Top tips for working with student ambassadors

Nurture your ambassadors' voices and insights

Working with ambassadors is a great way to not only allow your current students to share their unique student experience but also an opportunity to learn more about their journey as prospective students and the reasons why they chose your institution. Through our work with hundreds of education providers and ambassadors, we learned that the best way to make the most of the opportunity to work with ambassadors is to meet with them regularly and allow them to share feedback and suggestions with you. Do you want to find out what motivated your ambassadors to choose your institution? How did they do their research? What channels of communication worked best for them when they wanted to engage with you? What did they wish they knew before enrolling? Your ambassadors can share those insights with you and help you create more resources for prospective students to find answers to all their questions through your marketing presence.  

How to get started?  

The best way to connect your ambassadors with each other and allow them to start sharing their feedback is during the initial ambassador training session. It's important to get them excited about their role as well as highlight how important their ambassador role is in providing value to prospective students researching where they want to study or making their final decision of where they want to enroll. 

• During the initial ambassador training, you might want to kick off the session with an icebreaker that would allow the ambassadors to get to know each other by introducing themselves and sharing a fun fact about themselves. 
• We would recommend creating a group chat with all your ambassadors where they can reach out if they have any questions; you can also use this group chat to share tips and feedback with your ambassadors. These meetings are also a great opportunity to collect feedback about what channels of communication your ambassadors prefer - is it best to reach them via email, Whatsapp or The Ambassador Platform?
• During your regular check-in meetings with the ambassadors, we would recommend running brainstorming sessions with them to get their input on how they could help create content for your social media platforms or marketing campaigns. You'll find that your ambassadors are fantastic at coming up with great content ideas that your prospective students are interested in as well as the best way to deliver them (i.e videos, blog posts, webinars, infographics etc). A good place to start such a brainstorming session is to ask your ambassadors - 'What content would you have liked to see while you were doing your research about where you wanted to study?'. Once you gathered those content ideas from your ambassadors, the best way to make sure they all come to fruition is to schedule them in the Content Schedule. This will enable you to align your work with your ambassadors with the social media and marketing strategy and always have user-generated content on hand that you can share. Here are some of the content trends that might come up during your brainstorming sessions. 

Catching up regularly with your ambassadors benefits both you and them. Your ambassadors get a sense of community by meeting the other students, sharing ideas and building friendships. In turn, this enables you to work closely with your ambassadors and make sure they are engaged and supported in their roles. 

Wendy, a student ambassador representing Intake talks about the impact that the ambassador role had on her:

If you want to find out more about The Ambassador Platform and how we can help you take your ambassador program to the next level, don't hesitate to book a demo with us or start your free trial.