Surprise! (Not Really) Millennials Get Involved When Their Friends and Bosses Do Too

There are an estimated 55,727,000 managers in the U.S. over the age of 20, and 30,230,000 Millennial employees born between 1980 and 2000 in the U.S. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The 2014 Giving USA report noted that the United States gave an an estimated $358.38 billion to charity in 2014 and saw a 7.1 percent growth in charitable giving. According to Pew Research Center, Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce (Though by their analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, there are an estimated 53.5 million millennials in the workforce born between 1981 and 1997, so there is likely a difference in the definition of “workforce” there).

In this particular study, 80% of the managers said that half or more of the employees they supervise are Millennials – by any estimation, that’s a huge group of people to inspire to give and volunteer.

Research and creative agency Achieve, sponsored by The Case Foundation, released its annual Millennial Impact Report on June 24, showing, if not overwhelmingly surprising results, affirming results.

A few interesting facts:

Giving is high, even when not prompted by an employer.

84 percent of millennials made a charitable donation in 2014. That’s good, though slightly down from 87 percent from 2014.

Leadership needs to get involved too.

Generally, Millennial employees give a little less and volunteer a little less than their managers, though 65 percent said they would give more if their company matched it, and 44 percent said they’d be more likely to participate if their manager did as well. Additionally, 30 percent of managers said that they would volunteer if the company’s CEO also participated, so the clear takeaway is that company leadership trickles down– buy-in needs to happen at all levels.

Millennial managers are very involved

With 21 percent of millennial managers volunteering more than 40 hours of time, they are almost doubling the efforts of non-millennial managers.
You can download the full report on The Millennial Impact website.