Youth work influenced various levels of modern society’s development and has its significant place within it. Images engage people in eLearning courses and more and more used by youth workers in work with target group. Graphic interfaces made up of photos, illustrations, charts, diagrams, videos are gradually replacing text-based courses. In NFE and youth work visuals are used for training but not so many organizations around Europe use them in dissemination and exploitation of results of their projects or in their struggle to mobilize community around some topic important for young people. Partners from Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey gather around topic to build capacities of youth organizations to mobilize community around youth work by using visual messages and digital communication as a tool. To be able to reach out to all stakeholders and target groups youth organizations need to mobilize people around their ideas and get support for work there are doing. This project will create systematic educational approach for developing capacity of youth workers and organizations to use visualisation in their work and create and implement digital communication plans for reaching their goals.After setting activities during Team meeting, project will focus on capacity building of partner organizations to become mentors in the field of data visualization and digital communication (Study visit). Partners will be able to support other organisations to build their capacities to visualize and disseminate results of their youth work and become show cases for Visions online guide. Innovation that this project brings is step by step approach how to build the capacities of youth workers and organisations to use data visualisation and disseminate their work by using social media. It will contain milestones for implementation: How to select organizations fitting for this project; How to select their messages and results that should be presented; How to select tools for visualisation; How to visualise; How to make communication strategy; How to apply communication strategy; Evaluate, control quality, fix and do it again. According to milestones, project flow will continue by Training course for visualisation when youth workers will acquire competencies for visual presentation of their work. Training course for dissemination will be the next step in CB of organizations as they will gain knowledge and skills needed for dissemination of their work -to reach out to stakeholders and target groups via new media/social media. Online consultation and dissemination workshops will serve to spread out the messages created and gather stakeholders (youth workers/organizations/initiatives, youth councils/clubs, national associations) around Visions online guide as introductory learning material for milestone approach. It will be evaluated and recommendations for the improvement based on experiential learning will be provided.
Aim of the project “The Visions of Youth Work” was to build capacities of youth organizations to mobilize community around youth work by using visual messages and digital communication as a tool. In order to make sure that goal is achieved we set objectives and milestones for this project ensuring that they all lead to finale result mentioned in aim. After whole project cycle implementation we can say that now we have a community of youth work practitioners able to prepare digital media communication strategies and to implement them on social media all with a goal to mobilize community around achievements and struggles youth work is having. But not just that, they are also able to respond on received feedback and to improve their work based on it. We believe this to be great achievement as it will ensure sustainable growth. To achieve aim and objectives we implemented set of activities: For a starting point of the project team met in January at preparation meeting (Activity 1) to agree upon the route of process implementation and to set the frame for organizing the study visit (Activity 2) in April 2017. Study visit served for raising capacities of consortium to act as mentors on this project. Based on capacity analyses it was concluded what kind of knowledge and skills consortium need to be able to perform this task. This activity resulted with fully skilled members of consortium ready to take over their tasks but also with restructured set of milestones and curricula for learning. It also resulted with structured curriculum based on milestones that consortium set in bit different order then proposed initially. During the trainings for (1) visualization and (2) dissemination (Activity 3 and Activity 4), focus was given to explaining the benefits of digital communication in presentation of youth work results and participants were thoroughly lead through the following learning agenda: digital and social media landscape, mission and vision model production, target group identification and segmentation, organizational values, achieving communication goals, defining messages, how to use media mix, which content tool they should use, communication strategy, communication management, visualization as a tool for achieving goals, metrics for successful digital presentation and how to learn through showcases. The results of both training (mobility activities) were fully developed and implemented campaigns (30 of them- 1 per each participant) presenting current project/program of their organization and with measured achievements during the life of The Visions project. Except campaigns, results of this process were also organizations that raised their capacities to use visualization and communication strategies to reach communities. Last phase of project was focused on finalization and exploitation of results. Consortium through mentor-ship process supported participating organizations to implement their campaigns and reach as many people as possible. Besides supporting campaigns Consortium was working on additional dissemination activities such as social media campaign for presenting online Users guide and also the implementation of workshops made for the purposes of direct communication about Users guide with youth organizations who could benefit from it the most- Online consultation and dissemination phase of the project (Activity 5). This activities served to show cases created through project and promote impact that users guide can have on organizations that use it. During the Evaluation meeting (Activity 6) all activities, lessons learned, follow up possibilities etc. were discussed and Consortium showed its satisfaction with the achieved results.