Perception of millennials toward humanitarian organisations: how millennials perceive international humanitarian organisations, their marketing methods and how does it impact their donations?

Enterprises put special attention into communication and marketing. These two aspects are continuously evolving, transforming and adapting to better reach the expectations of a potential buyer. Especially for humanitarian organisations, there is no item to sell but the customer, in this instance: the donor needs to be understood in order to, again, not make a purchase but donate money. On the one hand, the customer is buying something, and on the other, he is giving. At the end of the day an enterprise and an organisation have the same goal, they both need funds to survive. This research aims to understand the perception of Millennials towards humanitarian organisations and to address potential solutions for the pain points mentioned throughout the paper. Qualitative data have been gathered by interviews with the organisations: International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and Terre des Hommes. This method enables the reader to gasp example of the current situation regarding the different communication mediums used such as mailings to households, billboards, celebrity endorsement so and so forth to reach the different segment of the population. It also helped understanding how organisations cope with communication guidelines when regards to choosing a picture or a content for an advertisement. Several concepts have been mentioned like “death kilometer” and “information hierarchy” which are used in communication and can impact how the information is received by the recipient. Challenges were also mentioned such as the situation of the humanitarian market, new laws affecting not only marketing departments, but also entire organisations. Quantitative data have been collected through a survey. The focus was made on Millennials living in the French part of Switzerland. 115 answers have been analysed and enable the reader to draw a picture of the situation vis-à-vis of Millennials. As results, at the exception of the 3 organisations interviewed, Millennials is split into two groups. The first one with 41% of the responses, people who already donated to an organisation, this group is then divided into occupations such as student, employees and unemployed people. The other 59%, the people who never donated to an organisation, were also divided by occupation, but the most interesting aspect is the reasons why they never donated. These latter were due to lack of financial means with the most answers, followed by mistrust toward organisations