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Ideas & Advice
June 26, 2011
In Reaching Young Adults, Nonprofits Seek to Appeal toThem as a 'Tribe’
By Jacob Berkman
Anita is obsessed with Hitler and fantasizes about weird sex.Darren drives a Zamboni and wants to be a high roller in Las Vegas. Clayton is a member of the Black Law Students Associationand sometimes lies down in the middle of crosswalks. When more than 17,000 people followed and commented on thelives of those fictional characters—and 10 more like them—onFacebook, Twitter, and YouTube, they became not just part of anexperimental-theater performance called Fatebook but also the vanguard for nonprofit organizations that are rethinking how they reach out to young people.The work New Paradise Laboratories, a Philadelphia theatercompany, undertook to create Fatebook two years ago is featuredin a new report on reaching people in their 20s that wascommissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, in Chicago, andthe Nonprofit Finance Fund with a grant from the Doris DukeCharitable Foundation.The study, “
Tipping the Culture,”
looks at the ways big consumercompanies like J. Crew, PepsiCo, and Starbucks, have successfully used social networks to reach young people, along with effortspursued by a wide range of cultural organizations.The most successful efforts boil down to a sort of mutual voyeurism, the report suggests: Companies and arts groups usesocial media to learn about their prospective consumers and theninvite young people into the creative process.The goal is that once the theater patrons, gallerygoers, orconsumers become “insiders,” they will quickly share theirenthusiasm with others and “bring in millennials as a tribe,”according to Patricia Martin, a branding and marketing expert who wrote the report.
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That approach should spread throughout nonprofits, says WhitMcLaughlin, artistic director of New Paradise.“In the nonprofit world, we have this idea that you create a productand then hire people to go out and sell it,” Mr. McLaughlin says What makes more sense, he says, is when “the people who arecreating the product are marketing it because they know moreabout it and are passionate about it. [Otherwise], you are getting anintermediary and you are getting watered-down news.”
A Virtual Drama
To kick off the creation of Fatebook, Mr. McLaughlin broughttogether the actors who played Anita, Darren, Clayton, and theirfriends. Over dinner, they discussed how their characters might berelated.They then assumed their characters’ identities online, made datesto meet one another in character offline, and started mingling withone another and with their real-life friends on Facebook. Over thecourse of several months, their communications, their attractions,and their drama came to define them, and more than 120 of theironline followers assumed fictional characters and becamesecondary players in their made-up lives. And when New Paradise finally held a live multimedia performance based on the online and real-time experiences of the Fatebook characters, some 1,300 people, mostly in their 20s, showed up toexperience it.
'Staggering Success’
While it might be easy for an experimental theater to create a work in an entirely new way, leaders of established nonprofitorganizations may wonder whether they can easily tip their culturesto reach people in their 20s.But some of the consumer companies profiled in the study face thesame challenge as the most venerable nonprofit. Among them was the Ford Motor Company, which used theintroduction of the Ford Fiesta to test new ways to reach young car buyers.In the past, Ford unveiled a new model at a major auto show,giving it to critics to test and spending millions of dollars ontelevision and print advertising.
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But instead, two years before the Fiesta was set to hit Americanshowrooms, the company held an online video contest and selected100 bloggers to test drive the European version of the car for sixmonths and chronicle their experiences online via YouTube,Facebook, Twitter, and their own blogs.Over the six months the bloggers spent on the road, Ford receivedmore than 6.5 million YouTube views of the videos and 50,000requests for information on the vehicle. And when the cars finally made it to American dealers, Ford sold10,000 Fiestas within the first 10 days, something the
Harvard Business Review
declared a “staggering success.”The effort succeeded because Ford chose bloggers who already had built up trust with large numbers of readers, says Scott Monty,Ford’s director of social media.Though it may have seemed risky to enlist bloggers who could havesaid they didn’t like the car, Ford decided it was worth a try because millennials can sense when they are simply getting sold, hesays.“If you are looking at social media as all about sales, you will lose,”he says “This is about relationship building. It is like having aconversation with someone at a cocktail party. It is not directmarketing. You have to get your head around that.”
Audience Plays a Role
Mr. McLaughlin used almost the same technique to find the actorsto play Fatebook.He sent one e-mail to six people in the arts world he knew were well connected and asked if they knew actors who might beinterested in the project.He urged the six arts experts to tell actors to submit 30-second YouTube videos that would give insight into a prospectivecharacter.More than 100 actors sent videos to New Paradise. After Mr.McLaughlin chose the 13 he felt were the best fit, he simply askedthem to mobilize their own Facebook networks.Ms. Martin, the report author, says other nonprofits need to think about ways they can give young people “a peek behind the curtain”and let them play a role in shaping a play, an exhibit, or other
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