|
| ||
|
|||
To order reprints of any article in its original format, visit Scoopreprintsource.com IntelligenceReaching Young Professionals Where They Are ASSOCIATIONS NOW, September 2009 By: Interview by Lisa Junker, CAE
Clare Inzeo is manager of special projects in ASAE & The Center's research department, and a speaker on young professionals and associations in light of ASAE & The Center's research on behalf of ASAE & The Center's Speakers Network. Associations Now sat down with her recently to capture some insights on younger professionals and how they are currently interacting with associations. Associations Now: What does ASAE & The Center's research tell us about how best to engage with young professionals? Inzeo: When we do all of these benchmarking studies, one of the main things that all of the [associations participating in the study] are looking to learn is how to engage young professionals, whether it's how to engage young professionals or how we are going to find the next generation of leaders. Decision to Join has a lot of information on why young professionals join associations and what they think associations do. In that study, a lot of what we heard before the research began is that people were worried that the youngest generation is not joining associations. But our research does not support that at all, and other studies that we've seen do not support that either. The millennial generation looks pretty comparable to other generations when they were in this stage of life in terms of association membership. The late 20s and early 30s seem to be when people get involved with their profession and their associations; really it's more a function of career levels then it is of age. With regard to the questions that we ask in Decision to Join about the overall value of associations, the youngest generation gave the lowest value to all questions except for one: "Will there be a greater need for associations five years from now, a lesser need, or about the same?" The youngest respondents were the most likely to give a positive answer to that question. With that background information, young professionals demonstrated some important preferences to keep in mind. In terms of what young professionals thought were the most important functions of an association, their top two were professional development and networking. That's what they valued most, which was different from older generations. In terms of benefits of association membership, we looked at both personal benefits and good-of-the-order benefits. For the personal benefits, the top two line up across generations: access to information and professional development opportunities. For young professionals, however, their number three most valued personal benefit is access to career information, while the older generations ranked that really low. The reason why this is important is that members of older generations are often the decision makers in the association; if they don't think career information and opportunities are important and therefore the association doesn't offer enough of such things, they may be hurting the organization's chances of appealing to young professionals. When it comes to the "good of the order" benefits, which are services provided to the entire field regardless of membership, the number one motivation for the youngest generation to join is supporting student education and entry into the field. And that's down really low on the list for every other generation, even gen X. Probably it's just fresh in the mind of the youngest members. But again, the decision makers in the organization don't necessarily think this is important, but if they're looking to engage young professionals, they may want to put more emphasis on it. Another important point from Decision to Join is that there's no real difference among the generations in terms of preferences for content delivery—how they prefer to get information about their field. We asked about blogs and podcasts, and they were low for everybody. Magazines and meetings are still the top two. What does Decision to Volunteer tell us about younger volunteers? A big overall finding is that the younger generations have stronger value ratings for volunteering generally than do older members, but they're less likely to volunteer for the association. I think that's actually a great opportunity for associations, because you have a pool of people who aren't volunteering for you who think volunteering is really important. They're interested in cause related volunteering in a big way. In Decision to Volunteer, we talk a little about volunteer opportunities as a recruitment tool, and I think cause-related opportunities through the association are a great recruitment tool for young professionals. Decision to Volunteer also showed us that local leaders are slightly younger than volunteer leaders overall. Local volunteering seems to be a good way to engage younger members. Is there anything unexpected our research has shown us about young professionals? I think the biggest surprise, especially with Decision to Join, is that everybody thinks millennials are not joining, that they're not joiners, and that's not true. That's not supported at all, and that's an interesting thing. Another interesting thing comes from ASAE & The Center's economic studies, which we conducted for the first time in January 2009 and a second time in June 2009. One thing that's surprising, and it shifted a little bit in the Summer 2009 Economic Impact Study, is that we expected to see a shift from in-person participation in education to virtual participation, and we didn't. It was consistent in all generations, and that I think is a little bit of a surprise. In the newer study, there's still not a migration from in person to virtual. But the newer study showed a larger number of people who said they were very likely (a 5 on a 1 to 5 scale) to do both an in-person and a virtual educational activity. The other thing that came out of the economic study this time around is that the youngest group is the most likely to drop their association membership no matter what. About 18 percent of millennials said they would drop their membership no matter what this year. In the case of young professionals, they are the least likely to be making decisions about which associations they are participating in; those decisions are often being made at a higher level. I don't think that's shocking, but it's something you wouldn't know until it's in front of you, and when it's in front of you it makes sense. Clare Inzeo is manager of special projects for ASAE & The Center's research department. She is also a speaker for the ASAE & The Center Speakers Network. For more information on the Speakers Network, visit www.asaecenter.org/speakersnetwork. Lisa Junker, CAE, IOM, is editor-in-chief of Associations Now. Email: ljunker@asaecenter.org
More Articles From Associations Now, September 2009
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
