GEN Z AND FAMILY PROGRAMS
A New Approach to Jewish Family Outreach and Education for Generation Z
As the OU Chief Innovation Officer, I get to dive into the fun projects that the Professionals involved in the daily whirlwind don’t have the luxury to do so. Over the last several months I’ve been privileged to explore the different approaches needed to
work with Generation Z and more specifically their families in order to develop a 5 year plan for NCSY Family programming.
The mission of NCSY to connect, inspire and empower Jewish teens and encourage passionate Judaism through Torah and Tradition still remains the same but our strategies need to shift with each new generation of Jewish teenager.
If NCSY had not switched from synagogue-based programming for Generation X (born 1960-79) to community and School based programming for Generation Y/Millennials (born 1980 – 94) we would have lost our market share. Similarly, we need to adapt our programming to include parents if we want to continue our success with Generation Z (born 1995 – 2010).
Parents are the top values influencer (more than peers and teachers) in the lives of Generation Z when estimated family income exceeds $30,000 per year (Generation Z Influence Meter by MDR a division of Dun & Bradstreet, Fall 2018).
Generation Z are exposed to more and are already developing lifelong influences on their future lives and culture in their childhood years and have a strong connection with their Generation X Parents (XYZ University, Fall 2019).
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 not having only one way to be itself. Its search for authenticity generates greater freedom of expression and greater openness to understanding different kinds of people (McKinsey & Company, fall 2018).
This bodes well for the future success of NCSY as long as we can adopt models that include Parent outreach and family programming from their childhood years.
Due to the foresight of the OU and NCSY leadership, in the past several years there have been many NCSY family programs that have received seed money to explore this program arena in new and creative ways.
A survey of these programs was conducted by the OU Innovation Department and several areas of success were identified for further exploration. It is beyond the scope of this blog to go into the details; however, the three main areas of success are: the Pre-teen pipeline to establish relationships with families at an age when the participants welcome their families involvement in “their” program, Parent only programming who introduce their teens to NCSY programs for the first time and Full Family programming for the families already connected in the first two areas. A perhaps surprising general rule (obviously there are rare exceptions) Family programs where the teens are already connected to NCSY independent of their families is much harder.
In those regions where the pilot projects have been conducted, we are already seeing tremendous success and as we roll out family programming throughout our cities and regions the future for Gen Z seems very bright.