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photo: Guerilla postering by Amnesty International in Belarus.
While everything and everyone ages all the time, new people come into this world every day. This is why every movement will need to rejuvenate its membership and tactics, eventually.
How do you appeal to a younger generation? What can you do to actively reach out to the youth of today?
Amnesty International in the Netherlands faced that question squarely when it noticed that its letter-writing membership was getting older, and older. So they set out to attract a younger constituency. Here’s what you can learn from what they did, as told in the Sending Out an SMS tactical noteboo
1. Use young technology. Short messaging (SMS) originally developed as a little-known underground feature, being exploited for free under the radar of telecommunication companies, and most adults. In developed countries, generations of teenagers relied on the phone to talk for hours. The young of today rely mostly on chat software and mobile phones. Find new uses for technology to generate curiosity and interest.
2. Go where it’s at. “You don’t reach younger people in churches or librairies, the places where we find most of the older people who are active for Amnesty. They can be found at pop festivals and concert”, says Anneke Bosman in her notebook. Put up cool design posters not only in schools, but also in trendy hang-outs and discos. Put your hard-impact ads in the zines they read, on websites they visit.
3. Use hip celebrities. AI calls on pop artists to relay its message to a hipper, younger crowd. Changing figureheads can help reposition your actions as exciting, cutting-edge and fun. Sting’s “Message in a Bottle” was used to brand “Sending Out an SMS” (okay, that was so 1980’s, but it still worked in 2001!).
4. Move fast, react quickly. Ask for short bursts of energy, rather than sustained, drawn out efforts. Remember when you were young. Don’t count on patience. Ask for something short and powerful (it may even be intense), and give immediate feedback. When young members sent action alerts through their mobile phone, they immediately received an acknowledgement thanking them for having sent “SMS message number 2594”.
5. Emphasize the good news. People in general, and younger spirits in particular, want to know how successful their action is. A short time after each Action alert, they would receive another message telling them the results: “Thanks to your action, Mrs. Y has just been released!”
6. Adopt a network-based approach. Young people are woven into especially tight networks of friends. Try to use one-on-one sharing to your advantage. Provide opportunities to “Tell a friend”. Use social networking sites (yes, the MySpace, Facebook types). As the notebook says: “the most effective membership growth tactic is direct dialogue”.
7. Build a buzz. The coolness factor is hard to build. First, you need to “brand” your campaign with clever design, and then work up the publicity to widening circles. You goal is to reach a point where individuals start snowballing awareness directly to one another.
8. Update your research. Youthful behaviour is driven by change. Keep up with the trends by reading up on them, asking young minds around you, and observing what’s new and exciting.
In French we say: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait... If only the young knew, if only the old could... The most powerful movements in the world are those that cut across barriers, age being a fundamental one. Meaningful movements need to bring together the young and the old. Energy and wisdom, together.
Here’s my last tip. It may be the most powerful one.
9. Renew leadership. At the end of the day, it’s not about tactics, tricks or gimmicks. It’s about being real. Genuine rejuvenation means genuine change in who is the face of your organization. Seek out new talents and potential. Leave room for the new. Trust younger activists to hold real positions of leadership within your organization. Now that’s meaningful change!
— Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org
I welcome your comments.
Leadership for change
The last tip about seeking out new talent and giving young people real leadership positions goes to the heart of effecting meaningful change, whether it be new leaders in the Middle East who are not so wedded to the intransigent positions of the past or the Presidency of the United States.. The undergraduates on my Global leadership course tend to be very cynical of politicians and are not going to make the effort to vote unless a candidate can really reach out to them and make a case for a change in the way we do politics. That is the kind of mood that JFK capitalized on and how he inspired a whole generation of young people to enter public service, send us to the moon, avoid nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union to name but a few far reaching outcomes.
So, if we want young people to vote, let's identify some new leaders whom they will follow - everyone talks about youth voting apathy - we need to understand the root cause of that apathy by introducing the kind of approach that Philippe advocates to engage young people in all types of political and civic activism.
Susan Atwood, Instructor, University of Minnesota’s Leadership : Leadership for Global Citizenship.