A compelling activity isn’t worth anything if what comes out of it can’t inform a decision. So everything starts from the decision, states its limits, and produces evidence that says plainly what it can and can’t support.
Designing it well is half the job. Getting young people to it — social, field work and activation, run by us rather than handed to you as a link — is the other half, and it is where most youth engagement actually fails. How we run the reach.
Every campaign commits to what you will do with what you hear — from taking it into account through to handing the decision over — in plain words with a date attached. “We will tell you how your answer changed this, by 14 October” means something to a 16-year-old.
The test is not whether a report looks convincing. It is whether it survives the first person in the room who asks where the number came from.
A statement in a sayit report carries the measures it came from. A sentence that cites nothing is not treated as a finding, however good it sounds — which is what lets the officer presenting it answer “how do we know that?” without going back to the raw data.
An honest count of who took part and a claim about a whole population are different things and need different designs. Every campaign states which it is making, and the report holds it to that. No number of answers turns one into the other.
A handful of people in one age band in one area is a person, not a statistic. Anything below the reporting threshold is withheld, and the withholding is reported rather than quietly dropped.
What somebody answered, and the exact question they answered, are fixed the moment they send. Nobody — including us — can change either later.
While a campaign is collecting you see reach and completion and who is answering. What they chose waits until it closes, because a live result changes the decision it is meant to inform and changes what the next person answers.
Who answered, how many, when, where, whether it is weighted and on what basis the campaign recruited. It sits under every figure a young person sees and every figure you report.
Open campaigns describe the people who took part. A claim about all young people in an area needs a sample designed to make it, and no number of answers changes that.
Only the people receiving an engagement can say whether it was culturally safe. sayit records what a campaign concerns and who is guiding it, and never awards a rating.
If a council was already going to extend the bus, the outcome says the finding supported it. Borrowed credit is the fastest way to become the institution young people already don't trust.
Activities where young people read each other's contributions need every one checked before anybody else sees it, for as long as the campaign runs. We don't offer them until we can do that properly.