Yaldei

“Before Shterna, everything was chaos. After Shterna, everything feels like there's an order and an understanding. What I mean by that: When I started with Yaldei about fifteen years ago, we were – baruch Hashem – successful in recruiting donors, but there was [still] a lot of misconception out there as to what we do. There were stories and cases I wanted to share with our donors, but I just simply did not have the time, ability and tools at hand to be able to communicate those things with our donors, prospective donors and the community at large. 

When I saw Shterna, her work, and the stuff that she was doing, I felt like this would be a very, very good fit. And what I loved about it was that she didn't just come in and say, okay, I'm here and we're going to do this. She did it from the ground up. We did a deep dive into the kishkes, into the meat and potatoes of what the organization is, what the organization wants to be, what the organization can be. 

She reached out directly to the families that we help and took input from them about what Yaldei means to them and the effect that it's having on them.

She reached out to donors to understand why they feel [strongly about] supporting the organization. 

She took apart the entire mission of the organization and put it back together in the form of our website, in the form of our basic brochure. 

And then, over the last year, has been communicating that story regularly. And it's just been great.

When Shterna said she wants to send out an email every week to donors, I thought it would be too much. But we went ahead with it. And all of a sudden people started calling me asking about the emails, noticing it. People see it. I don't necessarily get a reply from every single person who I send an email to. Mostly they don’t. But when you walk down the street and people tell you, “It's impressive just seeing your emails – it’s clear that you have your stuff in order.” 

It shows that you're a professionally run enterprise when there's constant, smooth, clear, not overdone communication, uplifting communication. It's not desperate communication, like “we need your money.” It’s a message of positivity, of good vibes, and people just like it.

Shterna is always pushing the envelope. She doesn’t just do what she’s hired to do. She’s always thinking about your organizations and trying to come up with new things you can try. She's always looking for new ideas, pushing me to consider other methods, and coming up with ideas of her own and saying, “Let's do this.” It's just a pleasure. There's somebody home, somebody that you know you can rely on who is thinking, who's always striving to do something a little bit better, perfect things. 

I know that every week there's going to be an email, that every quarter there's going to be a quarterly report, that if there's something that I need specifically tailor-made for somebody, that can be done. The amount of people that tell me, “You know, I get your emails, I read your emails, they're awesome” is just phenomenal.

We just finished our year-end campaign. I’ve worked on year-end campaigns in the past. It's stressful. You're not sleeping. Everything is helter-skelter running around scrambling.

[this time], we had a plan. [Shterna] wrote brilliant copy. The design she managed for the materials was exceptional. And you just felt that over the course of the week of putting out all the content that it was a great, uplifting story. My job was simply to be on the phone reaching out to bigger donors, smaller donors. I knew that the emails were on schedule, the text messages were on schedule. Every day a packet was delivered to the team, “This is what we're posting today, you can copy this, use that…” Everything was just so smooth, so seamless, it was incredible.

For fifteen years, I was looking for Shterna Lazaroff, and I'm so glad Baruch Hashem that I was able to find her. “

-Rabbi Dovid Leib Shur