Find the right way to engage with young people and plug into a source of passion that could reap great returns, says Jenny Ramage

Young people – particularly students – have access to incredibly powerful networks. Just take a look at Anthony Nolan’s student group, Marrow: last year, it succeeded in raising around £90k for the charity last year. Most critically, it recruited 10,000 donors to the stem cell register, which represented about 30 per cent of the charity’s overall recruitment total last year, according to fundraising director Catherine Miles.

“They’ve all got their own social media profiles and group profiles. In particular, where we’ve been nominated to win certain charity partnerships which are based on online public voting, they’ve been incredibly powerful in whipping up support and coordinating those public votes”, says Miles.

Socially sophisticated

Contrary to some thinking, young people are capable of running very sophisticated campaigns, says Miles. “They run face-to-face recruitment events, social media, produce videos of their work, and go out and do media interviews, among other things,” she says.  

The Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI), which engages young people in strategic philanthropy in schools all over the world, is currently running a programme in UK secondary schools focusing on local grassroots charities with a social service focus. The aim is to connect young people with their communities. According to organisation’s UK director, Tim Pare, its work is not just about raising awareness among young people of what charities are doing in their community, “it’s also about raising awareness within communities of the talents and untapped potential of young people”.

In order to tap this potential, you first need to harness their passion and commitment. Charities can often perceive young people as a hard-to-reach group, But Miles thinks this is a misconception. “Conventional wisdom is that this is a group that won’t engage, but in our experience young people can be a great source of support; they can be very passionate about issues and do want to engage. Charities just need to find the right way to enable them to do that. First of all, they need to recognise that young people engage in a different way. When you get it right, and when you give them easy ways to engage, they can be an incredibly powerful force. But you’ve got to engage on their terms.”

Cause and choice

One of the most important things to recognise is that young people are more cause driven than the generations that came before them. In general, for them the social issue comes first: “They connect to things on an issue basis, then they might go and approach a charity who deals with that kinds of issue,” says Miles. “And so the challenge for charities is how to get the message across that they are working on that particular issue.”

Going straight for the money isn’t going to work, says Pare. “We don’t ask young people to fundraise for us. We start them thinking about addressing the cause, rather than throwing money in a tin, putting a red nose on or doing a fun run without them really having an understanding of what they’re doing and what impact they can have on that particular issue.” Only after they have identified a social issue they care about will they start thinking about charities in their local community that are trying to ease or solve that issue, Pare explains.

“Choosing a charity is a key component of their engagement,” he says. “They are empowered because they’ve made their own decision about who to support, and it’s their relationship.”

According to Miles, the choices you present should not just be over what or who to support, but also how: “If you can tell people there’s a range of ways they can support your organisation, that leads to much better conversion and retention.”  

In contrast to the teacher-centric method by which charities have traditionally engaged with schools, the work that Citizenship Foundation’s Giving Nation initiative is doing is singularly youth-centred – with the starting point being the perception and desires of the young people themselves, rather than an adult’s preferences. The programme uses an experiential model based on accepted social education practice. “Our method is pretty sound,” says the foundation’s chief executive Andy Thornton. “Some people may take issue with it, but you’d find very few educationalists who would.

“I don’t know if anyone has ever applied that to charity support before, but it’s a pretty well accepted way of doing other kinds of learning”.

Letting young people take the lead can bring other benefits, too: “They are the ones who know what’s going to work and what’s not when it comes to their peer groups”, says Miles. “You can’t just produce what you think will be a good student fundraising product and tell them to go out and do it; you have to talk to them individually, be led by them, and be flexible.”

Goals and gains

Choice is important, but to truly engage young people you also have to show them the connection between what they are doing, and the impact that has or will have on the cause. Of course, the importance of demonstrating impact applies across a wide range of age groups, but according to Miles, it is particularly the case for young people: “They want to be convinced that by getting involved, they are going to be able to see an impact.” She qualifies this by saying that her organisation has seen young people “respond really powerfully to video clips with content that comes directly from beneficiaries, or aid workers out in the field.”

She adds that it’s also important to give them goals that are both tangible and achievable. “Our student supporters understand it costs £100 to put someone on the stem cell register, and they know that with every £100 they raise, they are potentially saving a life.”

Digital youth

While the three pillars of engaging young people – choice, issue and impact – will help to secure their support, the tools with which you engage them are every bit as critical. Miles is of the view that using digital and social media is vital: “It’s GOT to be online,” she stresses. “This is absolutely critical for the younger age group – you have to give them opportunities to engage in a way that is meaningful, but also that is fast and easily accessible. Unless that digital fulfillment is there and works smoothly, you will find it hard to get them to do anything.”

A good bet?

From a fundraiser’s point of view, investing in young people must ultimately yield a financial return. Can you take a highly engaged, but generally cash-poor, group, and turn their support into money? 

Thornton recalls that whilst setting up the Giving Nation programme, he would commonly encounter charities who foresaw no return on investment. “Virtually nobody saw young people as a good bet for putting time into, because they thought the giving variables were too high.” 

While it’s the case that many charities have spent years nurturing relationships within schools, it’s almost always been with teachers, not the students themselves. “They build up a relationship with the teachers in order to get their charity on the books every year for an own clothes day, for example”, says YPI’s Tim Pare. And while he concedes that those charities might get a few hundred quid a year from it, he views it as a “short-term solution” compared with the much greater returns that can be achieved by taking a youth-centred approach. “If you engage the young people in the cause, you are motivating them in a much more powerful way to make a longer-term commitment to the charity, and to the notion of charity and philanthropy.”

Reaping returns

Following the success of its Marrow student network, Anthony Nolan is now using telemarketing to successfully cross-sell to its young supporters – when they reach the tender age of 21. “Conventionally, you would think it would work more for people aged 40-plus, but we get particularly high response rates from 21-30 year-olds, both male and female, and they support at a fantastic rate,” says Miles.

Again, she highlights the crucial role of digital, saying that social media works as part of the fundraising toolkit. “Engaging with young people via social media can translate into money,” she says. “We get a lot of our young supporters chatting to us on the Twitter feed; that enables us to pick up on when they are organising their own fundraising. Whereas historically, the first a charity might hear about a fundraising activity is when the cheque comes in, now, if you engage with your supporter base via social media, you can pick up a lot earlier what they are doing. You can then offer help and support that enables them to raise more money from those events, because they’re getting that input, and even extra promotion in many cases, from us.”

Raising them right

The common factor between Anthony Nolan’s approach, and that of YPI and Giving Nation, is that the first interaction is categorically not about asking for money.

Thornton says: “You need to give young people something to do that voices their concerns in a way that buys them into the issue you’re campaigning on, and not introduce them to charities by saying ‘hey, there’s this terrible problem, and your money will fix it’. What we were doing, and we think it’s right to do so, is giving young people an authentic view of what they can do to make a difference to the world around them. Long term, this will reap greater returns.”

The real proof of the pudding still lies some years ahead, but with 75 per cent of Giving Nation’s young participants saying that they would go on to donate in future, all the signs point to achieving life-long engagement with the voluntary sector – with significant financial rewards to be gained along the way.

This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 28, April 2013