My First Intergenerational Social Media: Learning from Gen Z's and Value of Different Points of View

Earlier this week, Leslie Poston invited me to participate on her podcast on Race and Social Media along with Shireen Mitchell, Liza Sabiter, and Rahsheen Porter.   One of the takeaways was, don't assume that everyone thinks like you do - and expose yourself to different points of view.   This week I put that into practice.

Yesterday, I facilitated a hot topic workshop at the Healthy Communities Annual Conference hosted by the Search Institute in Minneapolis.  Search Institute is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide leadership, knowledge, and resources to promote healthy children, youth, and communities. 

When I've do social media and nonprofit trainings, the audience consists of staff, board members, or volunteers from nonprofit organizations.  The diversity comes from the different generations in the room, types of nonprofits, and budget size.   Nonetheless, there is a nonprofit perspective and my instructional materials and experience speak to that audience.

I've worked with other groups - small business, higher education, librarians, educators, and others, but never all mixed up.   This audience included representatives from all these groups -- including educators, school administrators, highers education, faith communities, youth-serving organizations, social-service organizations, and the public sector.  

And, best of all, I had young people in the workshop - all age 17 and under - the generation dubbed as "Generation Z.   The demographics of the room was 35% Gen Z, 10% Gen Y, 15% Gen X, and 40% babyboomers like me. 

It was a little challenging to remix a workshop that would be relevant to these different perspectives and age groups and have people leave the room having learned something.  So, remixed my slide deck to represent the different points of view.

I spent some time in the beginning asking questions and letting people share their experience and perspectives on social media.  As much as I could, if I got asked a question, I invited the younger folks in the room to answer and facilitated an inter-generational dialog.  It was eye opening.

I had intended to do the game simulation, but it was too nonprofit centric.  One lesson I learned early on as a trainer is not to be afraid to flush your lesson plan (at least the instructional delivery part) down the toilet if you sense it isn't right.  So, I changed delivery tactics and it worked!   We did mostly full room discussion, but I broke it up with some moving around exercises. (Note to self:  Need to have a back-up small group exercise that I could do when the game won't work).  Here's the full room exercises.

(1)  Audience Stand Up Poll:   Whenever I talk about social media and nonprofits, we talk about audience.  I've been using the Forrester Technographics as a framework.   Rather than me explaining it in detail and having people fall asleep.  I gave them a high level description and asked them stand - and then I interviewed them in front of the group about the social media habits, pointing out the different segments.

This breaks up the full room discussion format a bit.   But it also gave me an idea for a small group exercise or even an icebreaker where you might have people take a quiz or have the technographic profiles listed on butchblock sheets on the wall and have people stand in front of it.  Then have full room discussion and have them share "Three Things About Us".  Or you could break into small groups based on the technographic profile.  Then have the group work on coming up with those.

(2)  Walking the Line - Ready/Not Ready:   I used the spectragram ribbon and asked people to line up according to whether they felt ready or their organization's were ready to implement social media or not.  Then had a discussion having the ready folks give advice to the not ready. 

How can we use all this technology

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: nptech youth)

I revised a lot of the content to match the audience.  In the why it is important section,  I went through the social networking from birth to high school slides.   I asked the young people to share with us if they had used any of the social networks like Webkins, Penguin, Virtual Pets, etc.   This was fascinating to learn why and how they participate and how adults in their lives perceive these technologies.

I also always show a slide about the age demographics of email users.  When I talk to nonprofit professionals, this slide is always met with a high degree of skepticism.   But in this instance, we had an interesting discussion about generational differences in electronic communications preferences.

I took them through a remix of the cutedog theory - or how to think about it strategically.   In the policy section, I included the issue of cyberbullying and privacy issues.  The young people in the room are experts on privacy settings on social networks and definitely had formulated friending policy - while the concept of friending policies was very new to some of the boomers in the room.   The discussion was fantastic. 

One of the workshop participants, a librarian, had done a lot of work on social networks -- on a personal level - just to document how some of the security issues are overblown in the media and also to understand what to teach young people about responsible and safe use.   She shared some really useful resources.

While putting together the slideshow and thinking about social media staffing issues,  I recalled a service learning project for high schools students form over ten years ago called Nonprofit Prophets where high school students, trained in web development, worked with nonprofits.   I wondered whether there was a social networking version of that project today.

During the Q&A, a university researcher asked how they could get young people to fill out an online survey and whether or not they would do through a social networking.   I facilitated a multi-generational brainstorming session with the younger people sharing their impressions of whether or not they ignore a myspace profile or not based on certain design elements and what would motivate them to participate in the research.

After the session, a couple of the younger folks thanked me and told me that thinking about social media as it applies to nonprofits or for "professional use" is a great way to debunk some myths with the adults they know!

I wish I could do inter-generational professional development workshops all the time!  It's inspiring and energizing to get different points of view.  

Update:  Ashely pointed out that her experience is usually teens do not understand the issues.  I asked on twitter Coolcat Teacher - Vicky Davis's blog whether social networking security and privacy were taught in schools and she said no.  She pointed to this project.

What are your observations about the similarities or differences between nonprofit and social media across generations?  

Comments

[Alex Berger]

I did a session a few weeks ago with a number of local community members tied to the Public Library. One of the things we discussed was a 21st century media center and how to approach it.

In that instance I was the youngest one there and closes to a digital native - at 23, in my opinion I still don't make the "native" cut. That said, even as well read and as informed as they were, we have a very different ideological approach to the media, how it could be used, and the nature of that use. It was really valuable, in we were mutually able to share insights and better help each other understand the way and differences in which we relate to the question and how we view and utilize the technology.

I think the cross generational forum like that really helps balance the pragmatic side of things, with the real value. One of the biggest things i've noticed is that non-millennials/natives tend to view the technology as valuable and want to help the youth and others learn it, but often do not end up investing the time/energy etc. to understand/learn it completely themselves.

It becomes a sort of - that's a very valuable skill for the future, our youths should are are learning it. What can we do to help them so we can tap their skill set later instead of a - what can we do to learn it and embrace this technology while helping natives adopt it and providing the tools they need to really excel.

[joan]

Hi Beth,
very interesting post as usual. a lot of learnings on how to adapt to new communities and how to get attention to work efficiently. We had a similar experience last month im Antananarivo , madagascar during a big ICT event when Foko was invited to host the Youth day.
can you imagine challenges? we were trained to train youth to technology but thousands of them in just 6 hours was mission impossible. Most of the students even , in high-schools, were using internet for the first time but quickly enjoyed the interactivity (we made sure to show them "interesting but educational" content and networks such as....wikipedia, facebook...)
at the end of the day, exhausted, we just wished that the goverments or anyone else (us included!) could do something to get more students to use new technologies since there is no place in the entire country with free internet!
I hope you are well and looking forward to read more from you!

[Ashley Messick]

One quick comment I had was with regards to the statement "The young people in the room are experts on privacy settings on social networks and definitely had formulated friending policy - while the concept of friending policies was very new to some of the boomers in the room." I am curious if others have found that this applies in general to younger generations, as far as privacy settings are concerned. In volunteering with the young people at my church and in other organizations in the community I have found that many of them who friend me on social networking sites seem to present themselves online with little thought to future repercussions about pictures or language used. Maybe it is because at 24 they think of me more as a peer than an adult (although this seems not to be the entire explanation) or just that many of them are not entirely sophisticated when thinking about their online presence. How much do we think kids are really thoroughly thinking through their online actions? Just something that I thought of while reading through this really interesting and exciting post about inter-generational social media.