MH Budapest November Blog - Outreach

In your house's experience, what have been the most effective ways to bring people to Moishe House events? What role has technology played in this (e.g. facebook, website, calendars). How will your house continue to bring in new faces?

In our house’s experience there were many different and effective ways to bring people in. First of all, we started to promote the house months before we opened it. In that stage we simply spread the word among our friends so that the moment we opened the house a lot of people already knew about it and we had from the very beginning constantly lot of guests. So simply telling to the people the aim and the story of the House can still these days work out.

On the other hand, technology of course plays an important role. We tried out different ways to advertise the house, and Facebook seems to be the most efficient one. We created firstly a fictional account and collected that way lots of acquintances. Later on we set up a group and we ended up promoting ourselves only that way on Facebook.People can easily communicate with us that way. We usually paste here the official blog and it seems that people reach us through that blog as well, (the photos, from which we have less on Facebook are playing here an important role).

Meanwhile, technology helps us indirectly: there are people who found us by entering some keywords in Google when looking for an Engish-speaking jewish community in Budapest. Moreover, for ex. the gastroblogger who prepared a delicious dinner for us in October, posted the event read later by thousands of people daily. Thanks to that, lots of people got to know about the house.

By the way, the idea to invite „celebrities” or those who advertise the event where they have the possibility to appears again to be an important way to bring new people in. In addition they usually bring their friends along, who can be later interested in other programs as well. An other „indirect” way to promote ourselves is to receive different and not specially jewish type of programs. Like for instance we hosted a performance of the Contemprorary Drama Festival which did again a lot for our promotion.

An other alternative way to advertise us will be the participation on a very special event, the Quarter6Quarter7 Festival (http://quarter6quarter7.com/). It aims to make a huge community event happen during the time of Chanukkah were like 30 different places (from synagogue to music club, from restaurant to museum), all to be founded inside the so-called historical Jewish quarter, are joining the initiative and organizing programs on their places from their own resources. As Moishe House stands in an important street of the former jewish quarter we take as well part in the events. Both of the Kabbalat Shabbats happening during Chanukkah will be celebrated in the Moishe House, and will have on the top interesting lectures. We believe this event can again bring lot of new people in the house as the event has not only a website, posters and tons of flyers, bookmark, leaflets, etc. but it is promoted in the cinemas, different magazines as well.

There still remains some tasks to do. We already began to collect the e-mail adresses so to create a traditional googlegroup. Some people dislike or simply don’t use Facebook, and e-mailing turns out to be the only way we can really reach everybody. Finally we keep up trying to find new ways as well to bring in new faces. Like we are planning to hang out a poster-like thing on our balcony.

All in all, Mosishe House teaches us (or let us learn) how to communicate with people and how to convince them about the fact that the house is so special.