Generational Marketing

At age 22, fourth-grade teacher Jessica King is already a charity veteran. The recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, with a degree in civic communications, started volunteering when she was 15, as a swimming teacher to special education students. As an undergraduate, King and her friends mentored children in West Philadelphia through the Netter Center for…

#GivingTuesday is almost here. You’ve spent countless hours planning your campaigns, crafting the perfect emails, prepping your donation pages, fashioning the perfect tweets (the day does have its own hashtag, after all). So, will it serve as a way to get those wily, social media-savvy millennials involved in philanthropy?...

Scaling a charity is statistically harder than it is to grow a business. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, there are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., including public charities, private foundations and other types of nonprofit organizations, including chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations and civic leagues. Despite their…

University at Albany advancement administrators conduct one-on-one meetings with young alumni, individually connecting with potential donors to convince them to give back to the institution. The goal, assistant director of young alumni programs Brian Rudolph said, is to instill giving habits in the recent graduates. Though the tactic is expensive, it is effective, he said. Philanthropy…

In 2016, marketing and communications professionals will stop targeting millennials as one demographic and focus on reaching the younger consumers based on their passions, according to a study released this week by Hotwire PR. The agency's seventh annual "Communications Trends Report," which was based on crowd-sourced data from 400 communicators across 22 countries, revealed that…

Those of us in the direct-response fundraising profession are living in the age of walking a tightrope. That’s especially true when we wrestle with budgeting issues. Let me suggest we begin with two key insights: (1) Who nonprofit fundraisers should target to maximize revenue, and (2) how and where to best communicate with the target audience to accomplish this...

Among young philanthropists, the words "effectiveness" and "impact" circulate widely in talk about projects and organizations funded. With their sights on the environment and other global issues, they take a hands-on approach. But how clear are the differences between the priorities of young donors and those of their parents? To find out, Alliance magazine associate…

Logically, it seems as though Democrats would more heavily rely on social media for campaigning than Republicans because of their younger voting base. This notion is partly true and certainly was true in the groundbreaking Obama 2008 campaign. The party’s outreach toward younger voters is just as important today. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has been…

Time to get out your checkbook. Wait—what’s a checkbook again? That thousand-dollar-a-plate charity gala may seem hopelessly out of touch, not to mention financially out of reach, to your average debt-ridden, tech-savvy millennial. But that doesn’t mean that Boston-area nonprofits aren’t devising new ways to win this generation’s philanthropic hearts. This cohort—the 75 million or…

When Carol Nash retired four years ago from Dimensions Healthcare System in Maryland after a long career in nursing, she had no inkling that she would soon be working harder than she ever did before. But Nash, 70, is fine with that. “I burn with a passion for what I am doing,” she said. “If…