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About the author My name is Valentin. I studied digital marketing, I'm passionate about arts and worked 8 months as a youth worker. I created and facilitated 6 workshops; Photography Lab, Music Lab, Chess Club, Digital Lab (about digital marketing and creation), Iron Mind (about argumentation and persuasion), French classes and some workshops about European values. Around 400 youngsters benefit them. In this short guide, I put everything I learnt on how to create, promote, animate and maintain a workshop in European projects context. Disclaimer: This is a personal work build from my own experience in non-formal education, mixed with marketing practices. Those guide is non official and doesn't include any kind of proof. It may also be more or less effective depending on the context and I can't guarantee you any kind of results. The purpose of this guide is to give you ideas, solutions and inspiration but will not replace adaptation, training and efforts.
Introduction My coordinator is finishing her presentation speech and passing the mic to me. It's my turn to speak. In front of me, 53 Romanian students of a difficult high school are waiting to hear what a French Erasmus+ volunteer has to say. Like the 5 others members of our Arts Lab caravan, I created a workshop using arts to enhance the life of youngsters and I have a few seconds to introduce it with passion and credibility, so people decide to sign up to it, or not. I spent a lot of time to create my photography workshop. I also spent a lot of time improving it. We have been practicing in many different schools, for all ages, with many time constraints, different communities, nonEnglish speakers and some with disabilities (blind and autistics kids). We took feedback each time and try our best to improve. So here I am in front of the class, it's my turn to present my workshop and I actually know exactly what to say. Not that I learnt my speech by heart, but I henceforth understand how to make it great. Like a choreography, I enchain sentences that I choose purposefully over time. Shaping my presentation with emotions and energy. Many join the workshop and I now have 45 minutes to transmit my passion about photography, but here also, I'm using a clear and efficient pedagogue plan. Students are involved and seems having fun, they take great pictures. Eventually the anonymous feedback is positive. It's another success, without surprise. After dozens of interventions, I would like to share the method I use to guarantee the success of my workshops.
Ideation Phase Find the need, fulfill it.
The ideation part is for generating pertinent ideas of resilient workshops. Because we create the workshops for the participants, they should be participant-centered. That means taking in consideration their needs, interest, level of comprehension of the topic and knowledge. This also means knowing and asking to your audience some crucial information like their age, hobbies, life goals and motivations, common problems and needs. With a clearer idea of their profile you can present workshops that they need, so you drastically increase your chances that people come to them.
How to generate and choose ideas of resilient workshops? I noticed that resilient workshops tend to include at least one of those criteria: -
Practical information: information presented in a practical and concrete way like "how to" or "step by step guide". If the information is perceived useful, participants are more likely to come and come back
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Entertainment: The participant should enjoy spending time in the workshop. This can be achieved by building a rich experience climate (we will come back to in the design phase).
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Inspiration and support: Sharing positive energy and bringing some hope to a workshop can be enough to motivate participants to come back. This is especially needed with participants facing difficulties in their life and needing to be listened or to evade their problems. If some participants come for you more than for your workshop I believe it's ok because you are still making their day better. It can happen that they see you as a model.
→ Make a list of what you are good at and you would enjoy to share. Then speak with some random potential participants and ask them if they would be interested to know more about it and if they would enjoy it. You can also ask if they are willing to do a workshop. To do that you can ask people in your environment (youth center, schools teacher, parents‌) and use the power of the digital (see image upon) to do some quick surveys like google forms or Facebook surveys (keep it really light). If you don't feel comfortable with one topic but are eager to learn, be honest with the participants and present it as an open session where everybody can share his knowledge, learning and sharing all together. Don't try to appears as an expert if you are not, because everybody will feel it and it has a really repulsive effect.
Keep it clear and organized Once you get essential information and set your goals, you can put everything in a brief. This will help you to stay purposeful over time and maintain a clear administrative, logistic and financial transparency (with the National Agency or your coordinator for example). I include on the next page the one that I did for the Iron Mind workshop.
Example of workshop brief
Design Phase Building the experience
Once you decided what you will bring to your students (information, entrainment, inspiration) you can extract the goals of your workshop. Setting goals will help you to shape your workshop in a purposeful way and keep sure you don't do workshops for "spending time".
Structure How much time should be a workshop? It strongly depends on the flow of your workshop. If the workshop is heavy in information and you feel participants are struggling to assimilate, it's better to keep it short. If you feel the participant can handle long sessions and are enjoying, you can keep them longer. As a golden rule, shorter is better. It's better to let participants on their eager than to let them with an overdose feeling.
What is the best structure for a workshop? The best structure is the one that is creating a comfortable flow for your participants. Here are some tools you can use to enhance this flow:
→ Opening Ice breakers: An ice breaker create the first links between participants. If your audience don't know each other, it's a crucial step so they feel comfortable with their peers, more willing to participate and less shy. Energizers: Energizers can be use at the beginning of your session to take people at a higher level of energy. You can use them after a break or when you feel participants lack of energy.
→ The Introduction Depending on how you will present your topic participants will feel more or less concerned, interested or engaged. The introduction is one of the most important part of your workshop as participants will (consciously or not) determine if your workshop will be useful, fun or valuable for them. In other words, if it's worth it to give you attention and come back to the next sessions. I noticed that it's also one of the part during which the attention is at the highest. Therefore it's an opportunity for you to shape their focus for the rest of the workshop. During my EVS I tested many ways to reach the optimal flow during my workshops and I noticed that I had the maximum attention when I was doing this in the introduction:
(Example will be given for a workshop about photography) -
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Doing an energizer or an ice breaker strongly related to your topic (avoid at all cost to choose a random energizer). Really short self-presentation (max 20 seconds). Should include only elements that valorize you in a unique way. This is because we tend to give more attention to people that we perceived as rare. (Hello my name is Valentin, I'm a professional photographer from France and I'm travelling the world 11 months per year to take pictures.) Engage participants really early by asking questions about the topic (What do you like to photograph?) Storytelling your topic (The photographers mission is to reveal the unseen beauty of the world, and today we are going to explore a world that nobodies notice.) Set high expectations (Today we are going to discover professional photography tricks that you can use to make amazing pictures). Give them quickly a feeling of freedom and autonomy (During this session you'll be free to photograph whatever you want and to go wherever you want between point A & B). The drawback of giving freedom is that some may not participate because they feel they are not obliged to. From my point of view, I prefer to support rather than control. I will explain more those situations later.
→ The Body The body of your workshop is the main and longest part, during which you focus on building the experience and reaching most of your goals. Because it's strongly related to the topic, I can't go to much in depth here. However, here are some guidelines: -
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Make people experiment things. Whatever your topic, find a way to make people experiment feelings, new interactions and situations. Build a strong social climate. Humans release a lot of chemicals when they are in community. In this sense make sure your tease social interactions. Compliments people to make them feel fulfilled, use or encourage humor to make people feel joy, create roles, group people and incite team work and cooperative games to increase interactions… Surprise them. Amaze them. Once a while do something amazing. You certainly know a cool trick to do. Try to relate it to your topic and do it to maintain a sense of unpredictability in your workshop. This will help you to keep their attention and bring some fantasy to your workshop. If you don't know any trick, look on internet. For the photography workshop I really like to look for something hidden like an insect or a beautiful scene and tell them, look it's under our eyes and nobody sees it! – At this point I can hear some "wow" and it really help to motivate them to continue. Make it participative. That means times to times to ask if someone has something to share to help the others (related to the topic). You may be surprise how knowledgeable are your participants. It's a great opportunity to engage them and make everybody feeling part of a group.
→ The Conclusion The conclusion is an opportunity to make sure the goals of your session have been reached. Take the main ideas of your workshop and resume them in 3 minutes. If you have time you can ask your students to do it. This will help memorization and let everybody leave with a feeling of clarity. I also like to
provoke thinking with an implicitly philosophical discussion, or at least by sharing a deep vision about the topic. → The Debriefing The debriefing is a form of conclusion. Many methods of debriefing exist and their aim is to make the learning process as clear as possible. One of those methods is the 4F. Facts (What did we do?), Feelings (How did we feel?), Founding (What did we learn?), Future (What is the continuation of it?). → Feedback The feedback part is also important to improve your workshop and yourself as a facilitator. You can use many methods to take feedback as long as you find it relevant. The goal is to understand what you should start to do, stop to do and continue to do. Sometimes feedback touch your ego but remember that comments are not about you, they are about your results and results should be improved as much as we can.
Promotion How to avoid a flop?
Once your workshop is freshly designed it's time to promote it. Many of us struggle here and ends with an empty workshop. At our youth center we experimented everything, workshops with 0 participants up to 30. Here is what we learnt:
How to present your workshop? -
Packaging matters. Craft a beautiful poster for your workshop. If you know someone comfortable with design ask him to help you, if not you can use Canva that propose free templates and an easy tool to use for non-designers. Putting effort in the look will send the signal that your workshop is important and valuable.
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Excitement and emotions. The way you present your workshop should be something amazing. Creating a global euphoria will boost word-of-mouth and it all start from yours. Present it like the work of your life. Show and express your passion. Present incentives. Don't assume people will come because your workshop is good, tell them why it is and why they need it. Explain how it will change their life (remember your initial goals).
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Where to present your workshop? -
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Your Social Medias. If you don't have fans or an established community, you may consider to invest a bit of money in Facebook ads. With 5$ you can reach around 1000 people. School and universities partnership. Go there and speak to the director. Propose them free workshop(s). At the end of them, promote your youth center and the other free activities. Build lists. Using keywords, you can track people by interest and localization. You can make lists and propose them your workshop. On Facebook you can find the members of groups of the same topic than your workshops. For example, if you do a workshop located in Iasi about learning how to play guitar, you can send a message to the members of Facebook groups or events like "Musicians in Iasi" or "Concerts in Iasi" and propose them to come. If they are part of a group like "live jazz in Iasi" you can be sure that they like music somehow.
Print. If you get authorizations to display ads, design a poster and print it in a place where your target audience pass.
Boosts -
Look for influencers (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Pages) close to your thematic and your localization. Send them a message explaining your (altruistic) mission and that you would appreciate a bit of communication support. You can invite them to pass quickly to your workshop and to do one post about it
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Make local partnerships with others organizations or companies. If you are doing a workshop about music, go to speak with the music store around and ask them to distribute a flyer promoting your workshop to their clients. In exchange, you can tell them that you will recommend their shop to your participants.
Whatever the message, place and way you communicate, it's really important to track your results. If an operation is not successful try another method until you find the most efficient one. It may take some time based on your budget but it's essential to your workshop and youth center.
Improving, Maintaining
After launching your first workshop sessions you may realize that it's not working exactly how you could imagine. Because you can't predict anything, you will improve little by little dealing with each problem at a time. Here is some information to help you accelerate this process.
Difficulties you may encounter: Here are some common issues that I encountered and how I solved them:
Participants not cooperative I encountered many youths that told me directly that they don't like photography. They were there because the workshop is mandatory by the school so as a facilitator this is a challenge that I had to face many times. A challenge that depends strongly on the person or group you are speaking to. First, I try to understand why the person is not involved. I want to create before a quick trust relation, by asking his name and his passions for example. Then I ask "You don't like photography?" to figure out if it's the topic the problem or something else (like peer pressure or distractions). Many cases can appear:
The shy participant: → To involve a shy participant, start by knowing witch topics or situations make him more comfortable. For example, if he is good in math and at one point you need to compute something, ask him the solution and underline in front of everybody how smart he is. If you have time you can even go deeper and ask him to explain how he does. Because it's a topic he feels comfortable to speak about, chances that he opens himself to the others are higher. The rebel participant: Some youngsters don't want to participate because participating and being involve could make them appears like a cooperative student, and because they are in conflict with their teacher, school, classmates or whatever, they don't want to appear cooperative. Sometimes, the presence of their others rebel friends make the situation even worst. → Defuse by showing consideration. If the student is acting because of the others (peers or teachers) it may be because he is lacking selfconfidence and need some approbation. In this case I think it's important to show the student a strong consideration. The goal is to make the person feel like an independent individual, more than an individual of a system (the school) or a group (the rebels group for example.) To achieve this, if the student is seating, I'm seating close to him to be at the same level, and after asking him essential questions to establish some trust (name and passions for example), I tell him how unique he his and I provoke his authenticity. I say things like: "You seems to have a really unique story; I would be really curious to discover how you see the world" or "I feel a bit sad that you don't take pictures because I'm sure I think I would learn a lot from your perspective".
The feeling that you will give him by saying this will help you to involve him. From this feeling you can ask him a really easy thing to do ("Please, take just one picture"). This thing must be easy enough so he doesn't refuse it. At this point chances that he declines are really low because you spent a bit of time with him showing consideration. He would feel a sense of reciprocity and be more cooperative. Once he did the action, keep underlining his authenticity and challenge him to do a bigger action and so on.
Participants excluded or outside of the group If a participant doesn't feel well in a group, chances he comes back drastically drops. To avoid this situations, act on empathy. Ask to the others participants (separately is better, or during the break for example) to involve him. You can say things like "Imagine if you were going to a workshop that interest you and you are really excited but once you find yourself alone". Remember your storytelling and emphasize the common identity of your group. "In this room you are all passionate about photography, you are with people that understand your passion and with whom you can share unique moments. This is a unique chance."
Participants that don't like / hate your topic Hard but not impossible to find a solution. The last thing to do would be to force the participant to do it, this simply doesn't work. Instead, try to understand why he doesn't like it, ask when was the last time did he try it, why it was unpleasant, ect. Most of the time they don't really know and they will feel a bit confused. From this confusion you can start to present the hypothesis that maybe today they like it, but if they don't try they will never be sure. I also like to emphasize the fact that they get the chance to have a professional photographer here to teach them and that this opportunity may not happen twice. I finish by asking them a small action (like taking one picture) and I tell them that if they still don't like photography after that, I will respect their decision (which I does when it happens). I had many successes with this method where students eventually come out telling me that they enjoyed the workshop even if they still don't like the topic, and this is for me the most important. By supporting rather than controlling, you let a chance that creativity and volunteer cooperation appears and the participants feel respected and understood. To resume: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Ask many questions about his relation with the topic to incite them to reconsider their opinion about it Underline the rarity and scarcity of the opportunity to learn Then ask them a small action to involve them Precise that they are free to not like it after that, and that you will feel really happy that they at least give a try