Professional Millennials - What About Other Young People?

Earlier this year the Millennial Impact Report was released.  While it is certainly a solid and valuable contribution to the field of volunteer and stakeholder engagement for nonprofits, it is disappointing that the report focuses only on "professional" younger people.  What about the other 70% of young people who might not consider themselves professionals?  I wish the report gave a broader snap shot of all millennials - since people from all backgrounds can and do volunteer.  As a field, we should be interested and learning about how everyone thinks about engaging with nonprofits.  Check out VolunteerMatch's Blog for a terrific summary of the report.   

 

Remember the "Year of Giving" Guy?

Perhaps you've heard of him. His name is Reed Sandridge, and in December of 2009, after getting laid off during the great recession, he decided to give a different person in need $10 every day - for an entire year.  For more about him check out his blog which is interesting and insightful.  I have an amazing story about how Reed also tried to give his time, but more on that in a second. How did I, Reed Dewey meet another Reed you might be thinking.  We both attended the 2011 National Conference on Volunteering last summer in New Orleans. There were 4,000 people in the darkened opening session that had already begun, so I grabbed a seat sort of near the back then in a few seats. In a whisper I said to the fellow next to me, "Hi, I'm Reed" and so we connected.

Now fast forward to February and Reed and I finally got together for coffee. He's a very genuine guy who's a great communicator and is focusing his time to writing a book about his year of giving and helping nonprofits and companies better tell their stories.

After the year of giving was up, Reed decided to do a year of volunteering (once a week) with 52 different nonprofits in Washington, DC. Here's the interesting thing... only a handful of these organizations ever asked him more about himself and why he was volunteering. For all these nonprofits knew, this man might have been willing to volunteer many hours or give them a large contributions down the road.

What an opportunity lost for many of these groups. I've done my fair share of nonprofit work over the years and I know how staff get really busy, but it strikes me as short-sighted to ignore someone who's willing to volunteer 3+ hours of their time while someone who gives $30 can't get off a mailing list.

What do you think about this? Should nonprofit staffers take more time to invest in getting to know those who volunteer - even if for one time? What advice would you give to charities about how to better engage those people who volunteer occasionally?

Tapping Those Age 65 to 80 - Hidden Gold In Those Hills?

While there's certainly been a lot written about engaging boomers, families, employees and more, rarely am I hearing about tapping those age 65 to 80. This age group has been called the "silent generation" and they are usually healthy don't have kids or parents to care for. Boomers are often referred to as the sandwich generation because they do have more family obligations behind and ahead of them. Research shows that older volunteers can be incredibly loyal and dedicated -and often stay engaged with organizations for years.  AARP's 2010 "Connecting and Giving Report" found that 43% of those in this age group are "somewhat" or "very involved" in volunteer work.  Another reason to engage older folks???  It doesn't hurt that many of these 65+ year olds have significant financial resources and have the capacity to give sizable gifts in addition to being valuable volunteers.  Have you found it fruitful to engage this generation?

Letting Our Nonprofit Fans Decide How They Engage

While I think a lot about how nonprofits and government can effectively engage volunteers, I'm increasingly seeing that all our audiences are blurring. Most agencies have different lists - one for donors, one for volunteers, one for media, etc...  Even if these lists are part of of one database, we keep focusing on the groups within them.  In Beth Kanter's book "The Networked Nonprofit" she says we also need to be thinking about those who follow and spread our organization's messages - in addition to thinking about our advocates, donors and volunteers.  With this logic we'd spend more time communicating with everyone who will listen to us through various social media vehicles, and let them decide what they want to do. Today's donor is tomorrow's volunteer is next week's connector to a friend at the local bank, etc...  Perhaps we need to let our fans be free to engage with us in ways we never imagined.   What cool ways is your nonprofit engaging fans to stay connected?