Members of Generation Y...tend to be less loyal to an organization and hold high expectations for online attempts to attract them. But they also have a strong desire to help others and to raise money and attention from friends and acquaintances for their favorite causes.As datafail to back that up, we get this.
Donors born since 1980 gave an average of $341 to an average of 3.6 groups, while members of Generation X gave $796 to 4.2 organizations.Anyone else see the problem here? Yes, that's it, in a typical career environment you make more money as your career progresses. Anything else? Right, a good chunk of Gen Y are still in college! Assuming typical matriculation and graduation, the oldest GenYers graduated around 2003; the youngest won't graduate for another three years.
When you report data inaccurately, it doesn't help that you grant that we "have a strong desire to help others." It isn't okay to acknowledge our intentions are good if you're also insulting us based on your own preconceptions about what you'd like to find. So let's remember some things about this generation that is sooo picky about where we work and who we give our money to:
- The total amount of student loans borrowed by students increased by about 25% from the 2007-08 academic year to 08-09 academic year. Compare this to the increase from 1997-98 to 98-99, which was 1.7%.
- Two-thirds of college students take on student debt, with an average of $23,186 after a Bachelor's degree. Compare this to the numbers from 12 years ago, when 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.*
- This burden keeps us from doing things we want to do, like having a kids, buying a house, or throwing a wedding. (Things, I should note, that are big ol' important milestones for adulthood which we're criticized for "delaying.")
- On average (using a median) starting pay for men is $8,400 more than starting pay for women in the same graduating class.**
- More women than men graduate college (this trend is growing); more women than men donate to nonprofits. The bulk of the donors and likely donors in our generation are making less than our peers.
- The third of Gen Y who are still in college are largely living on borrowed money and thus aren't giving as much. Maybe we should count the interest I'll be paying for the money I donated when I was in college, and then see where the averages end up.
- Many of us opt to work in nonprofits as a moral decision, rather than an economic one, and thus make far less money than we would in for-profit organizations. For example, I am in the 16th percentile for jobs similar to mine in responsibility and region. If we consider the $9,312 between my salary and the average market value of my work to be a contribution, I wonder whether we'd still be decrying how stingy and flighty Gen Y is.
I've been reading The Canon by Natalie Angier, and I just finished the chapter on probabilities. The moral of the chapter was a warning that it's easy to be hoodwinked by statistics with poor or, in this case, a lack of analysis. I expected better; perhaps that's foolish. This is truthiness at its best: "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."
*These data come from the Wall Street Journal article, Students Borrow More Than Ever for College.
**These data come from here and originate in a cnn.com article.
I think they're mistaking life-cycle effects for generational ones--like you said, younger people have less money to give right now, that doesn't prove that we're less generous people. And the points they're extrapolating from the data don't make sense--if the point was 'target older people if you want to maximize donations' then, sure, older people have more to give, and they do give more. But the accusation that we're generationally selfish or skeptical is ridiculous. In the 60's and 70's advertisers were convinced that young baby boomers were too cynical for 50's style advertising, and too self-interested to fall for appeals to the greater good. In the 80's, young people were all stereotyped as yuppies, too concerned with personal success to give back. In the 90's it was the 'slacker' myth--that young adults were too concerned with not succeeding to give back. Hell, I've read essays from the 20's where older writers went on and on about how those gosh-darn flappers are all too wrapped up in themselves to help other people, and that would surely spell the end of American society. That we'd be conquered by the Kaiser at any moment if the younger generation wouldn't stop spending all their time dancing in speakeasys. The discussion is never "people give less when they're young and still establishing themselves," it's always "This new generation is totally different and worse than any ever before!" Which is a pity, because if people in your field would embrace the former, you could start looking for ways to get people engaged beginning at a younger age.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be surprised if younger people do, on average, have more skepticism toward online appeals--we spend more time online, so we get bombarded with more requests, and we tend to be more savvy about things like phishing scams. That may make us reluctant to give online if we don't trust both the organization *and* the company they use to process payments. But they don't give any information to support that argument, they just point to lower giving totals out of context and handwave.
I wish I knew the solution to the online issue. There's very little research about it that isn't laden with anti-GenYer bias. Anecdotally I know that I have a different impression of organizations that use integrated donation services (www.lambdalegal.org), on-site but unintegrated services (www.scsatl.org), and completely separate services like PayPal or Network for Good. It's a difference in perceived sophistication like the difference between full-color and one-color printed material.
ReplyDeletePS I <3 your social historical knowledge. The slackers they were complaining about in the 90s are now the GenXers that are the contrast to us GenY slackers.