JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL

Who are the people you serve with your mission?

Jewish Book Council serves a diverse community and the programs and resources we offer reflect these various demographics. Ultimately, the goal is to reach an audience that is curious about engaging with Jewish life, culture, and history through literature–whether as a reader, author, or program presenter. Each of our programs serves one, if not multiple, audiences, whether it’s community members already actively involved in Jewish life or community members seeking that connection for the first time from the comfort of their own living room. JBC also interacts with an academic audience through its awards that celebrate exceptional Jewish writing, and a secular literary audience through its editorial efforts that are designed to appeal to a wide audience.

How is your organization collecting feedback from the people you serve?

Community meetings/Town halls, Suggestion box/email, Social media, informal meetings,

How is your organization using feedback from the people you serve?

To identify and remedy poor client service experiences, To identify bright spots and enhance positive service experiences, To make fundamental changes to our programs and/or operations, To inform the development of new programs/projects, To identify where we are less inclusive or equitable across demographic groups, To strengthen relationships with the people we serve, To understand people's needs and how we can help them achieve their goals,

What significant change resulted from feedback?

In response to feedback, JBC has made several changes to various programs we offer. Some examples of this work include updating publicly-listed information that made the Network programming less equitable for a population of participating authors. With the increase in virtual programming, we also responded to feedback to make these online spaces more accessible to our communities. To this end, we added captioning to all virtual events and created intimate virtual meetup spaces to better strengthen community connections during a time when people felt isolated because of the pandemic. Finally, we updated our communications around programming to be easier to navigate and more accessible.

With whom is the organization sharing feedback?

Our staff, Our board, Our funders, Our community partners,

How has asking for feedback from the people you serve changed your relationship?

JBC views itself as a communal organization and has always taken feedback from the people we serve into consideration. Despite the breadth of JBC’s reach and programming, our team is consistently accessible and responsive to individual constituents served by the organization. We approach our decision-making process as an inherently collaborative one in which staff, board members, and constituents all provide valuable feedback on a rolling basis. This ensures that JBC is always mindful about evolving its programs, resources, and mindset alongside the ever-changing publishing industry, Jewish community, and society at large in order to serve the needs of constituents and therefore JBC’s mission.

Which of the following feedback practices does your organization routinely carry out?

We collect feedback from the people we serve at least annually, We aim to collect feedback from as many people we serve as possible, We take steps to ensure people feel comfortable being honest with us, We look for patterns in feedback based on demographics (e.g., race, age, gender, etc.), We look for patterns in feedback based on people’s interactions with us (e.g., site, frequency of service, etc.), We act on the feedback we receive, We tell the people who gave us feedback how we acted on their feedback,

What challenges does the organization face when collecting feedback?

We don’t have the right technology to collect and aggregate feedback efficiently, Staff find it hard to prioritize feedback collection and review due to lack of time,