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Youth consultation has a credibility problem. Young people have been "consulted" enough times — through online surveys, tokenistic focus groups, and staged events — to know when a process is designed to generate legitimacy for decisions already made, rather than to genuinely inform decisions yet to be taken. Running a meaningful consultation requires addressing this credibility gap head-on.
Define What You Will Actually Do With the Results
Before you consult anyone, be clear — internally and publicly — about the following: what decisions will this consultation inform? What is the range of possible outcomes? What would genuinely change as a result of different consultation findings? If the answers are vague or the range of outcomes is narrow, you may be running a legitimacy exercise rather than a consultation. Honest acknowledgement of constraints is always better than false openness.
Communicate this clearly to young people at the outset. Show them the decision-making process. Explain where their input will enter it. Be specific about the timeline. And then — crucially — report back on what happened. Show young people what changed as a result of their participation, and explain honestly why other things did not change.
Reach Beyond the Usual Suspects
The biggest design failure in most youth consultations is sample bias. The young people who respond to open consultation processes are already engaged: they have the confidence, the information, and the time to participate. The young people whose voices are most needed — those most affected by the decisions being taken, those most alienated from formal processes — are least likely to show up.
If your consultation findings confirm what you already believed, check your sampling. Either you were right all along — possible — or you only heard from people who already agreed with you.
Reaching beyond the usual suspects requires active outreach, trusted intermediaries, meeting young people where they are (not where you find it convenient), and offering participation in forms that are accessible and appealing to people who are not already civically engaged.
Choose Methods That Suit the Purpose
- Online surveys: fast, cheap, scalable — but shallow. Good for quantitative data on preferences, not for understanding reasons or complexity
- Focus groups: richer data, but vulnerable to group dynamics and facilitator influence. Need careful design and facilitation
- World Cafés and Open Space: allow participants to lead the agenda — good for exploratory consultations where you don't know what the issues are
- Participatory Action Research: young people as co-researchers, not just subjects. Time-intensive but produces the most genuine insights
- Digital participation platforms: tools like Decidim or Consul allow asynchronous, democratic participation at scale — increasingly used by European municipalities
After the Consultation
The most important phase is the one that happens after you have collected the data. Analyse honestly — including the findings that challenge your assumptions. Write a plain-language summary that young people can understand and share. Publish it. Report back to participants on what was decided and why. Thank people not just for their time but by showing them that their contribution mattered. A consultation process that ends in silence is worse than no consultation at all.