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Persuading Retiring Baby Boomers to Volunteer
January 6, 2005, The New York Times

By STUART ELLIOTT

Can the organizations behind ambitious campaigns intended to change behavior rather than sell products - which helped put across concepts like the designated driver and a National Mentoring Month - persuade baby boomers to consider becoming community volunteers as they begin looking at retirement?

That question is being asked as the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health begins an effort this week that includes advertising, events, the publication of a book and a public relations campaign, all aimed at promoting volunteerism. The Metropolitan Life Foundation donated almost $1.7 million to pay for the initial stages of the effort, aimed at the baby boomers, those 75 million to 77 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964.

"With the oldest of the boomers turning 60 less than a year from now, we're planning toward a nationwide party for them: 'Happy birthday. What will you be doing the rest of your life?' " said Dr. Jay A. Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard school in Boston and the Frank Stanton director of the Center for Health Communication.

The ability to influence consumers to buy one brand of soap, soup or soft drink rather than another has long been uncertain, much less the power to modify citizens' behavior for what are deemed to be socially laudable purposes. Making this even more challenging is the historic difficulty in getting baby boomers to do anything they do not want to do, from eating their vegetables to driving their fathers' Oldsmobiles to buying condominiums in "Seinfeld"-style Del Boca Vista retirement communities.

Even more daunting, can the baby boomers, long tagged as self-involved if not self-absorbed, be cajoled into not only thinking of others but doing for others?

"There is this two-sided quality to boomers," said Steve Slon, the editor of AARP The Magazine, the publication of the organization based in Washington that was formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons.

"Boomers are certainly capable of amazing self-involvement," Mr. Slon said, "but when something captures our interest, we will band together and make a difference."

"The assumption they'll be willing to open up their lives after they retire to volunteering may not be true because the people who do it find time for it when they're working," he added. "But asking people to volunteer at any time is a good idea."

Ken Dychtwald, the president and chief executive at Age Wave, a consulting company in San Francisco that specializes in marketing to older consumers, said the initiative was "fabulous," even if directed to "the most indulged, and most self-indulged, generation in history."

Even if as many as half the retiring baby boomers "decide that 'this is my time and I don't care about anybody else,' " Mr. Dychtwald said, that would still leave "tens of millions of boomers who will decide that's enormously unsatisfying and they would not feel useful if they weren't taking meaningful portions of time to give back."

One factor that might make baby boomers willing to consider volunteering, he added, is that they will be "hit by dual liberations, equally potent, leaving them with free time not just for years but for decades: a liberation from full-time work and a liberation from parenting," the so-called empty-nest syndrome.

This is being recognized by marketers pitching products as well as organizations seeking social change. A campaign for the Toyota Highlander sport utility by the Los Angeles office of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe, is a straw in the wind, centering on celebrations by boomer couples as their offspring start or graduate from college.

"Views of aging can be very negative, but there can also be a very positive view of the aging process," said Dr. Sibyl Jacobson, president of the Metropolitan Life Foundation in New York. The foundation also provided the money to the Harvard School of Public Health a decade ago for a program to fight youth violence, composed of public service advertising as well as mentions in scripts of television shows watched by preteens and teenagers. (The foundation was not involved in the designated-driver campaign, which the school began in 1988, or the mentoring month program, which began in 2002.)

The current volunteering effort grew out of a survey sponsored last year by the foundation and the school, titled "Reinventing Aging: Baby Boomers and Civic Engagement." A decision was made to focus the appeals initially on efforts to get boomers involved in mentoring young people. That is why the campaign that starts this week carries the theme: "Share what you know. Mentor a child."

The theme is intended to leverage the fact that "boomers have an optimistic and positive attitude toward the future," said Susan Moss, deputy director at the Center for Health Communication, as well as to "overcome the barrier that people put up when they say, 'I don't have any special skills,' by telling them, 'You have this life of experience.' "

Television commercials with this theme are appearing now, featuring people familiar to the baby boomers like John Glenn, Quincy Jones, Cal Ripken Jr. and Martin Sheen. Mr. Glenn's participation was especially prized, Dr. Winsten said, because he evokes in boomers their nostalgic feelings about efforts to make a difference in the 1960's centered on President John F. Kennedy, which included the space program and the Peace Corps.

The media partners for the initiative include the Comcast Corporation; the NBC Universal division of the General Electric Company, along with its NBC network; the News Corporation, with its Fox Broadcasting network; Time Warner; and Viacom, with its CBS network.