Alvara's founder reveals NU's challenges in managing young generation

Jakarta, NU Online

The Indonesia's demographic structure today shows that the very dominant generation is millennials and gen Z. As much as 53 percent of Indonesia's population is the young generation. On this stand, the founder of Alvara Research Center Hasanuddin Ali (Cak Hasan) revealed various challenges faced by the Nahdlitin-based organization in managing the Indonesia's young generation.

 

Cak Hasan was of the opinion that based on a survey he conducted in 2018, it was stated that 50.3 percent of Indonesian young people were at the point of not identifying themselves as members of any community organizations (ormas).

 

"Based on the survey we conducted in 2018, the majority of young people feel that they are not members of any mass organizations, (amounted to) 50.3 percent," he explained while speaking at the Road to NU 34th Congress webinar entitled NU Milenial, Milennial ber-NU, Thursday (18 /11/2021).

 

According to Cak Hasan, this phenomenon is a big challenge for the sustainability of mass organizations, including NU itself. "The trend is getting bigger from time to time," explained the Marketing and Political Research Practitioner.

 

Cak Hasan also mentioned that currently in Indonesia a new generation of Muslims had emerged with three characteristics, namely living in urban areas, young people, and middle to upper social class.

 

"These three characteristics when viewed from the statistics, their number is around 30-33 million people," he explained.

 

In terms of diversity, they tend to be independent or not to do with any mass organizations. These three characteristics then gave birth to four characters, such as depending on technology, high spirit of religiosity, modern lifestyle and mindset, and high purchasing power.

 

“Therefore, they set aside a lot of donations to donation and zakat institutions. So we can see that the concrete evidence is that their enthusiasm to donate has greatly increased," said Cak Hasan.

 

NU is also expected to continue to be able to facilitate its young cadres who are now spread to various education sectors to get space to develop. The reason is that, not only are friends with Islamic boarding schools background, young NU cadres are now known to have various expertise outside the religious sector.

 

“There are digital technology, data scientists, robotics. Now, this very diverse cadre is also a challenge for NU," he said.

 

NU's militancy through its young cadres to fight in the realm of social media also needs to be strengthened. To color the discussion space on social media, Cak Hasan said that NU was expected to show its smiling Islamic face more.

 

In order to penetrate a more varied market, Cak Hasan also called on the NU young people to focus not only on the content to be delivered, but also on the packaging of the impressions that are served.

 

Therefore, Cak Hasan said that this challenge needed to be answered so that in the future NU would be more compatible with the character of the new Islamic generation.

 

“We need to solve these three challenges so that NU could be compatible with the changes that are happening today and in the future. If we don't do it today, we have to worry about the changing population structure," he said.

 

Contributor: Nuriel Shiami Indiraphasa

Editor: Sudarto Murtaufiq