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.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-- Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Elliot School of Communication