Instead of relying only on internal staff or a mix of staff and venue or destination teams to handle onsite customer service at meetings, some associations are asking attendees to volunteer. The good news: It benefits everyone involved.

Associations spend a lot of time thinking about how to put on successful and worthwhile conferences for all of their attendees. Included on the list of must-haves is excellent customer service, because we all know that attendees will have questions and perhaps come across some glitches onsite.

How associations staff that customer-service function is also considered. Some rely on internal staff to do the job, while others may work with a volunteer team composed of both staff and then groups from both the venue and meeting destination itself.

But there’s still another way associations staff their onsite customer service team: with member volunteers. Not only is it a good way to get attendees more engaged in the meeting and with fellow attendees, but it could also save them a little money too.

Take the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Ahead of its 2015 Annual Meeting that took place in Denver back in November, it asked for student volunteers on its blog.

“Never been to an Annual Meeting? Nervous about meeting people? Volunteering is a great way to network and get a better understanding of the inner workings of the association …” the post said. “To ensure the meeting runs smoothly, AAA is looking for a limited number of students to volunteer their time and talent.”

AAA was looking for students to fill a number of volunteer roles, including staffing booths, greeting attendees, assisting members, and reporting for Anthropology News.

Student volunteers were required to attend a training session prior to the meeting, but they also were rewarded for their service: If they volunteered for six or more hours, they received free event registration.

AAA is not alone in asking attendees to also serve as volunteers. The Association for Continuing Higher Education asked for volunteers for its 77th ACHE Annual Conference and Meeting that took place in St. Louis, Missouri.

ACHE had some similar roles to those of AAA, including staffing the registration and help desks, but it also asked for IT volunteers to help attendees with projectors, communications, and other onsite technical issues.

In addition, it asked volunteers to take on more significant meeting and association roles. The first—Proceedings Editor—would write both a complete report of the conference and an annual report of the association’s activities over the preceding year. The position description says it requires a two- to three-month commitment, but the person would be compensated for their work by choosing an honorarium or a complimentary meetings registration.

The second role was Day Chair. Individuals are assigned one day of the conference and prior to the meeting are “responsible for coordinating the day’s session presenters and presiders regarding presentation needs and registration.” During the conference, Day Chairs give announcements at the end of each general session and lunch.

Then there’s the American Association of Geographers, which opens its volunteer opportunities to members and nonmembers (although members are given priority). For its 2016 meeting in San Francisco, it’s looking for volunteers to fill a number of roles, including field trip volunteers, tote bag stuffers, and move-out assistants.

What’s particularly interesting about its program is that volunteers are paid $14.50 per hour for their time. Because of this, AAG encourages students and unemployed or underemployed geographers “to apply for this unique opportunity to help offset their meeting registration costs” and reserves a certain amount of spots for these individuals. While applicants must already be registered and have paid for the meeting to be chosen as a conference volunteer, they are reimbursed onsite at the end of their final shift.

Have you been successful in using attendee volunteers at your meetings and conventions? Please share in the comments.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here. 

Have you seen the newest installment in the Star Wars saga: Episode VII “The Force Awakens?”

I admit I’m something of a Star Wars fan. Just take a look at my Facebook page and you’ll see.

One of the major themes in the Star Wars films is light versus dark, good versus evil. That same theme often runs through organizations. Light brings forth freedom and direction while darkness leads to restriction and a loss of vision.

Understanding Your Association Enemies

In the Star Wars franchise, the weapons of the dark side are control, fear, indoctrination and manipulation.

These are often the very same weapons used against associations: control, fear, indoctrination and manipulation. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of rejection and fear of the unknown all come from the dark side. The fear of change and thus staying the same actually leads to dark, murky, sticky, stinky stagnation. The fear of the unknown leads to stopping dead in your tracks.

Usually association leadership, especially boards of directors, is looking for the quick results and the big numbers. Sometimes less happens in one year than we expect. We need to give up the control and realize that growth and progress happens when we get out of the way. When we allow control, fear and manipulation to take over—the results are deadly.

3 Principles To Awaken Your Association Light

Here are three principles that can you help your association to live and move in the light while avoid making camp in the darkness. They are directly related to your leadership—both volunteer and staff. They are adapted from the writings and thoughts of Matt Nash on leadership.

1. Well-prepared association leadership will sustain your organization for the long-haul.

Get out of the mindset that this is Chairwoman’s Sue year or next year is Chairman’s Jack year and they are to leave their mark. The growth of your profession, society or industry does not happen with drive-by one-year leadership.

We need leadership that sees three to five years down the road, not just their term as chair or president.

These leaders have to take risks, be flexible and be life-long learners. They are there to lead—direct, guide, show the way and go in front of the membership.

2. Create a culture where leaders are free to fail so that the organization is more likely to succeed in the long haul.

The dark side characters in Star Wars live under total control and manipulation. Often truth is mixed with a lie and their thoughts and feelings and actions are twisted and broken. They never recover from this. In your association if your staff and volunteer leaders never feel that they can make a mistake, they will burn out and quit. However if they are encouraged to try things, embrace failure as part of their learning process, and feel free to make mistakes in safe environment, then everything changes. When your leaders have a relational trust with each other, there will be more success.

3. Leaders need authority that goes with their responsibility so that the organization’s mission and vision succeeds.

There is nothing worse than being responsible to manage and oversee something and not being able to make any decisions. Too often association staff leadership cannot make any moves without board or committee approval. This is a structure of distrust. Yet staff is held responsible for those decisions, not volunteers.

Volunteer leaders, such as boards and committees, need to keep their work at the strategic level and their area of expertise—their profession or trade. They should trust staff to take their advice and make the right decision. Then hold them accountable for the outcomes. Volunteer leaders do not need to micro-manage the daily operations.

Remember!

Remember this: Everything rises and falls on leadership as John Maxwell says.

What do you need to do to change the leadership culture in your association? What do you need to change within yourself to create a better association leadership culture?

This article was sourced directly from Velvet Chainsaw here.

In 2016 Women & Leadership Australia is administering a national initiative to support the development of female leaders across the professional services sector.

From February 10th 2016 the initiative will provide women in the professional services sector with grants for leadership development. More specifically, grant applications are open to women employed in the professional services sector at two levels.

Please click on the preferred program link for details. The deadline for expressing your interest for this funding in your sector ends on March 31st.

1. Senior Management and Executive level Women Leaders can apply for $12,000 Individual Grants to undertake the Advanced Leadership Program.

2. Women Managers can apply for $5,000 Individual Grants to undertake the Accelerated Leadership Performance Program.

Expressions of Interest

To register your Expression of Interest or to discuss the initiative in more detail please contact Ian Johnson at the office of the National Industry Scholarship Program, Australian School of Applied Management on 03 9270 9016 or via ijohnson@wla.edu.au. 

Announcement of 2016 Insulated Panel Council Conference - A message from the IPCA 

It is with great pleasure that we can announce this years conference which will focus on safety in the industry.

Date: 21-22 March 2016

Location: Sydney

Venue: Pier One Sydney Harbour

Theme: Focus on Safety

We are very excited to be holding our annual conference at one of Sydney’s finest venues. Pier One offers an excellent conference space, great accommodation options, dining facilities and a vast array of leisure activities at your doorstep.

We guarantee this conference will be relevant and challenging to all those in attendance.

REGISTER NOW and don’t miss out on two days of excellent networking and educational opportunities.

To register for this conference please click here. 

The inaugural Museums Australasia is set to take place 16-18 May 2016 at the Aotea Centre, Auckland, the first joint conference between Museums Aotearoa and Museums Australia. Based on the theme ‘Facing the future – local, global and Pacific possibilities', the conference will bring together New Zealand, Australian and Pacific museum and art gallery professionals to share challenges and opportunities and build relationships for future collaborations.

Phillipa Tocker, Executive Director for Museums Aotearoa, notes: “We have quite a lot of commonality with Australia, not just with major touring exhibitions going to both countries, but in terms of professional experience that is shared. This is a new way to develop those networks. The idea of what a museum or gallery is now differs from even 10 years ago, so we need to think differently about how we adapt and develop. On both sides of the Tasman we agreed as a profession we have things we can learn from each other and have shared challenges to negotiate. By talking to each other we can all do it better.”

The combined event has been met with a hugely positive response. “We received nearly 200 proposals for content and we’re now having to wrangle that into three days. That’s a really good challenge to have, people obviously want to be involved,” Tocker says. “We keep having to revise the numbers as we are getting such an enthusiastic response. The New Zealand conference usually attracts up to 260 people and we are expecting at least 500.”

She says one of the main reasons for this is the high-level education - with keynote speakers from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore - and networking opportunities happening close to home. “We are in non-profit organisations in a non-profit environment, so funding for these opportunities is always tight. The greater the number of museum professionals able to learn in an international context, the better for our industry. This is a real opportunity for us all to make connections.”

The confidence to go ahead

The initial suggestion of holding a combined event grew out of a conversation at a Museums Australia conference a few years back. Tocker admits the joint conference is “quite a step up for us”, but says support from Tourism New Zealand helped give them the confidence to make the leap.

“Museums Aotearoa only has two permanent staff, so it was quite a big challenge for us. We appreciated the support from the Conference Assistance Programme (CAP) to know we could make it work. We had to make the numbers stack up. We had assistance from Tourism New Zealand and the Auckland Convention Bureau to work out the budget and whether we could afford to do it, and what we could offer in terms of logistics and programme content. We received marketing support and help with our bid document, as well as help finding a PCO, as our annual conference had not been at a size where we needed to use one before.

“The CAP also helped fund some trans-Tasman airfares and accommodation. I presented our bid at a Museums Australia council meeting and they agreed in principle to go ahead. Then a colleague and I went to Museums Australia in Sydney this year to have more in-depth discussions on content. Tourism New Zealand helped us there, too, with an updated presentation and marketing collateral to promote the 2016 event - including postcards and chocolate fish, which went down well!

“As well as the cash to make the connections it was good to know there was someone who said ‘you can do this, and here are all the ways you can step up from something lower key and in-house to a whole new level’. Having that support meant we had the confidence to go ahead with it.

“Now that planning is well in hand, we are pleasantly surprised to find that a trans-Tasman conference is no more complex to arrange than our own. The increased scale is the main difference for us and good communication and a 'can-do' PCO looks after most of that.”

Great work on show

Tocker adds that the benefits go beyond individual members, too. “This event is good for the profile of museums. Individual institutions get media coverage but this is an opportunity to show our collective strength. It will show that we are a mature and professional sector making a successful contribution in its own right.”

The programme will include education and keynote presentations at Aotea Centre, then in-house presentations at local museums and galleries. Pre and post extended tours will also take place, as well as an indigenous hui for Maori, Pacific and Aboriginal attendees. “Other countries look to New Zealand as a model of bicultural engagement within the business and content of museums,” Tocker adds. “People are very interested in how that works and why it works. Also, because we are relatively small, we are not overburdened with bureaucracy so we are quite nimble and we can be very responsive and innovative, and our Australian colleagues are keen to hear about that. This is a great opportunity to show the great work we've been doing here as well as looking at and learning from the fantastic work happening in other places.

“We are really looking forward to Museums Australasia and hope that we can make it a regular event in future.”

For further information about Tourism New Zealand please visit www.businessevents.newzealand.com

Content marketing is an essential part of any successful business, yet regardless of whether you are an experienced content writer or not, the amount of information out there can be daunting to say the least.

After I posted content tips to inspire your employees I was asked for a list of the tools and resources I use. This turned out to be pretty hefty, but after ruthless consideration, I was able to put together the ones I use quite regularly, hopefully providing a good place to start.

Where do you get the content expertise and inspiration from?

1) Subscribe to the right blogs

As an advocate of social tools, I prefer to get my news, resources and insights through these channels. There are however a select few that I subscribe to, and really do read. It will be trial and error to get the ones that work for you. The most important thing is to be honest with yourself, and if it’s not working for you, unsubscribe. Here are my favourites:

CoSchedule – Just brilliant! The blog content is a useful and thorough selection of how-to guides and top tips, delivered in a style and tone that works for me.

The Content Strategist – These guys report on the latest marketing news and trends, in a witty and digestible way.

Content Marketing Institute – Here you find a whole host of resources and events to educate and discover new trends. CMI Founder, Joe Pulizzi, is a name to look out for.

Sketchplanations – Now this is just a delightful delivery once a week for anyone who enjoys words and sketches as much as I do.

Look out for relevant industry blogs as well and ask colleagues and peers what they subscribe to get their relevant news. In addition to the above I subscribe to internal communications blogs, such as Rachel Miller’s All Things IC.

2) Follow the experts

This is where you can be a little more generous with your affections. After all, if you decide you don’t like the updates, just stop following them! Plus, it might lead to a discovery of new experts and communities of knowledge.

The list of course is endless, so this top 100 influencers list is a great place to start.

Again, you should also look for experts in your target market which you can do by searching Twitter profiles for keywords, such as collaboration or internal communications.

3) Join interest groups

Nothing is inaccessible, and this includes the experts who are all at your fingertips. LinkedIn has made this even easier, especially if you don’t know where to access knowledge and expertise in the first place. The groups are a great way to be part of a community of similar interests.

Content Marketing Institute and Content Marketing Group are both active groups with great discussions.

So, how do you now choose a topic to write about?

You have an idea what you want to write about, but may not know how to refine that further in terms of specific topics and keywords. As well as the tools below, this blog post may be just what you need to spark ideas.

4) As long as you have a rough idea of what you want to talk about and who you are talking to, HubSpot’s Blog topic generator will give you a helping hand if you are feeling stuck for inspiration.

To give an example I searched for ideas around collaboration, internal communications and social tools. The generator presented some great blog topics suggestions, such as:

7 things about internal communications your boss wants to know

• What is the definition of collaboration?
  
• What will social tools be like in 100 years?
  
• 10 quick tips about collaboration
  
• The worst advice we’ve ever heard about internal communications
  

5) The Keyword Planner through Google AdWords tells you how often a keyword or phrase is searched for and the competition against it, which is invaluable information. Ideally you will be looking for a high search term with low competition.

6) A tool that is easily forgotten is good old Google. Just try searching for a particular keyword and see what comes up. You’ll get ideas, start to build an understanding of how keywords are ranked and see how others have structured their content.

How do you put the written content together?

7) Headlines are notoriously hard to write, and it’s hard to know how effective they are. CoSchedule are here to help again with their Headline Analyzer, which is really easy to use and highlights ways to improve your headline.

8) Now it’s time for an old school favourite, but one that I still live by; the Flesch formula. It’s really simple (Word will do it for you if you amend your settings). The Flesch reading ease test will rate content on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand (60-70 is good place to aim for – thankfully this post is 67.5).

9) There is so much information about SEO, and conflicting information too. Let’s Get Optimized produced a beginners checklist for SEO which I found invaluable when starting out.

How do you make it more visually pleasing?

Including as many images, infographics and videos you can will make your post more interesting and shareable. Yet of course if you don’t have access to a graphic designer, this isn’t such an easy task.

10) Canva is the perfect tool for someone who is as graphically challenged as I am. It’s easy to use and you can knock something up pretty quickly.

11) Again HubSpot has come up trumps with a selection of 15 infographic templates to create in PowerPoint.

12) Stock images tend to come at a price. However, there are some free options available. Pexels is definitely worth a peek, and will show you the paid options through Shutterstock, so you can decide if it’s worth investing in a greater selection of images.

How do you get your post out there?

So you’ve written the content, now what do you do with it? If you think the content is suitable, reach out to bloggers or experts who you have already been following and engaging with. But you can’t rely on someone else sharing your content for you, so there are some great tools that will help you share it yourself.

13) There are loads of social sharing platforms out there. I’ve tried out quite a few and my particular favourite is Buffer. It’s simple to use and there’s some great features, including an optimal scheduling tool, which will look at the best times to share your content according to previous engagement.

14) To get maximum reach, it’s a good idea to share your content beyond your network. Through Scoop.it you can publish your own content and suggest it to content curators for them to distribute to their social network.

15) Social also gives you the opportunity to share your content outside of your company profile page, making it more credible as they come from a real person. LinkedIn groups are particularly good for this. It’s much more effective if you contribute and comment regularly, so your name becomes familiar to the group. And remember not to make posts sound promotional or you may get blocked!

This article was sourced directly from Business2community here.

NORA Event: Brisbane eCommerce Expedition - Beginning Boutique & Edible Blooms

A special event opportunity from the National Online Retailers Association (NORA): 

After meeting at midday for lunch, our expedition begins with an informative presentation by Beginning Boutique Founder, Sarah Timmerman. Beginning Boutique launched in October 2008 after a trip to Paris, where founder Sarah became inspired to open an online fashion store in Australia that could offer a fun and affordable collection of clothing and accessories at a time when online fashion was dominated by expensive brands.

After overcoming several major challenges in the early days, Beginning Boutique has seen steady growth, and now has over a dozen staff members and a very strong social media presence (read over 498,000 likes on Facebook!).

After lunch we'll visit the HQ of Edible Blooms. A unique concept in the Australian market, Edible Blooms began in 2005 with a range of just nine blooms. Today, it offers more than 100 unique gifts, playing an active role in the milestone events of people’s lives. Now with six stores, including one in New Zealand, this delectable business is going from strength to strength.

Jump on board and find out why Edible Blooms was awarded the 2009 Telstra MYOB Small Business of the Year for Australia, and what makes it not only an amazing business, but also a fantastic place to work.

ITINERARY

• 12pm - meet for lunch at The Plough Inn (Boardroom and Deck), Building 29, Stanley St Plaza, South Bank Parklands 4101
  
• 12.45pm - Presentation and Q&A with Sarah Timmerman, Beginning Boutique Founder, moderated by Kevin McAulay, Super Retail Group.
  
• 1.30pm - Depart by bus for Edible Blooms HQ
  
• 1.45pm-3.30pm - Edible Blooms tour and presentation, including chocolate and champagne tasting!
  
• 3.30pm - End
  

Tickets are on sale now:

NORA Members $150 & Non-Members $300

*Non-Member price of $300 includes complimentary individual membership for one year.

For AuSAE members, NORA is providing a 20% discount for this event, please use the code 09993163. To register now please click here. 

A roundup of five great reads for association membership pros that will get you thinking differently about how to get members engaged, how members view your association, and what benefits they’ll want next.

If you’re a regular reader of Associations Now Daily News, you’ve likely come across our daily “Buzz” posts, which round up several new must-reads for association professionals every day. It’s a feature that dates all the way back to the early days of ASAE’s first blog, Acronym (RIP) and its regular “Quick Clicks” posts. Even then, there was more high-quality, buzz-worthy content related to associations on the internet than we could write full posts about, and that’s even more true now.

Our Buzz posts run the gamut of association topics, of course, but this week I will borrow the Buzz theme for a membership-specific roundup of five must-reads for association membership professionals. These have been gathering in my pileup of open browser tabs in the past couple weeks, and they’re too good not to share. Enjoy.

What really affects membership performance?

 In “Beyond Numbers: Using Non-Financial/Quantitative Measures of Success,” Anna Caraveli, managing partner of The Demand Networks, zeroes in on a difficult problem for every association: understanding indirect impacts on membership. For instance, how does customer service, product quality, or employee engagement influence membership recruitment and retention downstream? It’s easy to track those as expenses but harder to discern their ROI.

When an innovation serves a basic need in a new way, it sets new customer expectations.

Caraveli supports measuring nonfinancial drivers of success and treating revenue or member growth “as a byproduct of other things.” The trick is identifying those drivers of success and uncovering their relationship to more tangible results, like customer satisfaction. This is crucial in shifting your board of directors’ criteria for success. “Understanding what drives customer satisfaction and how satisfaction converts to increased sales will allow you to make the kind of cultural and managerial changes that will nurture such drivers,” she writes.

At the end of the post, Caraveli outlines several “research questions to investigate” to develop these new measures of success.

The heart of engagement.

 Speaking of hard-to-measure metrics, are you giving enough attention to how your members feel about your association? In “Ignoring an Important Indicator of Engagement,” Jeffrey Cufaude, president and CEO of Idea Architects, points out what we’re missing in the association community’s focus on measuring activity-based engagement. “A member could attend a lot of association events, but still feel outside the community,” for instance.

“We need to move beyond the activity that is easy to track to the feelings that individuals may hold toward the organization and its offerings,” he writes. “We need to discover the measures that customers and members themselves would use as indicators of their engagement level.”

What those measures are is hard to say, and Cufaude doesn’t posit any specific ideas, but he makes a good case for taking time to consider how you might augment your engagement metrics with other measures of customer satisfaction.

The little stuff matters.

More on engagement, this time focusing on getting members active in online communities. “How to Fix the Highest Barriers to Engagement,” by Ben Martin, CAE, chief engagement officer at Online Community Results (in a guest post at SocialFish), outlines a series of tips for removing common obstacles that get in users’ way in online community platforms, such as lack of email notification, trouble logging in, and “empty-restaurant syndrome.”

Martin’s tips are simple and practical, and they focus on getting the details right. They include posting clear reminders to check the “Remember Me” box on the login screen and favoring discussion teasers near the top of the community homepage rather than large images that would push that content down the screen.

He concludes: “Members will always cite the other two reasons that they aren’t participating: lack of time and lack of motivation to participate. Those are more difficult problems to solve. Start with the above, which are more easily attainable, and which will compound the positive effects you’re able to bring about on the motivation and time problems.”

In other words, fixing the little problems will help with the big ones.

Don’t play the nonprofit card.

Colleen Dilenschneider, chief market engagement officer at IMPACTS Research & Development, shares some perhaps surprising data in “Nonprofit Recognition: What Matters More to Visitors Than Your Tax Status.” Research on people’s perceptions of cultural institutions like museums, theaters, and zoos shows they are largely unaware of their nonprofit status. Only between one-third and one-half of people believe such organizations are nonprofit. For anyone working in the nonprofit sector, that might come as a shock.

It’s important to note that consumers’ beliefs about cultural institutions may not translate to their beliefs about trade associations and professional societies, but personally I’d bet there’s more commonality than not, because Dilenschneider chalks this misperception up to a simple truth: “Today’s audiences are generally sector agnostic. This means that they don’t much care about an organization’s tax status. They care about how well your company or organization does what it claims to be expert at doing.”

For associations, this means that, as you consider your place in your target market, you ought not to use nonprofit status as an excuse for not comparing your organization to other types of businesses, because chances are your members and prospects already are.

Look beyond your members. 

The latest update from Trend Watching, “Turn Overwhelm Into Opportunity,” is ostensibly about innovation, but it adds an interesting wrinkle to the mantra we hear often (like here on this blog, last week): Listen to your members.

That’s good advice, of course, but it might be too narrow. As Trend Watching puts it, you also ought to be watching what businesses are doing, not just consumers. Looking for “clusters of innovation” in other markets can show you what your own audience may soon be asking for. It’s more than just copying those innovations, though. Instead, look at what new expectations these innovations create, which members and prospects may then carry into their interactions with you.

“When an innovation serves a basic need in a new way, it sets new customer expectations. That is, it primes customers to expect something new,” Trend Watching writes. “And then the really important part happens: expectation transfer. Once created by a game-changing innovation, new expectations spread across markets, industries, product and service categories, and demographics. And thanks to the global brain, they spread faster than ever. Eventually, they’ll spread all the way to your door!”

How might any of these articles and their ideas shift your thinking at your association? Or, what else have you read lately on membership that you’d qualify as buzz-worthy? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here.

AuSAE has welcomed new members from the following organisations this month.

Is your organisation on this list? If your organisation is on this list as an AuSAE organisational member but you are unsure if you are part of the membership bundle, please contact the friendly AuSAE team at info@ausae.org.au.

Not on this list? To join AuSAE today please visit our membership information page here.

AUSAE WELCOMES NEW MEMBERS FROM:

Note; To respect the privacy of our members, we only release membership type and organisation details publicly each month.

I have a confession. Up until a few months ago, I didn’t realize I was a millennial.

I know. That seems horrifically unaware. It’s just that millennials get a bad rap, and my parents instilled so much self-worth in me that I thought the negative millennial descriptors couldn’t possibly apply, right?

Oh, my parents building me up to think I’m great is a tell-tale millennial attribute? As is an uncanny sense of optimism? And my tendency to justify clothing purchases by cost-per-wear?

So you’re saying that I’m essentially the millennialist millennial in a sea of millennials?!?!

This diagnosis was really brought to light at Marketo’s company-wide Revenue Kickoff meeting earlier this month. Jamie Gutfreud, Global Chief Marketing Officer of Wunderman, gave an incredible presentation titled “It’s Already Tomorrow,” i.e. the future of marketing is already here. The insights into the differences between Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y (i.e. millennials), and—scariest of all—Generation Z were eye-opening.

What struck me most—because apparently I am a self-absorbed millennial—was how the environment in which my peers and I grew up has shaped who we are. As Jamie said, it creates “your orientation in the world.” And millennials have had a lot of things to orient us, from the DotCom boom (and bust), 9/11, and the 2008 economic downturn.

With that, here are five things you need to know about marketing to millennials:

We Are Confident

As the children of Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, we millennials spent our formative years being patted on the back and praised for just about everything we did. You colored inside the lines? That’s great. You want to play all the sports? Awesome. You burped? Bravo!

This is because our parents were the products of darker times, and hyper aware of all the ways in which our childhoods could go wrong. In our school and home environments, the adults in our lives made sure we were set up for success.

In this way, millennials respond well to getting our ego stroked. Remember that our self-worth is high, so we don’t necessarily need brands or brand messages to feed us that extra boost. We also like to hear messages that add value to our lives. Help us, and we will help you by supporting your business.

It’s like Demi Lovato, international pop star and fellow millennial says, “What’s wrong with being confident?”

We Are Optimistic

Doom and gloom is not the M.O. of the average millennial. And September 11th, one of the darkest events of the last half century, is ironically what cemented our sense of optimism.

Losing our sense of security not just as a nation but as a generation created a juxtaposition between the new world order and how it had been before. Or, as optimistic millennials decided, how it could be again. Millennials have largely been fighting to regain that sense of security ever since and believe that in fact we can get there.

As marketers, there’s an opportunity to feed this optimism. In keeping with the “help me help you” sense of confidence I mentioned earlier, help millennials make the world better, and your messages will not only resonate, but become action.

We Are Creative

Jamie’s creativity point—which also stems from a strong confidence base—really stuck with me. Our parents told us that if we did well in school and went to college, we would get jobs, and everything would be champagne wishes and caviar dreams (ok, small exaggeration, but you get the idea).

But then the economy tanked, and millennials collectively had a quarter life crisis: Why don’t I have a job? Why am I not happy? Why hasn’t anyone given me my own reality show? The transition to adulthood was rough—and no one gave us a heads up!

Luckily, we’re a resilient bunch. When I was 23, I looked around at my group of close friends from college and realized that all but one of us had changed career paths within two years of graduating. We were nimble, we were creative, and while none of my friends were the founders of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, or any other new-age service company, it was our millennial peers who created the sharing economy. How’s that for creativity? “Oh, the classic economy isn’t giving us what we need? Let’s shake it up.”

It’s the millennial generation that has helped to reshape the American Dream into something that involves a creative idea, some seed funding, and an IPO. While this paradigm is likely to shift again soon (i.e. if and when the startup bubble bursts—and history tells us it will burst), marketing messages that speak to this creativity, this one-size-does-not-fit-all approach, is crucial in reaching this audience.

The key is about keeping the message personal, and with today’s technology, you have the capability to tailor messages in a way that speaks to this generation.

We Are More Than Our Devices

And speaking of technology, something I love about my generation is that while we are technology experts, we are not technology dependents. We can still remember a time when there was no wifi, not everyone owned a cellphone, when computers were slow, and when the whole world didn’t speak in hashtags. I like to refer to this time as B.E.–Before Emoji.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate what sets us apart is to delve a little deeper into our Gen Z successors. These kids were essentially born with an iPad in their hand. They have PayPal accounts instead of credit cards. They make purchases via their phones. They know their credit score at age 17.

This is the stuff my nightmares are made of.

Taking this point of reference into account, there’s a nuance in the way we should be spoken to. We see value in “unplugging” and in the balance between online and offline interaction. There needs to be a full, omni-channel approach to how we’re marketed to, because we move between our online and offline worlds seamlessly.

We Are Going to Have Babies

To close, I’m going to share my own personal theory with you, marketer to marketer. As more and more millennials start families, I predict that there will be a shift in the way in which our Gen Z (or whatever generation comes after Gen Z…do we start at A again?) kids approach technology. This is because millennials remember what it’s like to play outside—without technology. We remember what it’s like to read a book—without technology. And we remember what it’s like to be bored—without technology.

The adage of our grandparents may have been that they had to walk to school eight miles in three-feet of snow and it was uphill both ways. We will tell our kids—and our kids’ kids—how our parents sent us out in the yard with nothing to play with but a flat tennis ball and our imagination.

The ability to take something—anything—and transform it into something incredible—isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Article sourced directly from Blog Marketo here.