Achieving in the year 2020

In the days following the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards, I feel like a heroin junkie, coming down after an orgasmic high, at least that’s what I understand from watching the movie Trainspotting one time too many.

But as the high inevitably wanes, I keep reflecting on why the awards this year were such a massive success, with more than 30 000 people watching from around the globe, and why the SA Jewish Report webinars have been so successful, with nearly 700 000 people watching our 65 webinars to date.

I think the answer lies in one simple idea.

We didn’t take the real world and move it online, we completely reinvented the way we looked at everything. In our world view, the SA Jewish Report wasn’t a newspaper with a website, it was a community media company in a new multimedia, multi-channel world.

New media wasn’t about one-way communication, it was about a two-way conversation, it was about relevance and engagement. Community wasn’t something you found, but something you had to work to create.

We set about building a digital town square for our community to join people online and recreate the community in a different format but as strong and vibrant as before.

We didn’t just take the newspaper online, we completely reinvented the way we engaged with our audience. We made people chat, contribute, and answer questions, and by doing these simple things, we created the most successful alternative TV channel in South Africa and the Jewish world.

We reinvented the concept of community at a time of crisis which forced us all into the digital era.

We cannot go back to the ways of February 2020, we need to continually reinvent ourselves, innovate, develop new channels, learn how to speak to our community in a meaningful and engaging fashion, and make sure that everyone is invested in the outcome.

At the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards, we democratised the process and involved thousands of people. More than 12 000 people voted for 291 nominees, nominated by 594 members of the public. We gave our community a say and a stake in the outcome, and it supported the awards with exuberance and passion.

We took advantage of technology to reach across borders and oceans, to involve a wider audience, and to create a platform for a celebration that tugs at the heartstrings and makes you proud to be Jewish. We stitched together 71 videos, conducted 134 interviews, and showcased the most remarkable awards ceremony and variety show ever seen in South Africa, all free of charge to our community.

Therein lies the lesson for communal leadership for the post COVID-19 era.

I don’t know how we will go back to normality when the vaccine is here and people are willing to emerge slowly from their dungeons. The world has changed profoundly, as have our expectations as a community and our view of leadership.

Over the past few months, we on the board of the SA Jewish Report have started the process of re-imagination. We believed that we, like all communal structures, would be judged by how we served our community during this impossibly difficult time.

As we start to shut the door on 2020 and hope for better times ahead, I put my hand on my heart and say – sometimes we won, sometimes we lost, but dammit, we wouldn’t fail for lack of trying – and that’s the great lesson for me of the pandemic of 2020.

Trying needs to become part of our DNA, a habit and in the immortal words from Trainspotting, “We called him Mother Superior on account of the length of his habit.”

• Howard Sackstein is the chairperson of the SA Jewish Report and the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards.