Digital marketing and using digital tools in youth work

Young people of today have been surrounded by digital technology since their birth; ever since, their everyday life and practices have been entwined with social media, smartphones, tablets, and Internet use. Digital technology has been thoroughly embedded with how they live and learn. They have started interacting with digital technology already as toddlers, if not even earlier, and their adult life will for sure be thoroughly embedded and intimately intertwined with digital technology. When Covid-19 struck, it forced societal changes around the globe. Nearly overnight, governments issued orders that limited large gatherings of people, restricted in-person business operations, and encouraged people to work from home as much as possible. In response, businesses and schools alike began to look for ways to continue their operations remotely, thanks to the internet. They turned to various collaboration platforms and video conferencing capacities to remain engaged with their colleagues, clients, and students while working from home offices. In that reality, we could see and realize how fragile the youth work sector is, especially in the field of youth education and learning. Many youth workers have problems with developing their own educational sessions. They manage to develop something that looks good on paper, but in reality, they see that the developed educational activity is not reaching the planned goal and objectives.

This training course is one in the series of educational activities organised for empowering youth workers in developing digitally based educational activities for youngsters in local communities of participating countries. TC “Digital marketing and using digital tools in youth work” provides an opportunity for participants to better understand digital marketing in context of youth work, tools of digital marketing, using social media platforms for maximising impact of youth work, and provides space and networking with aim of developing innovative local activities and future projects and cooperation between participating organisations’ representatives. 

Objectives:

• Bring positive and long-lasting effects on participating organisations and sector of youth work by enhancing knowledge management with new innovative resources for development of educational activities within youth work and training models/curricula in order to provide quality youth work educational activities that will address needs of each specific target group. 
• Support youth workers and educational trainers in acquiring and developing key competences as youth trainers (of other youth workers) in the field of developing and using marketing strategies and tools for higher involvement and promotion of activities for youth.
• Engage into intensive dissemination and exploitation activities of existing and newly produced products and attract more youth organisations and youth workers on using the new innovative tools and approaches, and thus increase quality and quantity of educational youth work activities.

What will the TC look like?

Each working day will include 4 workshops in duration of 90 minutes each. Two of them will be implemented in the morning session (before lunch break), and two of them will be implemented in the afternoon session (after lunch break).

A coffee break for a duration of 30 minutes will be organised between each of them. At the end of every working day, we plan to organise self-reflection and evaluation sessions led by trainers and the staff team.

During the evenings, we are planning to organise some free time activities. Still, participation in them will be voluntary based, and participants will have a chance to develop them on their own mostly. Such activities are intercultural nights where they will have an opportunity to present their countries, cultures, traditions, food, and drinks through interactive games or presentations; NGO fair where participants will be able to present their organisations and the regular work they do in local communities. 

The whole training course will be based on non-formal education and learning by doing methods. We are planning to use general methods: working in smaller groups, interactive and creative presentations, brainstorming, working in national groups, simulation activities, role plays, etc.

PREPARATION FOR THE TRAINING COURSE

In preparation for the training course, selected participants will be invited to do a short survey and collect relevant data and information from their organisation and country – to be used for discussions and parts of the sessions within the training course activity.