Nonprofit marketing to millennials: the challenge of a generation

Abstract

As a nonprofit organization, marketing is a key part in obtaining donors and volunteers. However, nonprofit organizations have a minimal budget to spend on marketing. This means that marketers must know exactly how to market to their target audience to get the full use out of their small budget. Millennials are now becoming volunteers and will hopefully soon replace retiring baby boomers as major supporters. Marketers must now look at how to market to millennials for both volunteer and monetary donations. Based on other research, millennials are very different in consumer behavior than past generations, which means the way they are marketed to should be different than before. This study encompasses the Veblenian Social-Psychological, which is a marketing model of conspicuous consumption that lays out marketing guidelines for marketing "goods and services" as well as focus group data that was collected from millennials with a variety of volunteer and donation experience. From this data, marketers should consider donating and/or volunteering to a nonprofit as a good and service based off a conspicuous consumption marketing model. When looking at the results through the lens of the Veblenian Social- Psychological Model, it can be concluded that millennials can be marketed as a social group based off their interest, responses to digital marketing and personal connections. This researcher shows that even though millennials don't completely agree on every marketing tactic, the three factors were something they all responded to in similar ways.