Up until recently, events at our house were packed to capacity. Not that our house is empty now, but, things for sure have mellowed out a bit. For most of the last year (since I've lived here at least!) to be honest we didn't focus much on outreach. It happened spontaneously and organically -- one of us residents would be going about our normal daily lives and hangin' with our friends, would meet someone new, would be chatting about our lives, what we do, where we live. Inevitably living in MH would come up. We, being naturally amped and stoked on what we do, would rave and gush about our gorgeous house, our packed events, how fun it all is, and this new 'friend' would wanna come on by. We'd throw them on our email list, invite them to an upcoming shabbat, and that'd be it.
Lately though, I think we've reached a certain saturation point with our friends, and our friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. And some of the folks who have been coming for a year are getting busy with other things, are moving on, are less excited than when they initially came by the house. I think this sort of ebb and flow is natural in a crew of people our age. So, outreach is something we've actually been talking about a bit lately. How will we get new faces? How can we make sure our programming is fresh enough that people who have been coming for years still want to come back?
In working to ramp up outreach, a big thing we have been focusing on is getting one or two new housemates. One of our roommates is moving out, and we are using this as an opportunity to ensure we bring someone in who has a distinctly different connection to the larger San Francisco Jewish community than those of us currently in the house. We also have a small 'guest room' that we are considering filling with a full time roommate as well. We are really excited to be interviewing some folks for the room(s?) that we don't know at all, and don't have tons of mutual friends with. Of course we like living with friends, but that won't help bring new people in to moishe house events. We are emphasizing in our search that although we think it's great if we can help a new resident get plugged in to a Jewish scene in SF, we'd much prefer someone who already has a solid crew of Jewish friends that they'd love to share our programming with and invite in to our community. Also, since at our house we all sway to the slightly older side of 20-30 (26, 27, and 28) we've talked about purposely bringing in someone new that's 24 or 25... so that we don't have all of our own friends aging out, and so that we can make sure our house is also welcoming and non-intimidating for the more recent college grad types. So, that's one thing on the near horizon that we are hoping well help boost numbers and increase our ability to reach out to more people.
Also, we have been following up on our mass emailings with personalized emails and outreach to our own friends. Each of us does this in our own way, but for example... let's say on Thursday we have a barbacue and movie night... perhaps it was a week or two ago the mass email went out. So, during the few days leading up to the event, I might shoot an email to a few friends I think would be particularly interested, whenever we sign on to our MH gmail account we'd make sure our status message on gchat says something about the event, we definitely have it online on our calendar, and one or two of us might also throw it up as a status message on our personal facebook accounts. We each also text a few friends. It's a big mix of communication methods and different technology.
At the end of the day though, it's personal contact that is the best for outreach. Whether that's chatting someone up at a party, or sitting and connecting with someone new who shows up for one of our shabbats. That's the way to go. Having outgoing, social housemates, who are involved in other outside pursuits that connect them to others has worked as a way to spread the word. Think about how many people we each reach -- between work friends, sports team friends, high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, people we volunteer with and more!
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