Four Impacts of Generational Change

Resource
Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit

Contents
Four Impacts of Generational Change
    1. Boomers coming in the door
    2. Boomers going out the door
    3. Whatever happened to GenX and Gen@?
    4. Unintended consequences
Summary

From Vince Hyman, former Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:

This Tools issue is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of our book by Peter C. Brinckerhoff, Generations: The Challenge of A Lifetime for Your Nonprofit. If you’ve not met or heard or read something by Peter, you’ve missed some great stuff. He has won two of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s prestigious McAdam Awards, he is a regular conference speaker, and he is author of many books (including our own award winning Nonprofit Stewardship, and the Mission-Based Management Series, available on his popular web site, MissionBased.com.)

Four Impacts of Generational Change
Last issue, we focused on six trends that were tied into the generational change we are experiencing across the country and within our nonprofits, foundations, associations, and other organizations that constitute the nonprofit community. Those trends were: financial stress, technological acceleration, diversity of population, redefining the family, MeBranding, and work-life balance.

We also described the generational cohorts as:

• The Greatest Generation, (born 1901–1925)
• The Silent Generation (born 1926–1944)
• The Boomers (born 1945–1962)
• GenX (born 1963–1980)
• Gen@ (born 1981–2002)

We noted that the Baby Boom generation has been the largest in history, and its desires, problems, and habits affect everything.

In this issue, we explore four key impacts of those trends. These Peter has named:

1. Boomers coming in the door
2. Boomers going out the door
3. Whatever happened to Gen@ and GenX
4. Unintended consequences.

As you read through these, consider what they mean relative to your work, whether it involves administration of foundations, strategic plan development, use of evaluation tools, creating a nonprofit fundraising plan, or program management. Each of these impacts—along with actions you can take to respond to them—is dealt with in detail in Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit.

1. Boomers coming in the door
This impact has three parts: your staff, the people you serve, and your volunteers.

Staff: Hundreds of thousands of Boomers have done their twenty to twenty-five years in the for-profit and government world and, having taken retirement in their first career, are thinking: “Whatever happened to my idealism of the 1960s? I want to do something important.” These people are looking for work in the nonprofit sector and have amazing skills. But they haven’t yet figured out how to fit in. So how do you find, recruit, and incorporate these people into your staff and volunteer cadre?

Services: If you serve primarily people age sixty years and older, stand back and prepare for the onslaught. Aging services have known this for a long time, but other organizations, such as arts groups or volunteer organizations—anyone with this demographic—needs to figure out how you are going to ramp up capacity to serve them for ten to twenty years.

When creating a nonprofit business plan, remember that the Boomers (and all other generational groups) are what are called age-cohorts. They come and they go, despite Boomers’ apparent belief that they’ll live forever. While five or ten years may seem like a long time, it is not in terms of generational trends. The decisions you make now may haunt you in five years.

For example, when Boomers were in elementary school, hundreds of school districts built middle schools and high schools to accommodate the coming wave of students. These schools were full for about fifteen years and then half empty for the next twenty. A huge capital expense hung on these districts for a generation. Other districts planned differently, having schools do double shifts, and thus avoiding the construction costs and attendant debt. The point is that when dealing with age trends nothing is forever.

Volunteers: Finally, millions of Boomers, when they go out the door of their career, have time on their very capable hands. These are people who are often looking to help in their community, if you give them a cause. If we’re smart, they could be the biggest and best volunteer force in history.

2. Boomers going out the door
Boomers who have spent their careers in the nonprofit world are deciding on their own retirement plans. Since there have been so many of them, they’ve clogged up the management/supervision pipeline. Who is going to replace these people? Sheer numbers say we don’t have enough skilled managers to fill the slots opening up in the next ten years.

Start in the executive director/CEO seat. Thousands of these people are fifty-five or over and looking longingly at the door. And, in many organizations, the management team, whether large or small, is primarily made up of people of the same Boomer age group. Either willingly, or kicking and screaming, the majority of these people will be gone in ten years.

Look at your management team. How many are over fifty-five? Do you have a management succession plan? Are you training enough new managers internally?

If you're like most organizations, the answer is no—if for no other reason than you lack a “deep bench.” Foundations have had a zeal to keep nonprofit administration costs down. In nonprofit grant writing and nonprofit fundraising plans, we therefore keep our overhead costs very low—far lower than in the business world. This has severely limited our ability to hire sufficient managers. Thus there may be few people to groom to replace the Boomers.

The second twist on Boomers going out the door is centered on your board, and the problem is generally the same. The Boomers make up a huge percentage of boards in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are experienced in their board of director roles. So, as they age, they continue to help recruit “themselves,” asking people like themselves (read: the same age group) to serve. And the median age of board members rises.

If you have the records, go back ten years and do an average age of your board then. Then do it for your current board. No doubt, the board has aged. And if your current average age is over fifty-five, do you have a plan for diversifying your board based on age?

3. Whatever happened to GenX and Gen@?
Young people coming out of college have, for at least the past ten years, volunteered more than any generation before them. In fact, the kids coming out of college today probably have volunteered more by graduation than their Boomer parents have in their entire lives. So we are generating a great number of well-trained, experienced, willing volunteers. But, when you look at boards, or groups of volunteers, where are they?

The problem is that Boomers have to do the recruiting, and they don’t know where to look or how to appeal to GenX and Gen@.

Ask yourself this about your organization: “Is everything I would need to know about volunteering, or about serving as a committee member or board member available online? Everything: meeting times, time obligations, conflict of interest, term of service length, everything?” If the answer is no, then you are going to have a harder time recruiting among these cohorts.

The reality is that people under thirty are online as comfortably as they breathe. That’s where they go for information on everything from movie times to volunteering opportunities at your organization.

Similarly, do you have the ability to accept donations online with credit cards and PayPal? Do you have complete information about available volunteering, board service, and other opportunities on your web site, including ways to send you follow-up questions by e-mail?

The nonprofit community needs to have active programs to recruit younger volunteers. Again, this is simple demographics—our Greatest Generation volunteers are dying out, our Boomer volunteers are finishing careers and will retire. If we don’t fill the pipeline with younger volunteers, we won’t have much to choose from in five to ten years.

4. Unintended consequences
The law of unintended consequences is pervasive. For example, the United Way of America reacted to its scandals in the early 1990s by offering donors the option to target their donations to particular organizations. This action was intended to make donors more comfortable with the United Way, but no one really expected the number of donors who chose that option. The result was less money for United Way community groups to distribute.

In another case, the City of Chicago decided that its high-rise, low-income apartments were a failure, and, over the past ten years, has been tearing them down, redistributing the residents all over the city. Unexpected result? The failure of many nonprofits located by the former high-rise sites, dedicated to helping residents. By moving residents away from support sources, the ability to help them went down.

In complex social systems, we can’t foresee everything that may happen, or predict with certainty human behavior. So, here are some unintended consequences to mull over:

• What will Boomers do in their retirement? First, will they retire at sixty or seventy or ever? If they don’t retire “on schedule” what will the effect be on GenX staff?
• In retirement, will their volunteer hours go up, go down, or stay the same?
• What about donations? Will the baby boom generation be economically stressed in retirement and not make their regular donations, or will they keep the flow of money coming?
• What about GenX and Gen@ perspectives as they move into management positions at our funders? What will they think about our traditional service array?
• How will the new, younger cohorts—many of whom have academic degrees in nonprofit management but little direct experience—manage? Will a professional-management class have the level of mission passion that nonprofits have been built on? Will these managers retain a willingness to sacrifice some financial and career benefits for a cause?

Summary
These “big four” impacts will be with us for the next fifteen to twenty years. We need to be aware of the main issues and, as the final impact indicates, stay flexible as unexpected consequences arise.

In a future issue, we will explore some of the actions you can take to deal with these impacts. Peter describes six actions nonprofits should be taking to reshape their processes and services so in response to these nonprofit trends. Watch for that issue in a month or so.

Sincerely,

Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance

March 7, 2007

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