MHP - Outreach

For MHP, outreach is all about straddling the line between utilizing new media and maintaining close, personal connections. When MHP opened its doors in 2007, each of the founding members contributed the names and emails of their friends in the area who would be down for some Moishe-style community. We spoke with our friends personally and did a lot of emailing/phone calling to bring in people for those first few events. From there we received some press and started a weekly email list with over 500 members. As we have evolved, so has our technological outreach.

Now in our third year of operation, we have moved from a Facebook group to a Facebook fan page, we've transitioned from an e-mail listserve to a google group with a more streamlined newsletter (that's still readable on everyone's fancy mobile gadget ) and we've started a Twitter account. Our members like to hear from us in many different ways and we're happy to provide them those various avenues. Facebook is a great way to invite a large number of people to specific events, and Twitter has been very useful for last minute event planning and just giving an extra "Hello" or "Shabbat shalom" to our followers. We have mostly used our own forms of technology, rather than utilizing the Moishe house website to its fullest capacity. Perhaps that is something we could try in the future.

Part of our success at outreach is that we treat each person who walks through our doors as a potential leader in the Moishe house community and one of our good friends. We try to learn names and faces quickly - we have a photo wall that not only helps us with that, but also makes our members feel like stars on a wall of fame - and we review new people who come to our events at our weekly meetings so we can figure out the best way to follow up with them. In addition to cultivating those people who walk through our doors, we also work to partner with other organizations in the city to bring in new faces and spread the word of MHP to more people. We would love to get more press now that we've been around a few years and hopefully expand our reach to further parts of the city - all in an effort to increase our outreach.