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The idea of the “generation” as a grouping is a wholly American invention. The Lost Generation is the first truly named group, a term coined by author Gertrude Stein and later popularized in the epigraph of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Since then we dubbed the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha successively. The very concept is utterly arbitrary at best, possibly even bad for society at its very worst. So why do we care?

It can make sense to group people into age groups. It makes sense to think someone who’s 60 needs something altogether different from their professional association than a 30 year-old. And there have been growing assumptions that younger people don’t do email anymore, though that may be less of a case than previously thought. While “nobody” answers phones we all have a cell phone in our pocket, it’s just part of life. There’s got to be better ways to see what people want, to target and message, and deliver on the value proposition.

Just sticking with the sheer amount of data that’s gathered, and the myriad ways to segment, there’s a good number of other methods of targeting outreach and tracking member need that serve a greater purpose than an arbitrary age bucket. For professional associations, things like the highest level of education or certifications earned – or asked for – are powerful. Two diploma holders 30 years apart might actually want the same thing while two Zoomers, one with a grad degree and the other a bachelor’s, are going to need a different experience despite their closeness in age. On the trade association side, revenue or staff size can be vital in how you treat a member organization. It’s hard to believe that the multinational company in your member base wants the same thing from you as the 3 person shop in a garage somewhere. Sure, the second one might hit Amazon level eventually, but they’re going to need a boost from their association friends. Meanwhile, that big company might just want a voice on Capitol Hill. Going beyond age to where they are in their life – subtle but different – just allows for a clearer resonance. 

If associations work hard at one thing, it’s simply trying to hear and understand what their members want. Surveys, engagement scoring, tracking online community activity, even just bugging people via phone, there’s so much. It’s a lot of work though! Sifting through noise, filtering out the overly boisterous minority voices that just want things precisely their way, it can be mind-numbing. With the right tools though, and with the right effort, you can understand that maybe that course IS what everyone wants. That a conference doesn’t have to be cookie-cutter, there can be sessions that draw everyone in. Asking and answering, reacting to what people actually tell you, can be a perfect way to organize and build an association.

Actions speak louder than words. We know that people who went to a wine tasting twice probably did so because they enjoyed the first time. When you observe people’s specific behaviors, it’s a powerful way to survey them without asking a single question. And this can be an easy fallback. Simply for economic reasons, you’re more likely to find a Michelin star restaurant full of mid-career and older people, while the dive bar across town is where the young professionals hang. But this leaves a lot of other activities ignored. It ignores the fact that not everyone joins the association at the same time, but they still need to be engaged.

Smart associations know to have a common roadmap, that has branching based on where they are on the member journey. Using a centralized data model allows associations to give that new member what they need early on, then as they move deeper into their engagement with the organization they can be fed what matters next. Courses, events, the right advert at the right time (I recently heard of an association that explicitly DOES NOT send sponsor or partner messaging to new members for 15 months, to help them get more acclimated) all these different messages and opportunities are right for someone, but not for everyone.

This could be looked at as a tweak of a sort of “mentor/protégé” system that many associations want. Especially in the professional association sphere, there are a handful or so of career tracks and groups that are serviced and delivered content. So of course you can figure out what a new member in a certain job or discipline might want to learn and see, but that’s just focused on the role. What about their goal? Where does that pathway lead, and maybe it’s not wrong to feed content that might be considered “advanced”? It’s as much about building pathways as it is looking at who is responding to your messaging. So rather than just saying “this is early career”, maybe give the option to later career people, then there’s the chance to pitch it as an opportunity to work with the next generation in their field. 

We have to sort and segment our audiences in some way. It’s a known fact – presented at our own Predict conference recently from our partners at Higher Logic – that the smaller the segment, the greater the impact. By that exact notion then, it is wholly wrong to just go and assume that whole sweeping tranches of certain age groups want and need and behave in a certain way. Listening, watching, and trying novel ways to resonate, that’s the path to true success. Anyway, sometimes it’s fun to hang out with the old guy at the conference, why shouldn’t we be seated next to each other? He has fun stories. And, of course, the wisdom.