How to Successfully Organize a Youth Open House

Is your organization getting enough reach? Are you engaging with your community and incentivizing new people to join? If you answered no to both questions, then you are in for a treat in this blog post.

Many forget that there are creative ways to engage community members, raise brand awareness, and turn everyday people into supporters or champions for your organization. One effective way is to host an open house, but not just any open house - I challenge you to organize a youth open house.

An open house is an opportunity to invite members of your community or the public at large to come together to learn more about your organization, network, showcase your work and ultimately grow support for your organization.

A youth open house adds an extra exciting element to the initiative as it provides you with the perfect opportunity to start engaging the young people in your community.

Benefits of having a youth open house:

• Connect with young people and start building relationships with them

• Take engagement efforts from online advocacy to real-life spaces

• Ability to accommodate and be successful with many different budgets

• Showcase and target your organization's mission and message directly to young people

  
  

It's an opportunity to have a fun evening or a few hours on the weekend where you are opening your doors to all youth. You can, of course, organize one that is for community members at large and not just youth, but I think there is a lot of value in emphasizing youth for this open house.

Interested in planning your youth open house? Here are a few considerations I would recommend thinking about:

Audience

Understanding who you want to attend your youth open house is a crucial starting point. Who you invite will inevitably dictate how you market the event, entice them to attend and how to reach them.

When considering who to invite for your open house, I would recommend casting a broad net.

Normally I would suggest making your audience precise however, because you might still be in the early stages of your youth engagement development, inviting a lot of different people might help you see who is naturally curious about your organization.

Take it as an opportunity to see what type of youth your organization attracts and take note of it.

Location

When deciding where to hold the open house, you have a few options. First, if your organization's space has the capacity, consider hosting it in your offices to give attendees a behind-the-scenes look at what you do. Second, reach out to a local community center to inquire about renting a space for free or at a discounted rate. Third, and this is not necessarily accessible by many, you can inquire about renting out part of a restaurant or café to host the open house.

Location is extremely important but know that you can get as creative with this as you would like and can.

What’s important is that you are making it easy for young people to physically get to you.

Time

Unfortunately, hosting an open house directed at young people during working hours will not be successful. Because youth too are working and in school. I would recommend planning the event for the early evening during the earlier parts of the week, or sometime on the weekend. To ensure maximum attendance.

Any more questions on youth open houses? Leave a comment below and I’d be happy to help!

Want to consider other ways to recruit or engage youth? Head over to How to Attract Youth Volunteers: 3 Creative Recruitment Strategies to get some inspiration.