Engaging Young People Where They Are
Puzzling over how to engage young people digitally in an Information, Advice and Guidance project.
In a former life as a manager in a youth services organisation I was taught by the youth work team that we should ‘meet young people where they are’. In other words, rather than putting on activities at a centre or youth club, we should deliver youth work in the spaces that young people choose to be, where they feel most comfortable to hang around with their friends. Inevitably, this would be on street corners, parks or shopping centres. But what happens when young people stop congregating in those places and move to digital/online meeting spaces, which the COVID crisis has accelerated. Should youth work and information, advice and guidance services be moving ever more towards digital methods to engage with young people ‘where they are’?
Now working for a young homelessness charity, I have been puzzling over how to engage young people in an Information, Advice and Guidance project. We currently have a PDF and an advice worker engaging with young people on a one-to-one basis. We want to create a digital product that helps deliver the information to young people in a way that they can understand and are comfortable with. Having spent a considerable amount of time going down various different cul-de-sacs, I was this week reminded of the principle of meeting people ‘where they are’.
An easy trap to fall into is to design digital services that you understand, without thinking about where young people are. As a 40 year old, I understand email, websites and Facebook (a little bit). I still hold a phone to my ear and exclusively make audio calls. I know how to create digital assets that can be pushed onto Facebook and the website and shared on email. Young people tend not to use these methods. So where are they? What digital spaces are they using? How can we engage with them without putting up barriers?
A quick chat with an expert (18 year old stepdaughter) tells me that the popular spaces are Snapchat, Tik-Tok, Instagram and something called Discord. I understand some of these by comparing them to things I already know about. Snapchat = Whatsapp with better filters. Tik-Tok = Youtube with shorter videos and more dancing cats. Instagram =Facebook but better for photos. Discord = I have got no idea what Discord is.
What is striking is that most of these sites heavily feature video content and easy sharing. Long strings of text tends to be extremely minimal, which is not the case with our existing PDF resource. We are aware that we need to create new methods that are more engaging for young people. Our next steps will be to create some video content that is suitable to be shared on our existing digital channels (website, Facebook, Twitter), but that can also be very easily adapted for the channels that are more commonly frequented by the demographic of young people that we are trying to reach. Exciting times ahead.
