Millennials and Social Change

According to the 2015 Millennial Impact Report, a massive 84% of working millennials donate to charity and 70% of millennials spent at least an hour volunteering in their community in 2014. For those wondering, the millennial workforce is over 50 million strong. That is a pretty large number of people impacting their communities.

In a variety of ways, millennials seem determined to shake off the apathetic label assigned to them by their elders. For starters, the work ethic gap seems to be a myth. Millennials work hard and they also want their work to matter.

And now they want these investment of time, concern and money to matter as well.

Millennials want to invest in organizations that focus less on lining the pockets of their Boards of Directors and/ or founders. They want to make strategic investment with the intention of positively impacting the world.

Millennials are more exposed to the strife of others than other generations have been. With the 24 hour news cycle and social media, we see what is happening faster and more often than we did before. With that level of exposure to the world, it is not surprising that millennials feel a level or responsibility to fix it.

Millennials continue to seek out possibilities across all aspects of their lives to have a positive impact on society and question norms that might pose barrier to implementing their ideas for social change.

With such a diverse group and such preconceived notion about its personality and interests, it can be difficult to approach marketing to this generation. However, there are certain characteristics that are shared between nearly all millennials and those that are not targeted through niche marketing

Some essential tips for organizations to market their social impact investment causes to millennials include;

Be relevant and engaging;

Whereas this strategy applies to all generations, it is required for millennials. A great deal of millennials have never known a world without the internet and social media hence are the last group organizations can expect to simply accept messages on a face value.

Millennials are focused on solving challenges through online research-search and social media. Brands that provide relevant, simple solutions to the challenges have a higher chance of drawing millennials’ attention.

By rocking your mobile marketing, targeting social groups instead of life stages while being relevant and engaging will make a great splash with this demographic.

Rock your mobile marketing;

Organizations can market their social change projects and programs through mobile devices to reach this generation. To get started on this, organizations ought to make sure that their call to action is clear even on a smaller screen.

Through rocking their mobile marketing, organizations find ways to integrate their advertising natively into popular mobile applications and programs especially if it is styled as a great means to reach millennials.

Target social groups instead of life stages;

Millennials are the most nontraditional generation at the moment-they don’t value traditional life-stage advertising as much as the older generations did. To this generation, family and community have variety of meaning and their physical neighborhood is not likely the first thing they think of.

Instead of a focus on life stages, target millennials on social groups such as groups whose attention is on population, segments that are drawn to social causes, those in alternative lifestyles or those who vividly follow specific social media personalities.

Millennials are much more likely to have a strong attachment on these social identities than they are to strong identity with a specific stage of life.

Thanks to social platforms, brands have countless content opportunities to forge relevance and engage millennials on their social change programs and projects through providing relevant information and value proposition.

In the end, a millennial-friendly brand does not simply mean employing the latest technology. Millennials have had a rough go of it hence will turn to brands that make a positive impact-organizations should take pride in transparency and emphasize social change.

Generations, like people have personalities and millennials-the world teen and twenty-something who were making passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium, have begun to forge theirs — confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to social change.