Motivating, Managing, and Measuring Impact of Youth-Led Movements in Public Health Policy (Tobacco Control Case Study)

Significance

Youth activists have a critical role in tobacco control efforts. Unfortunately, many organizations face the challenge of motivating or sustaining youth participation, and others intuitively know that their organization is effective, but lack evaluation tools.

Objective

The Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation utilizes the Motivate, Manage, and Measure Influence Youth Empowerment Model in its Y St. (read Y Street) youth activism campaign to reduce youth smoking in Virginia by defining campaign objectives. By providing a defined structure, youth are left to implement projects to achieve quantifiable measures of influence (signatures, web hits, sign ups, etc) that further the campaign's objectives.

Virtually all projects are coordinated online to minimize administration time. The online system tracks volunteer activities and monitors the overall campaign progress with an automatic reporting mechanism. The tracking function allows administrators to assess campaign progress on a monthly basis to better plan for future campaign efforts.

Results

The Y St. infrastructure has motivated 406 of the 1216 trained youth to volunteer under the supervision of one of four adult coordinators. This 33% participation rate reflects a quantifiable return on investment for recruitment and training dollars, as each teen who volunteers contributes an average of 10.4 hours to the campaign. Y St. standardizes projects for youth involvement, allowing campaign administrators to focus on reaching campaign objectives instead of spending valuable resources on the day-to-day necessities of campaign management. The model and standardization process reduces administrative time and resources while increasing the effectiveness of each teen's volunteer time.