How Escape to Digital Is Helping Youths for Today and Tomorrow Build a More Engaging, Youth-Centred Digital Presence
Escape to Digital is helping Youths for Today and Tomorrow (YTT) turn its mission into accessible digital content that educates, empowers and connects with young people. The strategy is designed to make YTT’s work more visible, relevant and engaging across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
4,100%
increase in content interactions on Facebook
881.5%
increase in post views on TikTok
Dozens
Of new followers on Facebook & TikTok
about YTT
Introduction
Young people need more than awareness messages. They need information they can understand, advice they can apply and opportunities to hear from people who understand their experiences.
- For Youths for Today and Tomorrow (YTT), an organisation working to empower young people and communities in Zimbabwe, social media presents an opportunity to extend that impact beyond workshops, school programmes and community-based initiatives.
- YTT works across several important areas, including peacebuilding, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), mental health, environmental sustainability and livelihoods. Each area addresses real challenges facing young people, but communicating these different themes effectively requires more than simply publishing organisational updates.
That’s Where Escape To Digital Comes In.
- Working with YTT, Escape to Digital is developing a more structured approach to social media marketing, combining content strategy, short-form video production, expert contributions and youth-centred storytelling to help translate the organisation’s work into content audiences can connect with.
- The objective is to build a social media presence that doesn’t just tell people what YTT does but gives them meaningful reasons to watch, learn, participate and return.
We engaged Escape to Digital to help us communicate the work we do more effectively across our social media platforms.
Thoko ngwenya -ytt director
YTT’s work spans multiple thematic areas, from safer schools and conflict resolution to mental health awareness, SRHR education, climate-smart agriculture and youth livelihoods.
- The challenge is communicating this breadth of work without making social media feel like a continuous stream of project reports, announcements and commemorative-day posts.
- Young people consume information differently. They may be more interested in a practical answer to a question about exam stress, a fellow student’s perspective on peer pressure or an expert explaining an important health issue than a conventional organisational update.
- At the same time, YTT needs to maintain its credibility as a youth-focused organisation while making its content approachable and relevant to the people it serves.
This creates an important strategic question: How can YTT use its digital platforms to become a useful resource for young people, rather than simply a place where organisational activities are documented?
Escape to Digital approached this by developing a more intentional content strategy built around recurring series, expert-led education and youth participation.
Rather than treating every post as a standalone piece of content, Escape to Digital is developing recurring content series that give YTT’s digital platforms clearer themes and a more recognisable identity.
The approach combines three key elements: education, participation and practical value.
The work includes:
- Developing content ideas aligned with YTT’s thematic areas and organisational objectives.
- Planning recurring video series and writing scripts or questions for contributors.
- Identifying and coordinating suitable professionals for educational content.
- Planning and conducting youth street interviews where applicable.
- Editing short-form videos for social media.
- Writing captions and publishing content across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
- Reviewing platform performance to understand what content is reaching and engaging audiences.
- The agreed content schedule provides for a minimum of three posts per week across the three platforms, supported by relevant project updates, awareness campaigns, youth opportunities and community highlights.
It feels like having an internal marketing team built directly into our organisation.
Thoko ngwenya -ytt director
1. Making expert knowledge accessible
Escape to Digital is coordinating contributors with relevant professional experience to help communicate important youth health and wellbeing topics.
The Youth Health Expert Series focuses on subjects such as sexual and reproductive health, HIV prevention, consent, relationships and access to health information.
The Youth Wellbeing Expert Series is designed to address mental health, emotional wellbeing, stress, confidence, resilience and life skills.
By working with relevant professionals, YTT can deliver educational content that is grounded in expertise while remaining accessible to its intended audience.
2. Moving beyond awareness to practical value
Escape to Digital is also developing content concepts that position YTT as a useful source of information for young people.
The wider content direction includes practical guidance on mental wellbeing, career preparation, digital safety, peacebuilding and livelihoods.
The intention is to create content that answers questions, challenges misconceptions and gives audiences something useful to take away.
Over time, this can help build a digital resource that young people have a reason to revisit and share.
3. Giving young people a voice
Through the Youth Voices and Ask a Student formats, Escape to Digital is developing content that puts young people’s perspectives at the centre of the conversation.
Instead of speaking about young people without involving them, these formats create opportunities for students to share their experiences, opinions and practical advice.
For example, an interview exploring how students handle pressure during examination periods can offer relatable perspectives for fellow learners while also providing parents and other adults with insight into young people’s experiences.
This approach helps make youth participation part of the content itselff, rather than simply the subject of a campaign.
She doesn’t simply create posts for us; she takes the time to understand all our projects across areas...
Thoko ngwenya -ytt director
The Outcome
Explosive Growth Followed by Steady Gains
These figures offer a snapshot of the audience growth and engagement recorded during the ongoing social media management engagement.
The increase in profile views indicates greater interest in exploring YTT’s account, while the rise in shares shows that viewers were increasingly distributing its content.
For an organisation working to educate and empower young people, these interactions provide useful indicators of how its digital content is reaching audiences and encouraging participation.
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