I saw a great quote in Monocle (an absolutely fantastic magazine if you haven’t seen it): “Asking [governments] to innovate would be like asking your grandparents to start a competitor to Twitter.” The context is an article by Joshua Cooper Ramo, managing director of Kissinger Associates. He says that we live in revolutionary times and the need for innovation has never been greater. China needs to urbanize 300 million people in the next 15 years, for example. We have had no international agreements on significant issues such as nuclear proliferation or trade in food products in over 20 years. Such dramatic change will not come from people who are wedded to the past.
The same could certainly be said of associations. Most associations are run by middle aged people. (Notice I didn’t say “white males” but that might be true too.) Most association members are over 30 and the largest percentage are themselves middle aged. What these people (and except for the white male part, I count myself among them) know about the future is almost entirely based on the status quo or the recent past.
Associations as a whole bemoan their inability to attract and retain the younger generation, and to find young members to serve on their boards. Perhaps they have been going about it in the wrong way. Perhaps instead of saying “give us your membership dues and your conference registration fees so that we can continue to do what we’ve always done and provide you with the same services we provided to your parents,” they should say “Come reinvent us.”
Associations assume that young people are more technologically savvy. The answer, therefore, must be in technology. They assume that young people are hanging out in online communities. The answer, therefore, must be in those communities. They assume that young people manage their lives via cell phone. The answer, therefore, must be to develop mobile applications.
All of those things are true but none of them is the answer, certainly no one of them is the answer.
Instead, look between the lines in demographic and psychographic information. Read The Way We’ll Be by John Zogby. He offers not just great insight into what the future will look like but ways to market to who we’ll be. In addition to advice on marketing to people between the ages of 44 and 83, he offers the following for the next generation of consumers/members:
· The generation born between 1979 and 1990, what he calls “First Globals,” are willing to go anywhere, experience anything and live outside their home country. They are all over the Internet looking for ways to make that happen.
· We will define ourselves less by what we do than by who we are—more by values and less by work.
· The future will be more intimate. “It’s intimacy of experience people long for, not production values.”
This means authenticity, things that have value, experiences that matter. We all have the means to look behind the curtain these days, to separate the real from the hype. Young people are, however, much more likely to use those means, to vote with their wallets for things that matter to them. As Zogby says, “If you can’t market to this amazing crew, find another line of work.”
