Anita is obsessed with Hitler and fantasizes about weird sex. Darren drives a Zamboni and wants to be a high roller in Las Vegas. Clayton is a member of the Black Law Students Association and sometimes lies down in the middle of crosswalks.
When more than 17,000 people followed and commented on the lives of those fictional characters—and 10 more like them—on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, they became not just part of an experimental-theater performance called Fatebook but also the vanguard for nonprofit organizations that are rethinking how they reach out to young people.
The work New Paradise Laboratories, a Philadelphia theater company, undertook to create Fatebook two years ago is featured in a new report on reaching people in their 20s that was commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, in Chicago, and the Nonprofit Finance Fund with a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
The study, “Tipping the Culture,” looks at the ways big consumer companies like J. Crew, PepsiCo, and Starbucks, have successfully used social networks to reach young people, along with efforts pursued by a wide range of cultural organizations.
The most successful efforts boil down to a sort of mutual voyeurism, the report suggests: Companies and arts groups use social media to learn about their prospective consumers and then invite young people into the creative process.
The goal is that once the theater patrons, gallerygoers, or consumers become “insiders,” they will quickly share their enthusiasm with others and “bring in millennials as a tribe,” according to Patricia Martin, a branding and marketing expert who wrote the report.
That approach should spread throughout nonprofits, says Whit McLaughlin, artistic director of New Paradise.
“In the nonprofit world, we have this idea that you create a product and then hire people to go out and sell it,” Mr. McLaughlin says
What makes more sense, he says, is when “the people who are creating the product are marketing it because they know more about it and are passionate about it. [Otherwise], you are getting an intermediary and you are getting watered-down news.”
A Virtual Drama
To kick off the creation of Fatebook, Mr. McLaughlin brought together the actors who played Anita, Darren, Clayton, and their friends. Over dinner, they discussed how their characters might be related.
They then assumed their characters’ identities online, made dates to meet one another in character offline, and started mingling with one another and with their real-life friends on Facebook. Over the course of several months, their communications, their attractions, and their drama came to define them, and more than 120 of their online followers assumed fictional characters and became secondary players in their made-up lives.
And when New Paradise finally held a live multimedia performance based on the online and real-time experiences of the Fatebook characters, some 1,300 people, mostly in their 20s, showed up to experience it.
‘Staggering Success’
While it might be easy for an experimental theater to create a work in an entirely new way, leaders of established nonprofit organizations may wonder whether they can easily tip their cultures to reach people in their 20s.
But some of the consumer companies profiled in the study face the same challenge as the most venerable nonprofit.
Among them was the Ford Motor Company, which used the introduction of the Ford Fiesta to test new ways to reach young car buyers.
In the past, Ford unveiled a new model at a major auto show, giving it to critics to test and spending millions of dollars on television and print advertising.
But instead, two years before the Fiesta was set to hit American showrooms, the company held an online video contest and selected 100 bloggers to test drive the European version of the car for six months and chronicle their experiences online via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and their own blogs.
Over the six months the bloggers spent on the road, Ford received more than 6.5 million YouTube views of the videos and 50,000 requests for information on the vehicle.
And when the cars finally made it to American dealers, Ford sold 10,000 Fiestas within the first 10 days, something the Harvard Business Review declared a “staggering success.”
The effort succeeded because Ford chose bloggers who already had built up trust with large numbers of readers, says Scott Monty, Ford’s director of social media.
Though it may have seemed risky to enlist bloggers who could have said they didn’t like the car, Ford decided it was worth a try because millennials can sense when they are simply getting sold, he says.
“If you are looking at social media as all about sales, you will lose,” he says “This is about relationship building. It is like having a conversation with someone at a cocktail party. It is not direct marketing. You have to get your head around that.”
Audience Plays a Role
Mr. McLaughlin used almost the same technique to find the actors to play Fatebook.
He sent one e-mail to six people in the arts world he knew were well connected and asked if they knew actors who might be interested in the project.
He urged the six arts experts to tell actors to submit 30-second YouTube videos that would give insight into a prospective character.
More than 100 actors sent videos to New Paradise. After Mr. McLaughlin chose the 13 he felt were the best fit, he simply asked them to mobilize their own Facebook networks.
Ms. Martin, the report author, says other nonprofits need to think about ways they can give young people “a peek behind the curtain” and let them play a role in shaping a play, an exhibit, or other effort.
“The biggest challenge for the nonprofit cultural world is to cede some of their authority,” Ms. Martin said. “They are the original content creators, but we are seeing innovators in the theater do some really cool things, allowing the audience to tweet the subtext of a play, the subtext of what they think is going on in people’s minds. It becomes an interpretive act.”
Plugged-In Parents
Bartram’s Garden, a 45-acre public botanical garden in Philadelphia, has found that letting people into the process has sharply increased its attendance and membership, not just with people in their 20s but also with young parents, says its director of development, Stephanie Phillips.
The gardens, located on land owned by the 18th-century explorer John Bartram, hired the botanist Mark Dion in 2008 to create an installation. Using grant money from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Mr. Dion chronicled online his travels throughout the world as he collected specimens for the installation.
The project was a play on the life of Mr. Bartram, who traveled the world collecting plant specimens and seeds.
Mr. Dion also would show up in various spots in Philadelphia dressed just like Mr. Bartram and talk about his discoveries.
Through a GPS tracking system, people could watch Mr. Dion as he moved around the world to put together the installation or find him in public.
After the exhibit closed, the garden started to reach out to young families. It pinpointed plugged-in parents with well-developed networks and started marketing directly to them so they could push out the word about new family-friendly programs.
The garden, which has an $800,000 budget, has been able to increase participation on its guided tours by 34 percent. Its membership has grown by 28 percent since 2009, and it has brought into its family program 900 more attendees.
Word of Mouth
Using social networks well, Ms. Martin cautions, requires remembering that Twitter and YouTube are not just low-cost billboards for advertising a nonprofit’s work.
Steppenwolf has taken that idea to heart as it promotes a performance space it calls Garage Theatre, which it opens to groups that are experimenting with works that will appeal to young people.
Since the theater realized people in their 20s prefer to hear about new works from their friends, Steppenwolf does all it can to spread the message about shows through word of mouth.
It doesn’t create the expensive brochures it usually uses to promote a performance to potential ticket buyers; instead, it provides beefed-up program booklets at each performance that have lots of interesting information people who attend the shows can pass on to their friends through social media.
Linda Garrison, Steppenwolf’s director of marketing and communications, says nobody should underestimate how difficult it is for nonprofits to reach out to young people.
The key has been learning how to become an appropriate, natural part of their conversations without being obtrusive, she says.
“There is a protocol you have to learn,” says Ms. Garrison. “It is learning how to read the room, and we don’t know how to do it because we are novices.”