Before you design your participatory process and choose your methods, it is very important that you have a clear idea about what kind of format your final results should have. Here it is highly important that you listen to the decision-makers’ wishes. If they have voiced a wish for the Top 10 recommendations from young people and you provide them with a catalogue with more than one hundred ideas, the chances of the decision-makers actually taking the results into account are very low.
However, it might be that the preliminary result is an idea catalogue which is then being transformed into recommendations in the next steps of the project. This is also something that you have to consider when you design your process: What kind of results should be forwarded to the next activity of the project?
And consider the amount of data that each step of the participatory process can potentially generate. The last thing you want to do is to spend all your time compiling and analysing data. Therefore, put some thought into finding solutions to collecting the data in the most structured and useful way.