Generation Y & Gen X rock Convention
Howard Lake | 9 July 2009 | Blogs
Dividing the participants for the Gen Y seminar into 5 generational cohorts it was surprising to see no one from the Seniors or Silents and very few Boomers, just the people I would have thought needed to consider the impact of Gen Y.
Instead, Gen X and Gen Y considered the culture of the older, richer and more powerful generations and plotted how to lift their wallets. But consider the impact of that mobile integrated, hive minded, tertiary educated and well travelled group on our fundraising techniques: there goes direct mail (finally) here comes mobile bar-codes, crown fundraising and sudden mass movements as the hive swarms as it did for Obama.
Staying with theory of generational cohorts, Gen Y bears an uncanny resemblance to the Seniors now shuffling off the stage and herein lies a danger as the Seniors culture created the mass movements of the Thirties, and such blind reaching out for rapid changes in society can also lead to autocratic states of the left and right.
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Faced with climate change and other global crises it may be all too easy for Gens X & Y to find democratic processes far too slow… On the other hand all indications so far are of great generation emerging that will engage in social enterprises en masse, hopefully shunning some of the currently discredited activities of both politicians and capitalists.
John Baguley
www.internationalfundraisingconsultancy.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.