TITLE:
Utilizing Digital Public Relations to Promote Empowerment Strategies for Talented Youth:A Case Study of “Lamea” National Project
AUTHORS:
Layla Hasan AlSaqer
KEYWORDS:
Digital Media, Youth Empowerment, Talented Youth, Public Relations, Strategic Communication
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.14 No.4,
November
13,
2026
ABSTRACT: The paper aims to explore the role of digital media in promoting youth empowerment strategies. It analyzes empowerment strategies communicated through the Lamea Project’s digital content. The research is based on Zimmerman’s Empowerment Theory (2000). The researcher uses content analysis to examine the digital empowerment strategies used on the Lamea Association’s Instagram. The results reveal that Lamea Association uses various strategies to empower Bahraini youth. First, (24.375%) of the posts employed a competition strategy, followed by mentorship and leadership connection (21.875%), partnership and collaboration strategy (20%), recognition and visibility of talented youth (16.25%), training and knowledge development (10%), and connection to community & humanity values (7.5%). The results show that 51.875% of the posts indicate “government/leadership” as a key empowerment actor, followed by peer-to-peer empowerment (29.375%) and private sector partnership (18.75%). The results demonstrate that the project has implemented various levels of empowerment. The results show that 55.625% of posts focused on organizational empowerment, followed by 23.125% of posts focused on psychological empowerment, while 21.25% of posts focused on community empowerment. The findings reveal that digital communication has established a highly interactive relationship with the audience via “likes” at 100%, followed by “mentions” at 99.375%, “reposts” at 80.625%, and “comments” at 78.125%. The study finds significant differences (0.001) in the use of the Lamea Instagram account across forms of digital content, themes of digital content, empowerment strategies, empowerment actors, and empowerment levels. Since the research focuses on the “process” of employing empowerment strategies by Lamae’s Project, further studies should expand the findings by exploring the “outcomes” of this process for youth empowerment. Moreover, the study recommends that future studies should take a collective approach by integrating empowerment strategies across different cultures using a multi-level empowerment model.