New member here, and relatively new chipper (less than 9 months). I am 38 years old. I may not be a millennial, but there's at least one new collector out there I also work with teens/college/young career folk on a daily basis. As such, I find myself compelled to offer a few thoughts.

Because of the digitization of goods - media, currency, commodities, etc - the odds of the chipper ranks gaining popularity with anyone born in 1995 or later is low, and gets lower every year. The youngest generation of people are growing up in an age where all the "stuff" they have is actually just electrons. Sure, there's food and housing and furniture and cars, but other personal property keeps getting more and more digitized. Since chips somewhat fall into the "currency" category and because games using chips are available for free on mobile devices, most won't care about their more cumbersome, physical, real life versions. Furthermore, even traditional table games like craps and roulette are going electronic in casinos and eliminating the need for actual dealers - and chips! In short, technology is heavily working against the chipping hobby.

Furthermore, the avenues to obtain high quality chips for the home market are all but evaporated. No more TRK. No more BCC. No more Paulson home market chips. No more faux clays. Inconsistent China Clay chip quality and inventories. The list of barriers goes on. Thank goodness for CPC (truly!), but the nature of their business is such that customs through them frequently take months and for many people are prohibitively priced. Younger generations tend to desire more immediate, customized solutions. This hobby offers almost none of that.

With all that being said, there are some things you can do to make chipping more attractive to younger folk...

- Social media presense needs increased...greatly. Ron Clewell touched on it at the end of his suggestions, and he's spot on with that. Look up the major hobby conventions that go on...various comic cons, GenCon/game conventions, E3/video game conventions, PAX, Wizard World, etc...they all have constant images hitting Twitter and Facebook with official convention hashtags. Besides the convention proper, though, there needs to be social media content all year long - at least one post a week, if not per day. Content is king!

- Besides just social media, the hobby needs a technical facelift in general. Objectively speaking, sites such as this are *extremely* out of date, and potential hobbyists wouldn't give a site like this a second look if they didn't absolutely need to. Sure - good, modern web development can cost money, but if you want the hobby to attract a new, younger audience, updated sites are a cost of doing business. Note that this suggestion goes beyond the club website and this board. Almost every chip-related vendor I can think of has an outdated and/or poorly maintained website. That doesn't bode well for gaining new hobbyists and customers.

- It used to be that collectibles offered large base pools of merchandise with a few one-offs or errors being the most desirable. Now, it's all about the exclusives and the rarities, with base sets of things generally being cheap filler. With that in mind, offer convention exclusives and advertise them months in advance. Convention chips already exist (although I don't know if these are distributed through the casino or through the collectors club). Those are good, but vary it each year. We can all get 39 Paulson's from a casino, but how many of us have access to jetons? Plaques? 43mm chips? I would suggest each year having a new con exclusive plaque/chip made - or, even better, a series of denoms of plaques/chips made - that are numbered. The higher the denom, the lower the quantity available. Set a price on the chip that doesn't afford the organization much of a profit on the items, but then offer the chip/plaque numbered 1/x (200? 500?) as a raffle prize. Or, have sets of high quality fantasy chips available each year, and offer a competition to young designers for the inlay design. However you do it, though, offer chip/plaque exclusives.

- End the convention on a Sunday. This is just what younger con-goers are used to.

- Change the name of the club, or at least have a website with an easier public-facing name to remember. I still don't know the official acronym of the club. It has plenty of c's and g's. I may bother to memorize it someday.

- Open the convention to more things than chips/coins/tokens/key cards. San Diego Comicon has VERY few actual comic vendors in it. PAX has more than just video games. GenCon has more than just board games. It's all about the related merchandise, panels, events, and convention exclusive merchandise. The more types of merchandise you open the doors to, the more vendors/attendees you'll get.

- Have the chip makers available onsite and have them give presentations/panels. It doesn't matter that GPI doesn't offer chips to the home market currently (please, oh chip god, make them see the error of their ways!). It doesn't matter that GPI, Matsui, and Abbiati are foreign companies. Young folks love...LOVE...access to those that make the products they consume. That's part of why Twitter works so well for sports and media stars - it lets their fans have the illusion of access to them. If a young convention-goer attends a chip convention, they will expect to see the chip manufacturers there. Not having them there to at least hand out manufacturers samples and shake hands is a detriment. How you get them there...beyond asking, I have no idea.

- Find a way to hook into the World Series of Poker. Surely there's a way to sell chips to dedicated poker players, and there are gobs of younger folk that play/watch.

- The poker tournament is a great inclusion, but there needs to be more events. Have a beer tasting/beer night at a local brewery. Have a whiskey night. Get one of the poker pros in and have him/her conduct a masters class. Instead of just shopping/trading on the dealer floor (which, judging by the size, could be done in a single day - two, max), there needs to be reasons to come back every day. More panels and events should yield more attendance.

- I'll say it again - social media presence must be dramatically increased, particularly on Twitter. You have a free marketing tool that reaches its way into almost every person's pocket younger than 30 these days. It's this simple - If you have a message to communicate to young people and you're not using Twitter, you're wrong.

- Create a concise, marketable logo. Facebook has the blue F. Twitter has their lower case T or a blue bird. Paulson had the hat & cane. Auto manufacturers do it. Sports teams do it. The chip collectors club should do it.

To sum up, if you want a younger audience, a general re-branding of the club is in order. If you want better odds of attracting a younger crowd to the convention, you'll probably need to adjust the convention/club to offer more/different events and vendors.

Note that nowhere in here did I mention location. While I do believe it should remain in Nevada - and probably in Las Vegas - if for no other reason than proximity to the highest concentration of gaming and vendors, the specific venue isn't likely going to be terribly relevant to the convention goers. Give attendees a good enough reason to go to the con, and they'll go there. It's that simple.