What do young people need?
I was recently working on an Audience Development plan for a youth charity and so I’ve been thinking alot about what young people need.
As professionals we spend alot of time thinking about what our audiences need. And, the solution is to just ask them.
Working on this project, and running focus group sessions with young people, gave me alot of hope. The young people I spoke with could define their needs quite simply. Comfort, safety, places to spend time, inspiration to spend time doing things that interested them; things that they were good at. But most of all they needed trusted adults that they could rely on.
So, I was delighted to stumble upon the research report which informed the UK government’s 2025 Youth Strategy. It included the views of 14,000 young people who were simply asked what they need.
Read the Youth Matters report here
Their responses were brilliant in their simplicity. And, despite all of the talk of us needing to protect young people from online harms and to provide a better start in life for millions of young people nationally, I was delighted to see that young people had a brilliant sense of what they needed. All they wanted from us was a helping hand. What they are asking for isn’t rocket science and I was encouraged to see the clarity of thought and the sense of hope that conversations like these can create. I hope that as professionals we can all take some of these insights in to our work to refocus, not on what we can do but on what we can do with them.
A useful reminder that we should listen more when devising strategies and to believe in the power of young people. And that focus groups can be a really important part of your insight journey. It tells you the things that the rest of the data can’t.