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#5 How Can We Make It Easy and Engaging for Others to Join in?

Remember that some engagement is better than none. 

Think early and often about your target audience. How can you engineer an array of entry-points and pathways to participation for your community? Where are the opportunities for light-touch engagement that is potentially powerful in itself and also a possible gateway into deeper involvement? Make acting easy, so your users can co-produce your civic and political engagement.

What It Can look Like?

#5 How Can We Make It Easy and Engaging?

Do Something's creative campaigns invite teens to take part in a variety of ways, and almost all of the campaigns revolve around a teen's group of friends. For example, The 'Fed Up' campaign invites teens to upload photos of their cafeteria's school lunch program to begin an investigation about the food it contains. Students can rate photos 'eat it' or 'toss it', and are simultaneously provided with better-lunch advocacy materials.

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YOUTH RADIO INTERVIEW

"Keep It Simple"

 Interview by Desmond Meagley

Q.How important is it for young people to continue from light-weight civic engagement to deeper forms of activism?

A. Do Something offers a number of action that are "big, loud, and easy" to engage their users in social causes. Meanwhile, their research branch, TMI, researches involvement and impact within the campaigns they run. As Lisa Boyd, the lead strategist for TMI explains, encouraging young people to be self-directed––and even competitive––while completing simple goals minimizes Do Something's involvement, yet maximizes their impact. Listen to the interview that follows.

We make things loud, so we try to make them different. We make them fun, we make them engaging, we make them silly. And (we make) things that young people actually want to engage with. So, we’re taking them from doing one small action to a much bigger action.
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Concept Map*

Kathleen FitzGerald, a teacher at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School in Cambridge, MA, used a concept map approach to get her students to understand the 10 Questions.

#Question 1 "Why Does it Matter to Me? 

q1_image

#2 How Much Should I Share?

#2 How much should I share?

One of her students created a concept map about participatory politics.

 

 

MindMap1

 

 

This lesson idea is provided by one of our Teacher Leaders.  See the original post.

 

 

Teachers can use the Ten Questions Content Organizer to parse a big issue into small discussion topics. Have students fill in the blanks; they can think about the choices they would make and why, and what the consequences would be like. See an example here: "Facing History with the YPP Action Framework––Focusing on Eyes on the Prize: Ain’t Scared of Your Jails”

 

Question

Answer/Notes

Choices

Consequences

1. Why Does It Matter to Me?







  		                           

2. How Much Should I Share?







  		   

3. How Do I Make It About More than Myself?






  		   

4. Where Do We Start?







  		     

5. How Can We Make It Easy and Engaging?








  		   
 

6. How Do You Get Wisdom from Crowds?




  		     

7. How Do You Handle the Downside of Crowds?







  		   

8. Are We Pursuing Voice or Influence or Both?




  		     

9. How Do We Get from Voice to Change?





  		     

10. How Can We Find Allies?