The time has come. You love your older audience members because they actually care about your programming, and they actually write checks (literally, they write checks)—but they have an embarrassing tendency to nod off during the second act, and your foundation funders are raising their eyebrows at the fact that your average audience member’s mean age is higher than the mean age in Hair Club for Men. (The original club, not the indie band by that name.)

But you don’t just want any young people: you want young people who are going to grow up to write checks (or swipe their brain chips across your brain-chip reader or whatever they’re going to be doing in 2040). The solution: a “Young Professionals” group! That sounds college-educated and full-time employed, with benefits and maybe even please please please matching donations from corporate.

First things first, you’ll need a name. Figure out your Twitter password and issue a call for suggestions. Since most young people who are actually on Twitter are snarky underemployed hipsters, you’ll get a lot of suggestions like “Future Assholes of America,” “We’ll Have Wills,” and “Jargon Generation Sphere.” You’ll ignore them, of course, and go with your executive director’s idea: something vaguely condescending like Gen2K.

Next, you have to decide who qualifies for Gen2K. Under 30? Seems a little restrictive. Under 35? Under 40? Pre-AARP? In the end, you’ll probably decide not to have a formal age limit—the Young Professionals can define themselves.

Now, promotion! You have to let the world know that you’re ready to welcome all the young dudes and dudettes. Start a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the group, and additionally name a long and contrived hashtag that will never be used again except in the seven total tweets that will be issued over the entire history of your new account.

Now that you’re on the Facebook and the Twitter, you’re ready for advertisements. Create a program ad and maybe a magazine ad using that one cute photo of your board chair’s granddaughter looking hot and flirting with the bartender at your last gala fundraiser. Offer discount tickets and a chance to meet the creative team at a private reception.

At last, the day arrives—your first Young Professionals event! Things to do at this event:

• Get plenty of booze. Even if it makes you feel a little bit like a priest sharing communion wine with an altar boy, this is the one thing you know with confidence that Young Professionals enjoy.
• Get the director of the show to talk to the Young Professionals. He’ll probably either talk down to them using dated pop-culture references (“You know, Faust is a lot like Scooby-Doo”) or talk over their heads (“You know, Faust is a lot like St. Boniface in the matter concerning the Donar Oak”), but just keep that vino flowing.
• Give your P.R. intern a point-and-shoot camera to take “paparazzi shots” for your Young Professionals Facebook page. They’ll all be fuzzy, but that’s okay—people were going to untag themselves anyway.
• Keep an eye on that board member with the fetid red wine breath who keeps trying to corral Young Professionals to have intimate chats about the composer.

How’d it go? Let’s just call it a success!

So now you’re off and running. You may find as time goes on that your Young Professionals group is increasingly divided between 20-something résumé builders who will only come to events if they get business cards out of it and 40-something accountants who drink copiously of the zin, but that’s okay. They’re relatively young and relatively professional: mission accomplished.

– Jay Gabler, with group name suggestions from Becky Lang and Jason Zabel