-
Home
-
European Projects
-
Integrating social marketing in everyday youth wor..
Integrating social marketing in everyday youth work
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Apr 30, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
In the face of high youth unemployment, young people look for opportunities to distinguish themselves on the labour market, including through learning mobility. And while youth organisations, like YFU, fully understand the benefits of secondary school long-term mobility programmes, youth organisations need a new approach to effectively reach young people through their digital and social media channels and communicate the benefits of long-term learning mobility. YFU believes this new approach is Social Marketing.
So, for the last year, European YFU organisations have begun to work at increasing the visibility of long-term secondary school learning mobility programmes, specifically through using tools from social marketing. The International Social Marketing Association describes Social Marketing as seeking “to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social Marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.” In many ways, this is a radically new approach to youth work and youth workers within the YFU network. Subsequently, they need to advance their understanding of social marketing, its tools, how to integrate it into their daily work and how to use is it to reach young people.
The aim of this project Integrating social marketing into everyday youth work is to build the capacity of youth workers’ competences to effectively reach out to young people and promote youth mobility through social marketing approaches and tools. The specific objectives will be to: 1) increase participants’ ability to integrate social marketing methods and tools into everyday youth work. 2) Familiarise participants with the core concepts of project management: planning and evaluation. 3) Improve participants’ skills in designing social marketing materials for target audiences.
The project will consist of a 3-day in-person training. During the training course the participants will go through a learning process based on the methodology of non-formal education. EEE-YFU believes that NFE, as an active participation based learning process, will help to reach the objectives. During the training course we intend using the variety of methods of non-formal education such as inputs from the facilitators, simulations and role plays, a variety of visual inputs (videos, movies, photos, graphics, drawing), brainstorming, energizers, discussions, open space technology and creative thinking.
The project will be joined by youth workers (25-50 years old) from the following YFU organisations: YFU Austria, EEE-YFU Belgium, YFU Bulgaria, YFU Denmark, YFU Estonia, YFU Finland, YFU France, YFU Germany, YFU Hungary, YFU Lithuania, YFU The Netherlands and YFU Sweden. Participants should have experience in reaching out to target audiences in their national organisation to encourage young people to participate in a YFU educational exchange programme or should have a clear interest and motivation in become active within their organisational context.
The impact on participants is to gain knowledge, skills and attitudes in the field of social marketing. The youth workers are able to increase the quality work of their team. Participants will be expected to report back their youth workers team on their learning. The ultimate impact aimed for is for national youth workers team of sending organisations to improve their effectiveness in social marketing, thereby having an impact on the effectiveness of the organisation itself.
The project has a very practical hands on focus, to ensure that participants are able to integrate the knowledge, skills and attitude gained from the training in their organisation directly after return. Already during the project, participants will be encouraged and given space in the programme to discuss how, when and on what topics there are grounds for co-operation projects (using Erasmus+ programme) and how can they best support each other. The results of the project include the following: a 365 day social media posting plan, four press releases: two highlighting hosting exchange programme participants and two with a focus on exchange programme participants going on exchange, a promotion package outline for each organisation, adapted marketing strategies and work plans, and new social marketing ideas to implement and share with partner organisations. The long term benefits of this project are the increased knowledge, skills and attitudes of the youth workers as well as the gained competences of YFU alumni.