7 tips to get more young people involved in your club

It's simply fun and fulfilling to be involved in an organisation. Of course, it can also be challenging. Everyone who volunteers in a club knows this. However, children, teenagers and young adults are supposedly more difficult to motivate than they were a few years ago in times when there are so many different leisure activities to choose from. We therefore give you seven practical tips to help you find more young people for your club and increase the commitment of younger people.

spized | Club management

March 27, 2024 |

Whats’ on this page

1. Why it is challenging to get young people interested in your club

1.1 Ask yourself why young people don't currently want to implement projects in your organisation?

1.2 Create participation formats specifically for young people

1.3 Set aside a budget and write it off in your head first

1.4 Make it your project, but don't be in the project yourself

1.5 Just let it happen or: Just get started

1.6 Make the public aware of your projects.

1.7 Meet resistance in the association openly and seek dialogue

2. Conclusion: create successes and talk about them

Why it is challenging to get young people interested in your club

Before we give you our tips for getting more young people involved in your organisation, we first need to talk about the challenges in more detail. One major challenge, for example, is that your target group of "young people" is very large and heterogeneous. The German Sports Youth categorises all people up to the age of 26 as "young". This means that you are addressing kindergarten children as well as school pupils, trainees and students. As these groups are all in different phases of life and have different requirements and interests, this is of course nothing new for you. But you should always bear this in mind.

Another challenge is that there are far more opportunities for volunteering today than there were decades ago. The world of clubs has become much more diverse. There are new sports and many new areas of involvement where you and your club are in a kind of competition for volunteers.

As we wrote in our article on new and old volunteering, the demands placed on volunteering today are very different to those of the past. Gen(eration) Z in particular has its own demands on voluntary work that go beyond the selfless and identity-forming togetherness in a club.

The older among the young, i.e. potential volunteers in their 20s, are often also looking for an activity that fits or enhances their CV. You should also keep this in mind when looking for more youth participation in your organisation. It's the modern version of volunteering, which is characterised by give and take.

Equipped with this food for thought, let's move on to the tips:

1. Ask yourself why young people don't currently want to implement projects in your organisation?

This simple question quickly leads you to further questions and considerations. For example, you should ask yourself whether young people benefit from the current structures and funding opportunities and, secondly, whether they can find their way around and orientate themselves in your association structures at all. Important arguments for young people would be

You can really collaborate on a project basis.
They are taken seriously with their concerns and can get involved.
You can use the skills you enjoy and develop them further or learn completely new skills.
They can complete their project successfully and that is what the management and the club want.

To get young people interested in your organisation, you should also be prepared to make changes and rethink structures, for example. This should ideally also be communicated internally and externally.

2. Create participation formats specifically for young people

Many clubs have structures that have grown over decades. However, these structures mainly appeal to older members. You should therefore consider how you can create structures that also appeal to younger people. Possible starting points are

Adapt the club statutes and set up a youth board, for example. This will allow you to work together with the boys on a possible set of rules. At the same time, the youth board has certain rights that it can also demand within the club.
Develop junior teams. Young people involved in the club can join forces and work together to develop projects or models for the club. You can also apply for project funding for junior teams via the Sportjugend. For more information on Junior Teams, you can listen to the podcast here.

If you want to get young people interested in your organisation, you should above all be open to new ideas. At first glance, these may seem trivial or even difficult to realise. The aim is for the young group to gain their first successes with their own project and, above all, to gain experience. It is not about perfect projects, but rather about a learning curve. The young people are allowed to try things out. And this is exactly what can encourage children or young people to get more involved in your organisation. Because only if you show young people that you have confidence in them will they remain interested and continue to develop.

3. Set aside a budget and write it off in your head first

If you provide money to a youth group in your organisation, you should not impose any restrictions. The budget can be used freely for the project. The group itself decides how the money is spent. In this way, the younger members learn to handle their own budget responsibly and to plan with it. The budget should therefore be available every year.

You should write off the budget because then you don't have to keep asking about the status of the project. This takes the pressure off the group and you show trust. This in turn increases motivation in the team.

This budget is not about large sums of money. In most cases, 500 to 1,000 euros is enough to fund an individual project over the course of a year. Projects are often turned into side projects so that the main project can be financed. For example, youth groups within the club can create more financial scope for their projects by selling cakes at home matches.

4. Make it your project, but don't be in the project yourself

Act like a mentor to the project, but do not get involved in the project yourself. The goals that the young members formulate do not have to correspond to your goals either. It is therefore better to keep a low profile, but be there when help is needed. In psychology, we like to talk about helping people to help themselves. Show the young teams a possible solution without specifying the exact path.

It is also important to remember that every project needs clear rules. But these are set by the team members themselves.

5. Just let it happen or: Just get started

Not every project has to be planned from start to finish. The most important thing is to get started in the first place. This also means that ideas can fail at first, but perhaps succeed at the second attempt.

You will see that if you remain calm and trust a youth project in your club, you can achieve more in the long term than with precise plans. This is because it is usually more frustrating to keep changing existing plans than to regularly define new detailed goals in the process.

6. Make the public aware of your projects

If you want more youth participation in your organisation, the world should know about it. Therefore, seek publicity and publicise your ideas. Perhaps there are multipliers in the organisation who can also spread your ideas to the outside world? Multipliers can be other young volunteers who you have already been able to convince. They embody the ideas of your organisation to the outside world and can therefore convince other young people in an authentic way. Experience has shown that word-of-mouth propaganda works perfectly, especially with schoolchildren. In the best case scenario, you will achieve a snowball effect and quickly gain a lot of new members.

When you communicate your idea to the outside world, emphasise that your project is open to everyone. In this way, you ensure a very low-threshold offer to which people also feel invited.

7. Meet resistance in the association openly and seek dialogue

Opinions are often divided when it comes to the question of how to improve youth participation in a club. Depending on the type of club, there may be different camps that try to assert themselves with their respective arguments. When you hear objections, always ask yourself who they are coming from. Are they club members who fear for their positions or influence? Or are the concerns based elsewhere?

It is best to always seek dialogue. This will also help you to put yourself in the shoes of those who have reservations and try to understand their position. This gives you the opportunity to better counter possible objections and refute them.

To give you courage: There will hardly be a project that gets by without critics in your own club. Ultimately, however, it's always about how you yourself stand behind it and to what extent you are prepared to fight for it. Sometimes, by realising a project, you can prove that there can be more than one perspective and that it is possible to achieve things that previously seemed impossible.

Conclusion: create successes and talk about them

If you manage to ensure that young active people in your organisation can achieve success on their own and that you do not define success, you will create good conditions for more youth participation. If you then reach more young people with the multipliers mentioned above and talk about your ideas and projects, you will achieve a self-runner in the best case scenario and have secured the next generation of club members.