New client: DoorDash signs on to feed a holiday for strangers
America came out of lockdown lonelier than ever. We asked DoorDash to bring the one thing that gets strangers talking: a free meal.
America came out of lockdown lonelier than it went in. So we invented a holiday for people who don’t have anyone to spend one with: New Friendsgiving, a free picnic where the only rule was to sit down with strangers. On Saturday, November 20, 2021, with DoorDash, No More Lonely Friends, The Deep and YourMomCares, about 300 people did exactly that on a lawn in Santa Monica.
One afternoon in Santa Monica
- 500+people RSVP’d in the nine days after we announced itNew Friendsgiving was announced on November 11, 2021. The picnic was free and open to anyone.
- ~300strangers came to eat togetherPeople who showed up at Ocean View Park, most of them on their own.
- 4partners in one coalitionDoorDash, No More Lonely Friends, The Deep and YourMomCares, brought together by Buena.
A third of Americans said they were seriously lonely
The numbers were already bleak before anyone said “pandemic” out loud. In February 2021, Harvard’s Making Caring Common project published a survey in which 36% of Americans reported “serious loneliness”: feeling lonely frequently, or almost all the time, over the previous month.1 Among young adults aged 18 to 25 it was 61%. Among mothers with young children, 51%.
Those people didn’t need another awareness campaign. They needed somewhere to go, and a reason to talk to the person next to them.
The thing that gets strangers talking is a free meal
When we asked what turns someone from unwilling to willing to strike up a conversation with a stranger, the answer was almost embarrassingly simple: food. People will sit down with almost anyone if there’s a plate in front of them.
The idea started life as a pitch to DoorDash and The Deep called Deep Meals, a free dinner you could only eat with a stranger over Zoom. As the country reopened in the fall of 2021, we took it off the screen and into a park. And we gave it a name everyone already understood.
Thanksgiving is for family. Friendsgiving is for friends. New Friendsgiving is for strangers: a yearly day to break bread with people you’ve never met, which anyone can host wherever they live.
Four partners, one picnic
A new holiday needs more than a logo, so we built a coalition where every partner brought the thing it was best at.
The crowd
No More Lonely Friends, the meetup community Marissa Meizz built on TikTok.
The food
DoorDash fed everyone who came, and handed out postcards with a promo code to take home.
The conversation
The Deep brought question games built to get strangers past small talk.
No More Lonely Friends was the perfect co-host because it was itself born from loneliness. In the spring of 2021, a stranger posted a TikTok about overhearing a group of friends planning a birthday party around Marissa Meizz while she was out of town. Meizz answered with an invitation: anyone who needed friends should meet her in Central Park. About 200 people came to that first meetup in June 2021, and it became a movement of free picnics across the country.2
“Every single person there is there to make friends,” she told the Washingtonian that summer, explaining why the picnics worked.2 That was the spirit we wanted for the holiday.
YourMomCares, the children’s mental-health nonprofit co-founded by Sharon Feldstein and Patsy Noah, the mothers of Jonah Hill and Adam Levine, brought its network and its founders.3 Buena made the name, the brand, the website and the campaign, and pulled the partners together around one date.
The look had to feel like a party invitation, not a public-health notice. We paired a tall, loud condensed type with a handwritten script, the kind of note you’d leave on a fridge, and set it all in a warm tomato red. The website opened on the plainest possible promise, “A day to make new friends over free food and games,” and ran three words across the page as the whole program: play free games, eat free food, make new friends. For social, we cut vertical stories that ended the only way they could: swipe up to RSVP.
Nine days from announcement to blankets on the grass
We pitched the coalition on October 14, 2021. DoorDash announced New Friendsgiving on Thursday, November 11, with a press kit we built. The invitation was the whole pitch: a massive picnic, free and open to the public, noon at Ocean View Park in Santa Monica. All you had to do was come and be you.
More than 500 people RSVP’d. On the day, about 300 came, most of them alone. They spread out blankets in the sun, ate DoorDash’s food, pulled cards from The Deep’s games, and sat in circles with people they had met minutes earlier. Sharon Feldstein and Patsy Noah came too.
A holiday anyone can host
The point of making it a holiday rather than an event was that it doesn’t need us. The site invited anyone, anywhere, to host their own New Friendsgiving: invite a few people you don’t know yet, put out food, and see who you become friends with.
Over the holidays we cut the afternoon into a recap film, which we shared with the partners in January 2022. It shows exactly what we hoped for: a park full of people who arrived as strangers and left talking.
Marissa Meizz counted it among No More Lonely Friends’ most successful events, from a community that had already brought more than 10,000 strangers together in parks across the country. That is the part we’re proudest of: we didn’t build an audience from scratch. We gave people who were already looking for each other a date, a meal and a name.
Loneliness won’t be solved by a picnic. But for one Saturday in November, 300 people in Los Angeles proved how little it takes to start.
