Last updated April 12th 2018
Hey Everyone,
This is Jonny here from Secret Tel Aviv HQ. 2016 has been a huge year for Secret Tel Aviv – and our success is down to you guys, our amazing community, who are helping people with their questions every day. Here are some of our highlights:
Secret Tel Aviv Facebook Group
The Secret Tel Aviv Facebook Group continues to grow, and continues to be active. Over the past year the group has grown from 90k to 135k members. Every day there are over 400 new posts in the group, generating over 5,000 reactions (likes, comments, or engagements). Over 77% of posts get a reaction, and 94% of the community engaged at least once with the Group in the past 12 months. I set this group up because when I arrived in Israel with no Hebrew and no friends and family I found it difficult to settle – it’s a great feeling to see so many people get help from so many amazing people every day!
Photo of the Year ‘Tel Aviv You Are So Beautiful’ by Yotam Jizhaki and Tal Sapir, February 11th 2016, 6,073 likes and 4,357 shares.
Secret Tel Aviv Website
The Secret Tel Aviv Website has also experienced huge growth in 2016, with over 500,000 unique visitors in 2016 – that’s more than 3x the total Facebook Group members – and over 5 million page views (up 300% on 2015). This has been driven by The Secret Tel Aviv Jobs Board, new sections for Food and Drink and Tourism, and the soft-launches of the Secret Tel Aviv VIP Card, Secret Tel Aviv Business Directory and Secret Tel Aviv Calendar.
Secret Tel Aviv Recruitment
We continue to focus on Recruitment – we have identified that a huge amount of Olim Chadashim leave Israel because they can’t find good jobs. We know that the good jobs exist – we have hosted 2,000 good jobs on the Jobs Board this year alone – it’s just people don’t know about them. We continue to expose good jobs on the Jobs Board, there are currently over 350 active jobs listed, including over 200 specifically for Internationals. We support the ongoing Times of Israel investigation into Binary and Forex, and continue to help people from those industries find jobs in good companies.
As well as the Jobs Board, in July of this year we hosted our first Secret Tel Aviv Jobs Fair that was attended by over 800 people, and at least 25 participants found skilled jobs in top hi-tech companies. We thank all the great companies who participated (read more in our ‘Best 12 Companies to Work in Israel 2016’ blog post with over 50k page views), the amazing Abraham Hostel Bar for hosting us, and all the great artists and communities who also took part. We are especially grateful to WalkMe, Clicktale, Sisense, Payoneer, Rapaport, and Tel Aviv University, who continue to support us and believe in our dream.
Our next Jobs Fair is on Friday February 10th 2017 at Abraham Hostel, and as well as cool companies listed above and new companies like Wix, Playbuzz, eTeacher, and Feedvisor, we are also hosting cool universities and vocational colleges like IDC, BPM and Netcraft + cool hi-tech meetups + beer + pizza + live music + Escape Rooms from Questomania + CV workshops from Gvahim + OOlpan assessments. It’s free to attend, register here (some of the participants are still to be confirmed).
Secret Tel Aviv Food and Drink
As the quality of the restaurant and nightlife scene increases in Tel Aviv, so do our Food and Drinks Guides. Every day over 1,000 people read one of our Best Food and Drink Guides – and not surprisingly for Tel Aviv, Best Vegan Restaurants continues to be our most popular Guide. This year we have added new guides for Chinese Restaurants, Indian Restaurants, and Ice-Cream, as well as updating our most popular other Guides. We have also helped over 50 people with table bookings in Tel Aviv’s top clubs – if you would like to book a table let us know here.
Photo from Shila, one of our favourite restaurants in Tel Aviv.
Secret Tel Aviv Tourism Services
Do you have friends and family visiting Israel? Looking for a fun thing to do on a free afternoon? Want to find the best tours to Petra? What are the best hotels in Jerusalem? We’ve got you covered! We’ve teamed up with the amazing Abrahams Hostels (10% discount with Secret Tel Aviv), Abraham Tours (5% discount), Booking.com and iBookIsrael. You can now book hotels all over Israel (and the World) through our website, and over 100 amazing tours throughout Israel, the West Bank, Egypt and Jordan.
Photo of The Norman Hotel in Tel Aviv, one of our favourite hotels in Tel Aviv.
We have never asked for donations to keep our group running, however if you are booking a hotel Anywhere in the World please consider using our Booking.com portal – its the same price as Booking.com and we get a little bit of commission.
Secret Tel Aviv Labs
Living in Tel Aviv is expensive, and to make life a little easier we continue to add deals to the Secret Tel Aviv VIP Card. We now have over 60 discounts and over 3,000 cards distributed. Thank you to our permanent hand out spots Cafe XoHo, and Abraham Hostel.
We launched our new Secret Tel Aviv Business Directory in 2016 with over 1,500 businesses listed. Whiles there’s loads of great info in there, we still need to improve the way it looks and the functionality. This will hopefully get better throughout 2017.
Similarly in the past couple of months we launched the Secret Tel Aviv Calendar. There are currently over 150 events listed for the next 3 months, categorised by concerts, parties, meetups, shopping and more. Again, there’s loads of great info in there, we still need to improve the way it looks and the functionality. This will hopefully get better throughout 2017.
Secret Tel Aviv and the Community
Another major goal of Secret Tel Aviv is helping people meet people. We continue to build our Guide to Meeting New People in Tel Aviv and the Meetups Section on our calendar, plus we are proud to have supported ‘International Women’s Day’ and ‘Bake and Booze for Boobies Breast Cancer Awareness’, in partnership with School of Shine.
This year we have also partnered with Citizen Cafe: OOlpan to help people improve their Hebrew. Having tried many different Ulpans, I finally feel comfortable speaking Hebrew after studying at OOlpan. The 10-week part-time course focuses on conversational spoken Hebrew, combined with the most relevant Hebrew used in work and personal life. Get a discount if you register through Secret Tel Aviv.
Our Amazing Team
There is an amazing team behind Secret Tel Aviv. Thanks to Fernanda for the beautiful graphics, Orel, Itamar, and Yoni for building and maintaining the website, Karen, Sara, Evan, Alon and Shai for mentoring and advising, and all of our interns and contributors. A special thanks to Tere Metta who interned at Secret Tel Aviv for 4 months in 2016 – she was the creative genius behind many of our best newsletters this year!
We have worked really hard this year to stamp down on bullying, racism, and sexism in the Group. We hope that you will agree that the group has become a nicer and more helpful community, and thank everyone for helping other members of the community settle in Israel in a fun and constructive way. I apologise if I have upset anyone – it’s not my intention, we send out over 50 messages a day to the community and sometimes some of these messages suck.
We wish you all a very happy, healthy, and successful new year!
Love Jonny Stark and the Secret Tel Aviv Team
The Secret Tel Aviv Team: From left to right: Fernanda, Jonny, Yoni, Orel, Tere (we are missing Itamar).
email us at thelist at secrettelaviv dot com.
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