The most important thing for stories within these themes appears to be that they are recognizable, so that young people can tag each other to indicate that the story is important to them or to their friends. In addition, stories must be stimulating. Both entertainment and problems appeal to them. Young people are difficult to get excited about something they do not know. By increasingly responding to what high school students want, more and more young people respond to the content and more and more students share their own stories.
Contact with young people in groups is difficult. It is difficult to estimate to what extent opinions given in a group discussion are only important at that moment. Young people experience strong peer pressure in groups and at school it is not useful to show too much involvement. Students are severely judged for this the next day. In one-on-one interviews, young people generally want to tell their own story. This often leads to interesting conversations.
Three lessons learned: what is really greek phone number different than expected?
1. Communication channels
Because it is difficult to get young people excited about something they do not know, podcasts do not work. Young people do not listen to podcasts. They watch videos and read stories. These are also the forms of communication that Tussenuur currently offers them.
2. Not a target group
In the year preceding Tussenuur, young people in their final year classes were the target group for the direct predecessor of Tussenuur. The reason for this was that Human considers transitional phases in life important – and the final exam is an important transitional phase: young people often move out of their parents’ house for the first time after that, for example.
However, high school final exam candidates form a specific group of high school students. They seem to be only concerned with their exams and are much less interested in the world around them. They do not feel like thinking about things like how they come across. In addition, they have a special status at school. Therefore, messages for this specific target group are not interesting for other students, so that media that focus on them ultimately only serves a small target group.