The Movement for Progressive Judaism

Building the digital home for a historic merger - on time, on brief, and across two organisations with their own histories, voices and opinions.

The context

In 2024, two of the UK’s major Jewish movements - Reform Judaism and Liberal Judaism - merged to form a single new organisation: The Movement for Progressive Judaism. It was a historic moment, decades in the making, and it needed to be marked properly.

A merger of this kind doesn’t just combine two organisations. It creates something genuinely new. A new identity, a new voice, a new public presence. And that presence needed a digital home, ready to launch at the same time as the charity itself went public.

Web Goddess was chosen to design and build the website, working alongside Design with Purpose who had created MPJ’s new brand identity, and the MPJ staff team spanning both legacy organisations.

The challenge

This was our largest project to date, and it brought a level of complexity to match.

The scope alone was significant: a custom WordPress build, Hebrew and English fonts coexisting throughout, flexible page templates, full SEO setup, content strategy and an ongoing retainer relationship from day one. But the technical scope was honestly the straightforward part.

The harder challenge was human. Two separate organisations - each with their own history, culture, community, and opinions about how things should look and work - coming together to agree on a single digital identity. That means more voices in the room, more rounds of feedback, more competing views on everything from navigation structure to the exact shade of a colour.

And none of that could slow things down, because the deadline wasn’t moveable. MPJ was launching publicly on a specific date. The website had to be ready. There was no version of this project where we asked for more time.

On top of the stakeholder complexity, the content picture was mixed:

• Some material could be carried over from the two legacy organisations’ existing sites and reworked to fit the new unified identity.

• A significant amount needed reworking because a brand new charity, with a brand new purpose and a brand new name, needs content that reflects that. You can’t just paste together two old websites and call it a merger.

• The whole lot needed to be structured in a way that served MPJ’s multiple audiences: existing members from both movements, people new to progressive Judaism, the media, partner organisations, and the wider Jewish community.

What we did

CUSTOM WORDPRESS BUILD WITH BILINGUAL DESIGN

We built the site on WordPress to the specification provided by Design with Purpose’s brand guidelines, implementing the new MPJ visual identity faithfully across every page. 

That included the Hebrew and English typography - the branding agency designed the bilingual approach, and we implemented it to ensure it rendered correctly and consistently across devices, browsers and screen sizes. Getting two scripts, two directionalities and two typefaces to coexist gracefully on a live website is a detail that matters enormously to a faith community for whom the Hebrew language carries deep significance.

FLEXIBLE TEMPLATES BUILT FOR A GROWING ORGANISATION

MPJ is not a static organisation. It will grow, add synagogues, expand its programme of events and news, and develop new strands of work as the merger settles. We built the site with that in mind, using flexible page templates that allow MPJ staff to add news items and events themselves, without needing a developer every time something new happens. The heavier structural work, content updates and ongoing SEO management sit with us on retainer, so the team always has proper support without being dependent on us for day-to-day content.

STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT ACROSS A COMPLEX MERGER

Arguably the most important thing we brought to this project wasn’t technical. It was the ability to hold a clear strategic direction while working across multiple stakeholders from two organisations, each with legitimate views and understandable feelings about how their community should be represented.

That means listening carefully, feeding back clearly, making recommendations with reasoning rather than just presenting options, and keeping the project moving even when consensus takes longer than anyone hoped. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t show up in a project summary but makes the difference between a website that launches on time and one that doesn’t.

FULL SEO SETUP FROM LAUNCH

Because this was a brand new organisation with a brand new domain, SEO groundwork from day one was essential. We set up the full SEO foundation at launch including page structure, metadata, schema, and internal linking so MPJ started building authority immediately rather than playing catch-up six months later.

The result

The Movement for Progressive Judaism launched publicly with a website that was properly ready, not rushed-over-the-line ready. The new identity, the bilingual design, the content structure and the SEO foundations were all in place on day one.

The site serves a genuinely broad audience: longtime members of both legacy movements finding their new home, people discovering progressive Judaism for the first time, the media covering the merger, and partner organisations looking to connect. Getting the information architecture right for all of those groups simultaneously was one of the more satisfying strategic challenges of the project.

We continue to work with MPJ on retainer, managing the structural and SEO work while the team handles their own news and events. It’s the kind of long-term partnership that actually works - MPJ have the autonomy to keep their community updated day to day, and the confidence that the strategic and technical work is in good hands.

Why it worked

Large, complex projects with multiple stakeholders and immovable deadlines don’t fail because of technical problems. They fail because someone loses the thread of what the project is actually for, or because the decision-making process collapses under the weight of competing opinions.

Keeping that thread was the core of our job on this project. 

Everything else, the build, the content, the SEO, was in service of that.

We’re proud of this one. Not just because of the scale, but because of what it represents. Playing a part in helping a major new faith organisation find its voice online, and doing it properly, is exactly the kind of work Web Goddess exists to do.