The challenge

When it comes to engaging prospective students in their enrolment journey, connecting them with current students is a key piece of the puzzle, and one that can lead future students to make decisions more confidently. As a believer in peer-to-peer marketing, Huron implemented an alternative platform to enable their team of student ambassadors to share their experiences with future students.

Only, it didn’t quite deliver the results they were expecting, to the point that the team started looking for alternatives in the peer-to-peer space. But how do you switch platforms smoothly without disrupting existing processes and adding to a busy workload?

User-Friendly Interface

The Ambassador app is user friendly, making it easier for Ambassadors to engage with it regularly

Powerful Admin Dashboard

With its analytics and reporting tools, the team can effectively monitor engagement and plan their next steps accordingly

User Generated Content

The social media-style UGC section of the Feed is authentic and vibrant, creating a sense of community

Fanshawe College started their journey by building their Digital Ambassador team. They wanted their ambassadors to come across as authentic and personable without being overly institutional. Diversity of representation was also incredibly important to them. To select their ambassadors, they took into account the student's program of study, and asked each candidate to send a short video talking about themselves and why they wanted to be an ambassador.

When they started the program, they recruited 18 ambassadors hosted a workshop on how to use The Ambassador Platform, and provided guidance on how to approach chat conversations with prospective students; the team also created a WhatsApp group to foster a sense of community among the ambassadors and exchange advice.

To ensure their ambassador program ran smoothly, the Fanshawe team built a fantastic incentivization system, including a certificate of participation and weekly giveaways for the ambassadors who spoke to the most students.

In only 18 months, Fanshawe College scaled its ambassador team from 18 students to 78 without scaling its admin team. If you want to find out how they did this, check out our Customer Spotlight webinar with Priyank Mistri, Digital Recruiter at Fanshawe College.

Screenshot 2022-03-03 10.57.04

Why The Ambassador Platform

Huron's team needed a solution that would deliver on three key problem areas:

More engaging content - their previous platform focused on long-form content like blogs, making ambassador involvement challenging, and there was no real sense of community among them.
Better student engagement - they found that the alternative platform didn’t showcase student life in an accessible and eye-catching way.
Better reporting - They needed a solution with strong reporting features to track ambassador activity and prospective students’ engagement.

The Ambassador Platform ticked all three boxes (and more), prompting Huron University College to take the leap.

The Switch

The idea of switching providers from an established service is always daunting - the Huron team had questions round the length and difficulty of the transition process. Would the staff embrace it? Would the ambassadors be resistant to the change? Once it was all said and done, they found the switch easier and quicker than expected:

Some of the TAP team visited the Huron team in person to provide initial support and guidance.
The onboarding guides and resources on the Dashboard were very handy.
The Ambassador Training Centre made ambassador onboarding a smooth process (and the team didn’t need to personally chase and train ambassador.

“Our team faced challenges in how to motivate students to create content, where to gather this content, and where to showcase it. One of the key factors that attracts students to our university is our strong sense of community, but it's been difficult for prospective students and their families to truly understand what our community is like. TAP's content tab is the perfect solution to this problem: our Student Ambassadors enjoy sharing their day-to-day experiences, and this has made a significant difference in allowing us to share their stories while our recruitment team travels the world to attract the next generation of students!”

Linea Strong,

Director, Recruitment
Huron at Western

“Using TAP has completely changed how I interact with potential university students. I love that I can use the application like social media, and display pictures of my university life. Building an identity on the platform allows students to have a better perspective of what student life at Huron looks like. Personally, I find it to be much more engaging than the platform we were using before because it is more user friendly and modelled more similarly to apps I interact with on a daily basis”

Student Ambassador
Huron at Western

The Experience

The Huron team fully embraced The Ambassador Platform, and deemed the rollout a success. Since then:

Collaboration between admin staff and ambassadors has improved, and so has the content output, thanks to some friendly competition with prizes awarded to the most engaged ambassadors.
The quality of peer-to-peer conversation has increased. More engaged ambassadors = faster responses and longer interactions with prospective students.
Comprehensive student engagement tracking led to better leads for the Student Recruitment team.

By ticking all the boxes, TAP provides better value to Huron University College. If you are also looking for a more effective peer-to-peer platform, our team can help.

Do you want to know how we can help you show your prospects what it's really like to be part of your institution? Book a call with the team today.

Huron at Western

About Huron University College