Wondering what the gold standard to aim for looks like? Take a look through this article on some advice around best practice for working with your ambassadors.
Onboarding
- Ensure you have a clear understanding of what steps are required to successfully onboard yourself and your ambassadors onto the platform
- Identify who within your team will be responsible for various aspects of running the P2P programme at your institution and take the following into consideration:
- Who will implement the platform from a technical perspective? (Setting up the TAP account, embedding the Feed onto your website, implementing pop cards and/or other website promotions, integration between TAP and your CRM).
- Who is responsible for recruiting, training and managing the ambassadors?
- Who can ambassadors add into conversations should they need any additional help answering a question put forward by a prospective student?
- Who will be working with the ambassadors on producing content?
- Who will promote the opportunity to connect with ambassadors, to your prospective students through various marketing activities and campaigns?
- Who will review the data and results of the P2P interactions?
Ambassador Management
We'd highly recommend watching this webinar that runs through some advice from both our team, as well as some of our best partners in the community on how to manage an ambassador programme successfully. Engaged and happy ambassadors are key to successful P2P programmes and there a number of things that you might want to factor in, when working with ambassadors:
- Thorough training of ambassadors to include technical training of the platform, how to manage conversations, safeguarding, roles and responsibilities of your wider team if they will be working with the ambassadors as well as expectations on response times to both conversations and content requests from yourselves.
- Keep it fun! Remember that they will want to feel part of a community and it's important to remind them they have peers working with them. Set up regular meetings with them, (this might be every couple of months, or one a term for example) and make sure to share feedback as well as upcoming plans with them such as a content campaign you'll be working with them on soon.
- Remind them of the impact they're having - as part of the regular catch ups you have with them, it's a good thing to show them how many students they've helped as a collective over the last couple of months/term. Students often put themselves forward to be an ambassador to help 'give back' to their wider community.
- Keep your ambassadors engaged on the platform by awarding payment or prizes for the work that they're doing. Free pizza, university merch, training modules, and/or coffee catch ups never go amiss! Here are some more ideas and tips on how to keep your ambassadors incentivized
- Your ambassadors are an excellent panel of experts - you can work with them to run focus groups as and when you need insights into the student voice when running any general brand work.
Marketing your Ambassadors
This is one of the key factors in the success of P2P programmes. We want to make sure your prospective students know that the opportunity to connect with ambassadors exists and this is primarily achieved through frequent marketing activities. Take a look through a generic framework for how you might manage this:
- Launch campaign - When you first go live with your Feed, you want to ensure that you've planned a campaign to introduce this new, exciting opportunity to your target audience.
- Conversion campaigns - Are you trying to encourage a student to submit an application, accept an offer and/or enrol? These are prime times in the student journey to ensure you're including at least one email campaign in your sequences to notify students that they can learn more from someone like them. The more personalised, the better! For example, if you're sending an email out to your offer holders from a specific market, why not promote the profile of an ambassador from that same market?
- Online events - If you're not already, you should definitely be including your ambassadors in online events that you run for prospective students. You can incorporate you ambassadors into a range of events through our Streams feature so that your prospective students can access authentic insights about the experience of studying at your institution, all from one place.
You could run ambassador Q&As, advice on applications, finding accommodation, info sessions with academics - check out University of Galway for some inspiration. - Complementing in-person activities - Why not encourage students to continue the conversation by connecting with ambassadors online, before and after in-person events? This way you're regularly nurturing these students and maintaining a personal connection with them, through several touchpoints. We've seen this achieved in all sorts of ways - polaroid pictures of ambassadors and QR codes to their profiles distributed at events, postcards displaying the same handed out during Open Days, slides as part of a presentation that highlight the opportunity to speak with real students.
Working with TAP
If you're working with a Customer Success Manager (CSM), think about whether you would benefit from regular catch ups and if so, set up recurring meetings with them, at a cadence that suits you. Have a think about what campaigns or activities you currently have scheduled to connect with your prospective students, and be ready to discuss these with your CSM so that they can help you identify how we can embed your ambassadors into some of that outreach.
Even if you're not working with a CSM, there are always ample opportunities to connect with us and learn what's happening in the world of P2P in higher education:
- Connect with us on LinkedIn
- Subscribe to our newsletter
- Join us for our webinars, where we're often joined by guest speakers who are industry experts
- Read through our whitepapers for research on the student voice and more best practice when it comes to using P2P
- Come see us in-person at events that we'll be at
- Drop us a line! Always happy to hear from everyone at support@theambassadorplatform.com 😊