tailored to you,” said Ziv-el.

PlanitJewish replaces the community calendar that used to be found on the federation’s Web site.

“In the old days, the community calendar was this book that nobody would really see,” said Jerry Benjamin, chair of the marketing committee for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, who oversaw the subcommittee that developed jewishmilwaukee.com.

“Now we have a completely transparent scheduling system.”

That transparency, said Benjamin, will help alleviate scheduling conflicts that used to arise when two or more organizations scheduled events for the same day. “Now you can see immediately where the conflicts might be and [that] can help you schedule an event.”

Building community

The site not only includes a list of events, which can be customized according to an individual’s interests, but also allows individuals to register for events online, pay cover charges and sync the program to their personal calendars.

They can also alert friends to events they might be interested in and explore volunteer opportunities. “Changes will come from feedback from the community. It will evolve and get tighter over time,” said Crawford.

“The ultimate goal [of PlanitJewish] is to get more people involved in the Jewish community,” said co-founder Howard Brown. He and Steve Kaufman created the program after sitting at Jewish community meetings in San Francisco and wondering how to boost attendance.

“San Francisco was like other Jewish communities, with 90 percent of the community uninvolved,” said Brown, president and CEO of PlanitJewish, during a recent visit to Milwaukee.

So the two created PlanitJewish, which is now customized for more than a dozen cities across the United States and Canada. The Milwaukee site launched on March 2.

The site already boasts more than 120 organizations and over 800 events. Responses so far have been positive.

Marilyn Ruby, the senior administrative assistant at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, is the PlanitJewish liaison for the school.

“I found it remarkably user-friendly,” she said, while acknowledging that she has “only just scratched the surface” of the Web site’s capabilities.
Jen Friedman, co-president of the Milwaukee section of the National Council of Jewish Women, is excited that her organization will be able to reach more people with PlanitJewish.

“We do a wide variety of programming, so this is a great avenue to let people know what we’re doing,” she said.

Other communities’ experiences with the site have also been positive.
“Initially, I was a little hesitant about signing on with PlanitJewish, but after managing it for nearly two years, I’ve become a real enthusiast,” said Susan Ehrenfeld, the Web manager for Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado, which launched the site in February 2006.

Ehrenfeld acknowledged that there is a learning curve, especially for the organizations, but the manual provided them has been “invaluable,” and she has never received a call from an individual asking for assistance with the site.

Moreover, the number of monthly page views for PlanitJewish in Colorado has increased nearly sevenfold since its inception.

Fill a gap

Though the federation is responsible for bringing PlanitJewish to Milwaukee, the site is seen as more of a grassroots community tool.
“We at the federation want to be seen as community builders, and this is a tool to help build this community,” said Benjamin

In other cities that have launched PlanitJewish, there is often a fee that organizations have to pay in order to register on the site. The federation has procured outside funding so that use of the site is completely free.

“We’re here to support all the Jewish organizations, and I think PlanitJewish is us doing that,” said Laura Barnard, marketing and communications director for the federation.

Barnard said that for smaller organizations that are not very visible, or that do not maintain their own Web sites, PlanitJewish will help incorporate them into the community.

“It’s really going to fill a big communications gap,” she said.
Barnard made it clear that users will not receive any mailings from the federation as a result of their registration on PlanitJewish.

Jewishmilwaukee.com does provide information about organizations and events outside the city of Milwaukee, and has search tools specifically for several cities and areas in Wisconsin.

“There’s a wealth of Jewish activity going on all the time,” and this Web site will connect everyone to that activity, said Benjamin. “And that’s pretty exciting.”