Are you optimised? SEO and Positive Activities

Often, young people don’t think to search for positive activity information because they are not even aware or confident that there could be information to find. However, as we found when we ran a activity-finding simulation game at 2morro festival in July, when young people do turn to search right now the results are not great.

Part of that is down to young people’s search skills (as JISC found in research last year, the Google generation are not always all that great at, well, googling), and part of it is down to the fact that many positive activity information sources are not well ’search engine optimised’.

That is, the web pages where positive activity information is displayed are often not put together with search engines, and visitors arriving from search engines, in mind.

So how do you optimise?

Search Engine Optimisation is, most of all, about providing good quality content.  Many search engines also use the number (and type) of web pages linking to your site and specific pages on your site to help rank it in their search results. There are many small steps you can take to make sure your web pages perform better in search engines. Take a look at the Google Webmaster Central guidance to get started – and perhaps share your best tips in the comments below.

Optimising for young people

In our experiments a number of important things to consider came up:

• Young people don’t include their age in searches – so a 15 year old was far more likely to search for ‘tennis in Warrington’ and ‘junior tennis in Warrington’ or ‘tennis for 15 year olds in Warrington’ . That can seem quite unhelpful from a search point of view – and highlights the value of a strong youth information brand locally that, even if it doesn’t get the top spot in search engine results, young people will be able to pick it out and prefer it if it appears in the top-five. In our tests, we could also see a lot of value for cross-linking between ‘youth information’ and information for adults, so that the ‘Free swimming for pensioners’ page on a local authority website may include a quick link across to the ‘Free Swimming for Young People’ page and vice-versa.
• Where in the world – we found that young people did not easily pick out clues to indicate when a listing was out of date, or, more problematically, from another country (one or two young people in our experiment were making quite significant plans around a visit to ‘Victoria Tennis Club’, until they realised the ‘Victoria’ in question was in Autralia on a .com.au domain name!). Think about how you can signpost young people arriving on archived pages from search engines to the latest information – and when you write about your local area, think about specifying the location as if you are writing for a global audience (which you are!). For example, use Stroud (Hampshire, UK) to refer to the small village in the South, rather than simply ‘Stroud’.
• Don’t leave them at the door – in our tests, many young people ended up via search engines on pages which gave the information they were looking for. But they didn’t find the information because it was hidden half-way down a page. Being able to search within a page could be almost as important as a page turning up in a search engine.
• Tags, synonyms and local names. Your website may be talking about ‘futsal‘, but does that mean young people searching for ‘football’ shouldn’t find it? And the activity might be taking place in ‘Stakes’ ward, but if young people know the area by another name (Stakeshill for example) – are they going to find your activity when they search. Think about how you can include local names and variations on activity names on pages about them. That doesn’t mean having long lists of key-words (if you’ve read the Google Webmaster Central Guidelines you will know that is not popular with search engines), but can be achieved by writing good copy. For example, including the sentences “Futsal is similar to football and five-a-side” and “taking place in the Stakeshill area of Stakes Ward” in your description of an activity gives the search engines the keywords they need – without upsetting them spam detectors.
  

Share your tips:

How do you optimise your website for search engines? What can you do to optimise positive activity promotion?

Marketing Month on the Plings Blog

Plus we’ll be inviting guest bloggers to share their ideas on promoting positive activities. If you want to share your thoughts on what makes for great positive activity promotion then get in touch.

What better way to start our look at promoting positive activities than taking a look at DCSF research, hot off the press, exploring how young people relate to positive activities – and attempts to promote them.

If you can get past the rather dry title, then “Positive Activities: Qualitative Research with Young People (PDF)” is well worth a read. Based on in depth interviews with over 140 young people, it explores a whole range of factors that promote or prevent uptake of positive activities amongst young people – and offers a range of useful frameworks for thinking about the different audiences of young people that positive activity promotion needs to reach.

Segments and subtleties
There are over 4.7 million 13 – 19 year olds in the UK right now – and they are all different. Having just one approach to reach all young people is clearly out. Of course, trying to bespoke communications individually for every young people is also likely to be precluded in most cases – but you can think carefully about the different segments of young people most likely to respond to different marketing strategies.

Showing change over school years of barriers and drivers for activity participation.

“Positive Activities: Qualitative Research with Young People” points out the importance of thinking about different stages in young people’s lives, highlighting how the shift to secondary school between years 6 and 7, the shift to GCSEs, and the move to further education are all times of opportunity for promoting positive activities. They are also times when young people’s participation in activities is likely to lapse – and the recognition that good marketing may be necessary not only to initially engage young people, but also to maintain that engagement, is an important one.

When it comes to thinking about the different attitudes young people might have towards positive activities – and the different marketing approaches that might be needed, Solutions Research, authors of the report, divide young people into:

“Not bothereds” lack motivation to get involved. They may be lacking in self-confidence, or have had bad experiences of activities when they were younger. They recognised that getting involved in positive activities might involve commitment – and they expressed unwillingness to get committed to activities.
“Authority-rejecters” were older, more confident teens – or sometimes younger, more rebellious young people. A rejection of organised activities and being told what to do was common amongst these young people – although they may be involved in organising their own activities, even organising informal activities for other young people.
“Shy and lacking confidence” young people often recognised their lack of confidence as a barrier to engaging in activities, and may have been able to overcome this with the support of peers. Sometimes young people’s lack of confidence was the result of past bullying, or down to a disability.
• “Friends first” young people were focussed first and foremost on spending time with their peers. Structured activities were avoided lest they led to missing out on time with friends. Committing to a regular activity that might conflict with an active social life with friends was likely to present a problem.
“Open and interested” young people ranged from those already involved in regular activities to “serial trialists” – trying out many activities, but rarely sticking with any. The “Open and interested” group also includes young people who may not yet be involved in activities – but could get engaged ‘if the right activity came along’.
“Passionate achievers” were regular participants in activities – often putting the activity first. Committed and motivated – this group were often motivated by competition. Friends and peers were still important – but “Passionate achievers” find time for their activities. This group may be willing to actively seek out information – and gained confidence through their participation in an activity – although they could have less confidence in trying new and different activities from those they were used to.

(Read the full typologies with quotes from young people in Section 6 of the report)

Messaging and mood
Knowing that there are many different groups of young people out there to communicate with can involve coming up with a range of different messages.

Finding the right message will involve thinking about what motivates different groups of young people to take part – and reflecting on the different potential barrier (from cost and transport, to issues around self-confidence and questions of commitment) that are faced by young people in different contexts.

Fortunately, the DCSF commissioned research has started to unpack some of the different approaches to messaging – and the different moods that positive activity promotion can tap into, by asking young people what they made of different statements and picture-boards.

How does it make you feel? Mood boards used in the research...

Having fun, being social, trying new things and feeling good were all seen as appealing aspects of positive activities in many cases (although not unequivocally – sometimes meeting new people can be off-putting and intimidating as opposed to an attractive element of activities). Talk of ‘clubs’, ‘competitiveness’ and taking part for the sake of your ‘CV’ gained traction with fewer young people.

Finding the right message-mix for your positive activities may involve local consultation and experimentation – but don’t ignore the head-start offered in Section 10 of the report.

Marketing as activity design
As anyone who has ever read anything by marketing guru Seth Godin will know, marketing is not just something that can be bolted onto products (or activities) once they have been designed and planned – but is something that should be built into the very design of activities.

The DCSF research talks about the way in which being able (and encouraged) to take a friend along to an activity when trying it for the first time can be a great boost to the likelihood of young people turning up, taking part, and attending an activity again in future. But translating this message from research into good marketing isn’t just about adding the phrase “Bring a friend” to your posters – it involves thinking carefully about the experience of attending your activity, how amenable it is to friends attending together, and what incentives there are for young people to sample the activity as part of a pair or a group.

The messages from “Positive Activities: Qualitative Research with Young People” are as much messages for commissioners of activities, and activity providers, as they are for staff involved in raising awareness of the local youth offer.

Online Information
Whilst the report demonstrates that online information provision (including through Social Networks like Facebook) is top of the list when young people are asked to suggest possible communication channels – it also recognises that many young people are not actively seeking out activity information.

Taking information, and importantly, inspiration, to where young people are online – whether through advertising on social networks or helping peers to share activity information with their friends is likely to be a key part of any local marketing strategy – and it’s certainly something Plings is geared up to support.

What insights did you find?

Have you read the report? Are you going to? Why not share your insights and reflections as a blog post of your own or a comment here – or even a guest post on the Plings blog.

Getting social & keeping safe – principles for SNS application development

Increasing the flow of information about positive activities through Social Network Sites is a must if we’re going to make sure as many young people as possible get to hear about the opportunities that are open to them. Social Network Site applications are a key tool for increasing the flow of information on sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace – but any engagement with social network sites needs to always put the safety of young people first.

Often fears about online safety can lead public bodies to steer clear of social networks, and to avoid engaging. Or it can lead to engagement with all the interactivity ripped out, so that engagement fails to be effective. We don’t think it has to be that way.

That’s why we’ve just published ‘Safe and effective Social Network Site applications for young people: Considerations in building social networking applications for under 19s (PDF / view online with Scribd)’ – a working paper covering key issues in building SNS applications targeted at young people.

The paper is designed to provide information, advice and recommendations for both staff from local authorities or charities involved in commissioning social network site applications and for the developers of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace or OpenSocial Applications.

It’s been written to make the case for specifically addressing the needs and safety of young people during applications development and to set out key issues to consider when designing safe and effective applications targeted at teenagers.

The paper also includes an extensive risk assessment annexe which provides a sample of possible risks and responses that will need to be considered during application development.

Whilst the paper is focussed specifically on the safety of young people – many of the principles it contains will also be relevant for any socially responsible Social Network Site application development.

A Social Network Application for Plings
We first started drawing up this paper back in November last year when plans for a Plings Social Network Site application emerged. Between then and now then we’ve been consulting with developers, local authorities and organisations including CEOP to get input to help develop the paper into the revised version linked to above.

Since earlier this year we’ve been working on developing our own Plings SNS application with NeonTribe. The application will be available from July to all the local authorities who have got data into Plings as part of the Information & Signposting Project pilots and we’ll be sharing more details on how the application will work very soon….

Where are the pressure points on transport?

Photo Credit Carlo62

If not knowing what positive activities are taking place, where and when is one big problem for young people – the other has to be transport.

Young people are major users of public transport, yet very few sing the praises of their local bus, or find the timetables and prices meet their needs when they are trying to get out and about to take part in sports, arts, volunteering or leisure time activities.

There have been many pilot schemes to make transport more accessible and convenient for young people, and young people are actively campaigning for change (sometimes using a fantastic mix of social media tools) – but there is still a long way to go.

Andrew Stuck of Rethinking Cities is working on a project for Play England to explore to identify how lobbying on transport could be better joined up – and to learn about what works in campaigning and lobbying for better public transport provision for young people.

Andrew writes:

I would welcome your opinion on how lobbying on behalf of children and young people is currently taking place and your suggestions on how it could be improved.  Are there local authorities that are outstanding in their consultation with young people, and are there initiatives being undertaken by NGOs or by young people themselves that have proven to be effective in influencing national transport policy?

If Play England wanted to develop a transport lobbying initiative at which points in the transport policy making process do you feel that such intervention would be most effective?

If you’ve got an insight or a story to share – please do use the comments below and we’ll get all your comments back to Andrew and fed into the Play England research.