When I was 16 I founded my charity, Pink Week, to raise awareness of breast cancer among young people.
It’s a cause close to my heart. My mother, Dina Rabinovitch, the former Guardian columnist, was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was just 10. As I grew up I realised that young women were not being targeted by breast cancer charities, despite it being the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. There was silence on the topic at my all-girls’ school and at my university.
In the four years since its launch, the Pink Week campaign has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds from university students aged 18-21. Its success got me thinking: clearly young people are able to raise significant amounts of money via donations and microdonations (some as small as £3). So why are charities doing so little to encourage people of my generation to become donors?
Charities’ focus on older donors with greater financial resources has led to a growing generation gap in giving. Thirty years ago, people over 60 gave about a third of UK charity donations. But now more than half of all UK donations are from people over 60.
This gap shouldn’t exist. My generation – Gen Z – is on track to become the largest generation of consumers by 2020, with up to $4bn in spending power in the US alone. There needs to be a radical shift in what non-profit organisations see as their target audience.
Gen Z has proved to be one of the most purpose-driven generations to date. We came of age during #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, clicktivism, and the global refugee crisis. Younger people today are acutely aware of – and are acting on – the environmental, political and socio-economic problems facing our society.
Private companies are well aware of this. Many are putting money into creating a more socially impactful brand, because they know that Gen Zers are more likely to engage with a brand that supports a social cause than one that doesn’t.
Take Gap’s latest UK campaign with the Prince’s Trust championing mental health, or Katherine Hamnett’s Cancel Brexit tees, or Zara’s sustainability push. And in an overdue but welcome move in August, the bosses of 181 of the US’s biggest companies changed the official definition of the purpose of a corporation.
But there’s a problem. As young people are pulled in by these private brands they are disengaging from non-profit organiations, leaving them chronically underfunded. The proportion of people giving money to charity in the UK has seen a steady decline between 2016 and now.
The environment is a prime example. Despite the noise surrounding the climate crisis, only about 2% of UK charitable goes towards protecting our climate.
Charities need to diversify fundraising, looking at all possible donors and all possible ways of appealing to them. And there is a role for private companies to help bridge the gap between the non-profit world and Gen Z.
The insurance company I now work for, Lemonade, has built donating to charity into its profit model. Policyholders choose a cause to donate their unclaimed premium to, making customers de facto donors. And it’s working: the average age of a Lemonade donor is 33, which is half the age of the average donor in 2019. The donations have helped support a range of projects including funding water projects, and sponsoring mental health education in secondary schools.
Another example is UK-based startup Depop, which allows its UK users – 90% of whom are under 26 – to donate proceeds from peer-to-peer sales to charities.
Companies like this do not see the Gen Z consumer and the Gen Z donor as separate entities. They know, from a business perspective, how aligned these two audiences are.
With fewer people donating to charity in 2019 than previous years, it is clear that cultivating the next generation of donors is the lifeblood of the future of the non-profit movement. In the meantime, we must find a new way to give back.
Nina Rauch is founder of the Pink Week campaign and social impact coordinator for Lemonade
