How to Engage 20-Somethings in Your Cause (Hint: Insulting us isn't it)

I'm 26. I work in a nonprofit. My first part-time job out of college was at a nonprofit, and six months later, my first full-time job was at a nonprofit. I'm at the same nonprofit now. Many of my friends work for nonprofits; many of us knew that it was where we wanted to work even before we found the specific cause we'd be working for. I volunteer for nonprofits; I give monthly and annual donations to nonprofits. For years, my holiday (and often birthday) gifts have been donations in the name of the giftee. I'm a fundraiser and I work closely with our marketing director, so I read a lot about engaging different demographic groups (and a lot about twitter and facebook). So imagine my amusement when I got an email from guidestar.org titled "How to Engage 20-Somethings in Your Cause." I'm a 20-something. All my friends are 20-somethings. Let's see if they have a new read on us. *click*

Today's 20-somethings, sometimes called "slactivists," are often cynical of corporate efforts.

(Before I go any further, let me promise that I'll be offering my own thoughts after I finishing berating the offense that turned up in my mailbox.)

My partner is familiar with the term slactivist, and according to him, it does in fact mean what it sounds like. I wanted to make sure, so I checked wikipedia:

The word is considered a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction.

Guidestar's article went further, to "explain" why we 20-somethings are lazy do-nothings:

After all, at a formative age they witnessed dramatic institutional and corporate failures. But they were also born during an age of riches, are highly educated, and have been told that the world is their oyster. So they are a very optimistic group.

So, we're self-centered slackers who click through online petitions, have too much money, too much education, and too much idealism, because we grew up during "dramatic institutional and corporate failures"? How can we be disengaged while still being engaged enough to have witnessed and understood the Enron catastrophe? But I digress.

This argument fails not just because it doesn't follow its own logic, but because we are not all highly educated (though we do have a record amount of student loan debt), we did not all grow up with riches (though we did grow up in a second gilded age with exploding consumer debt), and we're being told here and elsewhere that we're lazy slackers, not that the world is our oyster. We grew up knowing that we were supposed to save the world, to go to college, to get PhDs, and every day, we are keenly aware of just how far off the mark we are from perfection. And idealism is not the same as optimism.

We grew up in the era of 9/11: I was a senior in high school when I watched the twin towers fall during third period AP English class. I was only 17 when we started fighting a war, not quite 19 when we started a second. My youth and my "formative" years are pock-marked by depression and anxiety; by militarism and steadily increasing death tolls; by a narrative that racism and sexism are over when we can see so plainly that they're not; by deciding which library books to check out based on what story they would tell about me if my records were ever subpoenaed. It's this last part -- the recognition that nothing I do or say is private -- that has most shaped how I see myself. I am permanently conscious of what story the minutes in my day are adding up to.

I went to a college that was among the first ten that Facebook opened up to, back when it was an online version of the Freshman Facebook we were all encouraged to send our pictures in for before we got to campus. I was on Twitter before it ballooned, and my first iPod was a mini, which is now out of production. So here's what you should know about our generation:

• We have a healthy dose of cynicism mixed with idealism, and we struggle to think we can make a difference in the world.
• We want meaning. Some of us want 2.5 kids and a dog, but we want to choose that, as part of the meaning we've found in life. We don't want to think we're just floating through life until we die.
• We expect immediate, polished ways of communicating. I have about 15 email accounts, three laptops, two facebook accounts, two twitter accounts, two personal websites, two cell phones, two blogs, two liverjournals, one work extension, one work direct line, one myspace, a blackberry, and an almost-constant gchat presence. I can be reached anywhere, any time. Social media are tentacles, not lives.
• We forward emails and facebook posts and internet petitions and such not because we don't care enough to do more, but because we get 1,000 requests and only care about five of them. So we invest time, money, and energy in the five, and hope we can at least get the word out about the other 995. We are stretched thin, and still we're trying.
• We don't trust institutions. My grandparents trust institutions because they lived through the Depression, when government worked. My parents don't trust institutions because they lived through the 70s and 80s, when working institutions were dismantled. My generation doesn't trust institutions because we're used to the smoke and mirrors. We know when we're being swindled or cajoled, and we find it insulting to our intelligence.
• Don't handwave at what you want; just tell me, and trust that I'll decide if I care. If I don't care, don't try to change my mind. I'll just get pissed off, and then I'll care about not caring.
• Believe it or not, we're adults now. If we're not the kind of adults you were at 20-something, that doesn't mean we aren't adults. It means that adulthood is being redefined. Stop mistrusting us and treating us like children. 
• We know that the internet is used for creepy things like preying on children, but that doesn't mean everything internet-borne is creepy. I have met friends and lovers on match.com, okcupid, and craigslist, and I have reconnected with long-lost friends (including my partner) on livejournal and facebook. Internet connections and blog-posted information are no less real just because they involve the internet.
• Bombardment is just a click away. When an email is sent to my work address, it comes to my blackberry, my work laptop, and the PC partition of my personal mac, and gets forwarded to a work-specific gmail address that gets picked up by mac mail and is easily searchable online. This isn't exactly normal for my generation, but it's close. If I hear about something three times, I know it's a big deal. If I hear about it five times, I wish you would shut up. This is the Information Age, and information is everywhere.
• We believe in the value of our elders. Our grandparents will live longer than any grandparents have before. We know them as people, not just in family lore. My eldest cousin is 40; I'm the youngest. We have our own relationships with our grandparents as people, not just as family roles.

I moved eight hours away from my mother when I went to college, and we have spoken on the phone every single day in the eight years since. My family live in South Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey. My best friends live in Boston, Princeton, Austin, D.C., San Diego, Indianapolis, and down the street from me in Georgia. We are in constant communication on google reader, through googlegroups, on googlechat (notice a theme?), on free conference call lines, through text messages, and on facebook. There are few cities I could go to where I wouldn't have a place to stay, even if I didn't know anything there personally. There is a reason facebook tells us who our mutual friends are.

We are not disconnected; we are not disengaged. We have woven webs of experiences and relationships. They may not look like yours, but if you fail to recognize that they are as important as yours, you will be missing the point entirely.

Hire a 20-something to do your marketing to 20-somethings. Clearly nothing else will work quite as well.