Hi!

A special welcome to all those who have joined recently, if you missed the first newsletter, feel free to check it out here.

Are you looking to build a youth engagement strategy for your organization? Not exactly sure where to start?

In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain how to start building a youth engagement strategy. The first step is evaluating your organization’s approach to youth engagement. I’ll share some practical tips; and lessons learned from personal experience and guide you through the process of evaluating your organization

If you have any youth engagement questions or are interested in my services, please don’t hesitate to reach out or email me at [email protected].

Want to learn more about me? Click here.

Happy reading!

They Forgot To Do One Very Important Thing & It Hurt Their Youth Engagement Efforts

Before you can jump into building out your youth engagement strategy, it’s important to evaluate how your organization currently engages with youth and approaches youth engagement.  

Why?

Let me explain.

I once worked with an organization that was eager to get youth involved in their community but had not had much luck. When they did build a youth engagement strategy, they dove straight into a range of tactics that had very little context, history or strategy to them. What ended up happening? The organization didn’t meet their youth engagement goals and ultimately failed to engage youth.  

So, what went wrong?

The organization did not take the time they needed to evaluate how they were approaching youth and engaging them.

If they had taken the time to evaluate, they would have been able to see:

• The barriers and challenges within their organization made it difficult to engage youth.

•  The lack of internal mechanisms in place to support youth initiatives consistently and sustainably.

•  The lack of social media presence or any online engagement was driving interested youth away from their organization.

In most cases, this is the type of scenario we want to avoid. Taking the time to evaluate how your organization approaches youth engagement is the fundamental component of a youth engagement strategy.

So, what do you do instead?

You have to conduct a thorough evaluation of your organization’s internal and external operations through a youth engagement lens. This includes evaluating different components of your organization’s operations and identifying key barriers, challenges or gaps that your organization faces when engaging youth, or when youth engage with your organization.  

For a bit of guidance and structure to this evaluation, I recommend checking out The Youth Engagement Baseline Tool for a more detailed approach to the evaluation.

But if you want to get straight to the substance, then here are three key questions to consider:

1. What gaps or challenges does your organization face in effectively engaging youth?

2. Can you identify or foresee any barriers that might hinder your ability to engage youth, or for youth to engage with your organization?

3.  Evaluate your organization’s ability to engage youth and discuss realistic actions to start bridging the gap with them. What would the first step be?

Key Takeaway

Practical Tip Of The Week

Looking for practical tips on how to go about having an evaluation? Here are some things to think about or consider:

• Evaluate as a team and encourage a collaborative approach.

• Ensure that youth staff are in attendance and contributing significantly to the evaluation.

• Don’t rush the process, take the appropriate amount of time to evaluate and discuss each point.

• Make it interactive by using post-its on a whiteboard, or with a virtual tool such as Miro.

• Prioritize creating a discussion space that promotes open, honest and productive conversations.

Blog Post Recommendations

Your Youth Engagement Guides

Question For You!

And with that, we come to the end of the newsletter for this week. I hope you learned something new and are feeling more confident in getting ready to build your youth engagement strategy.

As always, if you’d like to learn more about what a youth engagement strategy can look like for you, don’t hesitate to reach out or email me at [email protected].

Have a great week & I will see you in the next one!