Engaging Gen Z by Engaging Their Parents
/As the Orthodox Union’s Chief Innovation Officer, I get the opportunity to work on innovation-oriented initiatives that our program staff involved in the daily whirlwind of outreach and engagement work don’t have the luxury of time to do. Over the last several months, I’ve been privileged with the task of exploring the different approaches used to engage GenZ and their parents in order to develop a 5-year plan for NCSY’s family programming.
Since 1954, NCSY has dedicated its efforts to connect, inspire and empower Jewish teens and encourage passionate Judaism through Torah and Tradition. While our mission remains the same, we have found a shift in strategy necessary with each new generation of Jewish teenager.
Looking back, we can now say with confidence that the switch from synagogue-based programming, designed for GenX (born 1960-79), to community and school-based programming was crucial for retaining participation of GenY and Millennials (born 1980-94). Similarly, we have realized the need to adapt our paradigm yet again, this time to include parents, if we want to engage GenZ (born 1994-2010).
In the case of GenZ, parents are the primary values influencers in families with income that exceeds $30,000 annually. (Generation Z Influence Meter by MDR a division of Dun & Bradstreet, Fall 2018). That means by the time GenZ students are reaching college age, their parents will have already had lifelong influences on their values as adults (XYZ University, Fall 2019.) And for Generation Z, the main spur to consumption is the search for truth, in both a personal and a communal form. This generation feels comfortable expressing itself in more than one way in its search for authenticity, a mindset that generates a greater freedom of expression and greater openness to understanding different kinds of people (McKinsey & Company, Fall 2018.)
“We have realized the need to adapt our paradigm yet again, this time to include parents, if we want to engage GenZ.”
This bodes well for the future success of NCSY because the OU and NCSY have been experimenting with NCSY family programs over the past few years. Many chapters have received seed money to explore this program arena in new and creative ways.
The OU Innovation Department conducted a survey of these pilot programs and identified several replicable areas of success for further exploration. While it is beyond the scope of a blog article to offer all the details, the three main areas of success we discovered include the following:
Our pre-teen pipeline programs established relationships with future NCSYers at an age when participants involved in our NCSY programming still actively welcome their parents’ involvement in family programming.
Parent-only programming encouraged parents to introduce their children to NCSY including some who were experiencing NCSY programming for the first time.
Whole family programming designed to engage the entire family reinforced the outcomes found in the previous two program models.
An unexpected observation from our explorations is that parents were much less likely to become involved in our family programming when they had a teen who was already active in NCSY. Equally valuable to point out is that parents of a child not yet involved in NCSY were more successful getting their child involved in Jewish life (including NCSY) if they first participated in a program geared for parent involvement such as a Momentum Israel trip, started a Middle School Jewish Culture Club in their child’s public school, or enrolled their family in our Family Sunday Hebrew School.
We are encouraged by the tremendous success we are seeing In the regions where the pilot programs have been conducted, and we look forward to learning more about effective ways to engage GenZ through programming with their parents together.
Rabbi Dave Felsenthal is the OU Chief Innovation Officer. He was the founding Director of the OU Next Gen Division (College & YP Programs), OU Birthright Follow-up (Bring Israel Home, Bring Back Shabbat), OU IFS (Israel Free Spirit Birthright Israel), NCSY Alumni, Columbus Jewish Connections, the Schottenstein Scholars and ASAP. He has worked in various capacities for the OU and NCSY for more than 35 years in Atlantic Seaboard, New York, Central East, New Jersey, Israel, National NCSY and the OU Administration.