43% of the world is under age 25, and that number is over 50% in developing countries. This represents a half of the world that has long clamored to have its voice heard - and has found technology and social media to be the platforms that finally give them the influence they have long demanded. Just look to Egypt and the Arab Spring for potent examples of the power that youth wield today.
When the United Nations convened the Global Youth Forum - the first major UN Forum designed specifically for youth input on the development agenda - they came to us to help create a program that uses technology to expand the sphere of participation beyond walls of the Forum itself. We created a participatory brand and an online platform that allows youth to sign up as virtual delegates to participate from anywhere in the world (another first for the UN). The online discussion and recommendations were collected from the delegate platform, fed into the live discussion in Bali, and integrated into the official recommendations to be presented by the Secretary General to the UN General Assembly.
The platform proved so successful - engaging over 2500 youth representing every country in the world, including Antartica (!) – that it is being deployed for additional conferences including five Regional Population Conferences. The Bali Declaration that came out of the Global Youth Forum is considered one of the most progressive UN declarations to date, due to the input of the wide variety of youth who were truly engaged in the process for the first time.
For the branding, we created a flexible system centered on empty speech bubbles that begged to be filled in. To keep the focus on individual statements, these are used in a variety of ways to prompt input - event posters with blank bubbles and markers, badges to promote individual issues, social media badges to share delegate status, and downloadable photo templates and video scripts that prompt sharing of visionary viewpoints.
A series of customizeable toolkits were developed after the Forum and distributed to delegates of the GYF and other conferences – to provide easy access to the key messages from the Declatation, and simple suggestions for continuing the momentum both locally and globally.
A microsite features active youth leaders and a simple sign-up process to make it easy to become an official delegate. Thousands of delegates signed up representing every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe - even Antarctica.
We conceived and launched an online platform that fosters real-time communication among youth leaders from around the world - to watch live video streams from the Forum in Bali, schedule Meetups to gather input from their community, contribute official recommendations on five key issues, vote on others' recommendations, and connect to and learn from other leaders who are passionate about the same issues.
Fun fact: many of the layouts are designed on a grid with 43% white space.
