Hopefully you had endorsers who initially made a promise about taking the results of the project into account. It is your responsibility to make sure that they keep their word. If nobody made this promise, you should continue trying to convince the decision-makers of the importance of including young people’s voice in the decisions to be made.
The best way to present your results to the decision-makers is to meet with them face-to-face. An email with an attached report rarely gets read. This presentation meeting can take many forms and highly depends on what the decision-makers agree to. For instance, if your project has been carried out in a municipality you can arrange a press conference where you and a few of the young participants present the results to the decision-makers and other stakeholders. In this way, the results will be disseminated more widely and maybe the media will cover the event. This will put additional pressure on the decision-makers to listen to the young people’s opinions. The meeting can of course also be of smaller scale. For instance, you can present the results at the city council meeting or meet bilaterally with the decision-makers to share the results with them. All in all, only your creativity sets the boundaries.
You should be well-prepared for these meetings. The decision-makers might ask critical questions about the project that you should be ready to answer. The questions you may meet are often about the number of participants, representativeness, the legitimacy of the results, the neutrality of the information material, and so on. Therefore, before this kind of meetings you could gather your project team or your sounding board and go through the potential questions and prepare an answer to them.
One meeting with the decision-makers is usually not enough. You need to follow up and remind them about the unique results that you have presented to them. In other words, you should not give up too early, but be persistent, and hopefully new opportunities for influence will occur.