Update on Our Facebook Relationship
Jews' Next Dor
Dear Fellow Jews’ Next Dor Member,
Thank you so much for being a valued participant in our community. It is because of you that we have grown over the years to become one of the most active and vibrant Jewish young adult groups in the Bay Area.
Over the years, as we have grown, we have come to rely more and more heavily on Facebook as a means of communicating with you. As you may know, Facebook recently redesigned how Groups work on its site. The new Group format requires new members to be approved before they can join, sends members notifications multiple times per day, and makes it difficult, for some users, to view a full listing of the Group’s events. Many of you complained about this after we underwent this transition, and some of you even left in protest. Facebook encouraged us to switch to using a Page, which was supposed to be more appropriate for large groups like us. Yet we have discovered that Pages, too, have certain drawbacks; notably, we can’t invite all of our “fans” to an event we post on the Page. Many of you may not have noticed our most recent event postings unless you thought to check the Page recently.
In the end, we have decided to resolve this dilemma by maintaining both a Group and a Page on Facebook, and creating separate events in both of these locations. We leave it up to you to choose whether you wish to remain subscribed at http://www.facebook.com/groups/22995128720/ to our Group, at http://www.facebook.com/JewsNextDor to our Page, or both. Being a member of our Group will ensure that you are informed when we plan a new event, but will also likely spam you about things you don’t care about (and are beyond our control). Being a fan of our Page will offer a quieter existence, but will require you to be more proactive in checking for new opportunities to interact with us. We will, of course, do our best to post important communications, such as this one, in both locations, and to make these distinctions and trade-offs clear to new people looking to get involved. If you do remain subscribed to both, you will have access to two copies of each event we plan. As always, we ask you to help our volunteers in their planning by RSVPing to at least one of these copies. We by no means expect you to RSVP to both, though if you do accidentally from time to time, we won’t hold it against you. And if you choose to intentionally RSVP to both every time, so that everybody knows where you’ll be, feel free.
Remember, also, that there are several ways for you to connect with us completely independent of Facebook. We post all of our events to a Google Calendar, Jews’ Next Dor, to which you can subscribe, as well as to our blog at http://cbdyag.wordpress.com/ . We also post other communications and other groups’ events we hear about there. We publish a regular newsletter to our Google Group mailing list, to which you can subscribe at http://groups.google.com/group/cbdyag . We maintain another public Google calendar, Jewish Bay Area, to which we add every Jewish young adult happening in the Bay Area we can find, and are even collaborating with other local groups on new communication ventures, such as a brand new Meetup group at http://www.meetup.com/bayareajews/ . There are, in fact, even more ways for you to receive our information, but we’ll save the full list for another message. If we could be doing a better job of communicating with you or someone you know, please do not hesitate to let us know.
Once again, thank you for your understanding and patience as we navigate this updated Facebook terrain. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we hope you understand that much of this is out of our hands. No matter how you connect with us electronically in the future, we look forward to seeing you in person at many events, and continuing to build this community together. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at jewsn...@beth-david.org .
On behalf of the Jews’ Next Dor Steering Committee,
David H.