The Brief
Founded in 2009, NCS (National Citizen Service) helps young people discover their confidence and become more work—and world-ready. Through trips away, grant-funded community programmes, and online experiences, NCS’s powerful mission is to instil confidence, connection, capability, and citizenship amongst young people.
In 2024, to meet these goals and effectively make a difference to the lives of young people, NCS felt that their commitment to youth engagement needed a refresh to take it to the next level.
NCS Trust, the central team working to ensure impactful NCS experiences are on offer, recruited Participation People. This partnership set out to delve into and reimagine how NCS listens to, values, and acts on the benefits of youth participation, focusing on both the teens who take part in their programmes and the young leaders and team members shaping NCS’s future.
The Solution
We began by asking ourselves a few key questions. What’s working? What isn’t? And where exactly are the gaps? In search of the answers, we rolled up our sleeves and created an action plan which included:
1. 70 hours of ‘beyond the surface’ desk research
We explored NCS’s existing policies and how the public and their global competitors were perceiving them. Going beyond the surface with our research, we understood how NCS compares, highlighting what they can learn from others.
2. A staff-wide diagnostic
We engaged the entire breadth of the NCS team, from HR to programme delivery, reaching 77 staff members with our bespoke engagement diagnostic tool. This tool helps organisations to think beyond a traditional youth council, bringing a comprehensive audit together that assesses youth participation in the context of organisational culture, structures and feedback processes. And with almost 50% engagement (previous diagnostic tools have yielded 27-35% returns), we can safely call that a win!
3. Executive insight
We held in-depth interviews with 13 senior NCS executives to challenge and ultimately validate our research and diagnostic findings. We knew that we’d be able to retrieve a treasure trove of insights that would only come to light through real, human conversations.
4. A co-production event
This was the juicy cherry on top of our strategy cake. We gathered executives, trustees, frontline staff, and young people together to collaboratively get under the skin of the organisation and work together to co-create an actionable plan that strengthens youth engagement across all departments.
We facilitated this event to leverage the individual expertise of stakeholders and young people so that recommendations for meaningful youth voice integration throughout NCS could be generated. By implementing techniques such as SWOT analysis (taking each recommendation and establishing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and Planning Poker (an engaging way for teams to apply relative estimates to planned work), an actionable roadmap was put in place, which prioritised actions into three clear categories: What we can do now, soon, and later to strengthen youth engagement across all aspects of NCS.
5. A Self-assessment benchmark
What’s a cake without sprinkles? The finishing touch saw the co-creation of a dynamic benchmark tool. Grounded in Lundy’s Model of Child Participation, NCS could then use this benchmark tool as a means of tracking progress through the roadmap, over the next five years.
Outcomes
It’s as much about the journey as the destination, and during this collaborative adventure, we encountered several key insights along the way.
- Expanding youth voice
We found that every inch of NCS needs to be centred around the benefits of youth participation, valuing youth voices entirely, whether that be across policy or operations. With around 69% of organisations in the UK having a dedicated policy to include young voices, this rising figure shows that a lot of organisations are also starting to notice, and want a slice of, the benefits of youth participation.
- Closing the loop
A clear priority was found in strengthening feedback loops to ensure that young people aren’t only sharing their opinions and ideas, they are seeing tangible action taking place as a result. And keeping these young people in the loop so they can fully understand why things may be behind schedule or can’t be completed, ensuring full transparency, accountability and integrity.
- Diversifying engagement
It’s great that so many young people know about and already engage with NCS and their mission, over 800,000 in fact, however it’s important that those who haven’t yet heard about the trust, or have felt disconnected from the experience, aren’t forgotten about. We need to ensure that everyone can choose to engage with NCS should they want to.
We didn’t just simply tick the boxes and call it a day. Each and every step of the process was put in place to contribute towards a clear roadmap and evolving benchmark tool to help NCS implement the benefits of youth participation, making their youth engagement real and meaningful long into the future. We developed a structure that would allow young people to shape decisions at NCS, in real time, everywhere from grassroots to the boardroom.
Learnings
Sharing is caring, right? We’d love to offer you a handful of top tips for organisations looking to discover the benefits of youth participation so you can follow in NCS’s footsteps.
- Stop designing for your stakeholders and start designing with them.
Successful diagnostic tools incorporate diverse stakeholders from day one—it’s as simple as that. It’s the only way to ensure that you’re capturing the real story and creating genuine buy-in.
- Free your data from the walls of reports.
Turn your data into actionable changes and close that all-essential feedback loop. Rather than confining your data to a report, use it to make informed decisions that show young people that you’re really hearing them, gaining their trust and loyalty. Also, be transparent about why some ideas work and why others don’t.
- Boring meetings? It’s a no from us.
Embrace dynamic methods like SWOT and Planning Poker activities to encourage creativity and collaboration when making strategic decisions. Some professionals have even reported spending up to 31 hours monthly in unproductive meetings. Trust us, and your colleagues will thank you for bringing something fun and different to the boardroom!
Testimonial
“Working with Antonia Dixey and Participation People was such an engaging process, providing valuable insights and clear guidance on taking our youth engagement to the next level. Antonia’s energy, passion, and ability to drive things forward at pace were exactly what we needed to make meaningful progress in such a tight timeframe.
Antonia nailed the balance between support and challenge—pushing us to take a hard look at what we were doing while giving us the confidence and tools to take bold steps forward. The co-production event brought together executives, board members, and young people, shifting how we think about sharing power and making decisions. Developing a self-assessment benchmark based on Lundy’s Model of Child Participation was brilliant and insightful. The benchmark gave us a framework to guide our progress over the coming years and lead to a clear pathway for embedding youth engagement more systematically across our work.”
Sabryna Porter, Youth Engagement Manager, NCS Trust
If your organisation isn’t feeling the benefits of youth participation yet, contact us to discuss how Participation People can ensure your business strategy includes youth insight.
