The Costs of Recruiting Young People

July 20th, 2008 by mas | Filed under Society & Issues.

Thanks to a 4 hour delay at Luton Airport I bought myself a lads mag a couple of weeks ago and within was a feature article about a festival organised by V - the volunteering charity for young people (aged 16 - 25) - the ‘article’ was slanted towards showing how funky modern volunteering actually is (Its not about beards & sandals - learn dj’ing etc. & so on) - except that it wasn’t an article by the magazine at all - it was a full page advertisement in one of the biggest selling monthly magazines and I suspect a very expensive one too.

I remember a couple of years ago being shocked when I first saw an advert for Connexions at the Cinema and then later on TV, plus of course plastered all over billboards, buses & the various media. I say shocked because at the time I wondered how much bloody money is being spent on that?! and at a time when I was trying to fundraise for our own youth programme.

Well I felt similar with the V advertisement, except I can perhaps see a better argument for V who are ‘in the business’ of trying to recruit more young people to volunteer. My question though is given the huge amount of costs of using this type of media - is it cost effective, and does it work? (and not according to this research)

I’m not qualified to answer but my gut reaction is that its very doubtful. Maybe this could be money better spent on additional staff - certainly for Connexions I’d guess the majority of their ‘recruitment’ of young people is via staff on the ground. I remember a group on one of our courses planned a campaign based on ‘open all hours’ - a challenge to Connexions to open up beyond ‘9 - 5′, something I used to think personally each time I passed the Connexions Shop in Chester that seemed to close just as young people finished school/college!?! Maybe with more staff to open for more hours there wouldn’t be such a perceived need to splash out on expensive recruitment campaigns?

Having said all that it does seem that not a lot of the general public understand what youth work is - something Tim Davies found at the recent 2gether event, maybe a recruitment campaign for more good youth workers similar to the adverts to recruit teachers - demonstrating what a good rewarding career it is would help? For sure I think its all well & good recruiting young people, but you need to have invested in recruiting good staff first.

As a subnote heres a recent V campaign film (that I have to admit is pretty damn good!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojgwN0MR0wo

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ade 4 months ago 1 point
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i have to admit that is a pretty slick promo - but with regards to whether V is working or not - I think there is something about our obsession to get every young person volunteering or taking part in youth activities - admitedly 27% aint great but it's not bad is it? Or am I being defeatist??

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digitalyw 4 months ago 1 point
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Hi Ade - what's the 27% figure from - is that 16 - 25's taking part in volunteering or a wider age range taking part in some sort of youth activities? Every month there seems to be different figures banded about for young people volunteering - the general conclusion of which seems to be that young people already were and remain the age group most likely to volunteer anyway.

I wasn't really meaning to comment on whether or not V is successful - but now we are my personal opinion is that it is a good aim to encourage all young people to take part in some form of community activities, but I fear that the term 'volunteering' has become very diluted and confused with less attempt to encourage a genuine culture of freely contributing and too much emphasis on individual gain and really quite a selfish 'reward system' - this is a great shame because for me the real power in encouraging volunteering is to challenge individualism.

And then back to my original point I'm confident that I could organise a national programme with significant benefits for young people and the communities they live in using the advertising budgets alone from the campaigns mentioned above, and no doubt you would echo that.

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