The NetRaising Experience

Jen Boxerman

What’s your NetRaising experience?

He’s so accessible. I really appreciated that as a vendor. In this day and age, people don’t pick up the phone, but he always picks up the phone. And if he can’t, I know that he’ll call me back right away. And that’s been so important for our vendor relationship.

I got in touch with the designer right away. So right away we were able to talk about look and feel and branding, and she sent mockups right away. There were no three-month lead times. It was really seamless, so pleasant and fun. Even if there was something that, where the answer was no, it was always given in a really professional way.

We literally put pages from the site map on post-its and created all new panels and used his advice about how to customize our calendar so that we could better use it for marketing, with graphics. And so that was an amazing process of being able to come together with design elements that we liked from other synagogue and nonprofit sites to build into ours. The accessibility to our site was also a big priority for our redesign. And so we appreciated the guidance that we were given about increasing contrast, san serif fonts, font sizes, all those things so that we could try to be as accessible as possible.

We love our site, that it’s responsive, and that there is a feed at the bottom that has all of our service times and there are just a lot of cool bells and whistles that he helped us make possible. It’s so straightforward, just the ability to edit subpages ourselves. I’m really surprised that we haven’t redesigned it since, but it’s because people still like the elements of it.

We stopped getting complaints. We were getting a lot of complaints about our [previous] site from our members.

Oh, they were so happy. We have a pretty active board of 40 members and they all have their own programs that they want promoted and that was the biggest complaint, was that there was just nowhere… Homepage. So now every program gets promoted on our homepage because we have a featured events feed that feeds from the calendar. It used to be a manual, super tedious thing to edit the homepage. And now if I put in a calendar entry, it’ll automatically appear on that feed.

Also, we’ve been growing, which is pretty unusual for synagogues right now. We hear a lot of that… (because of course, we ask when they call and are interested in becoming a member, “How did you hear about us”?). It’s all from our site and just from finding us through Google.

People get nervous about the ongoing retainer; synagogues don’t have a lot of resources. I think a lot of people, especially in this age of WordPress or whatever, think that they can just… It’s like a one-and-done and not an ongoing expense. I just say it’s so invaluable. You’re going to be beta-testing a site for the first year. And so you want to be able to have someone at your…on-call to make on-the-fly changes.

Nonprofits, especially religious organizations, see ourselves as communities, not businesses. The terms like branding and marketing can seem too formal. So I think already having a relationship where someone’s helping you create a deliverable, like a website, would make a lot of sense for them to then have those other conversations that wouldn’t seem so…foreign, I think is the word I’m looking for.

Cutting edge, accessible, comforting, when I feel like I don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s fine. I’m not being judged for not knowing the technical jargon for what I’m trying to accomplish. I feel like if we worked with a larger firm, I’d be spending my time on phone menus instead of the mission. And the scope of knowledge they have from their client base. We’ve really benefited from him sharing examples from other clients, so we’re not reinventing the wheel. They’re so respectful and I just, I trust them completely.

Jen Boxerman
Communications & Philanthropy Director
Temple Isaiah