Five tips for working with your digital student ambassadors - a workshop with NCUK

Are you struggling to engage your student ambassadors to work on different user-generated content projects? 

Get inspiration from NCUK's Ambassador Workshop and recharge your collaboration with your ambassador team. In April 2022 I had the pleasure of taking part in the Student Ambassador Workshop organized by NCUK for seven of their digital student ambassadors in their office in Manchester.

Meeting in person can be invaluable 

After a couple of years of online meetings and training sessions, it was surreal to meet the NCUK team and their digital student ambassadors in person, but nonetheless very exciting. Three weeks later, the NCUK team has already noticed an improvement in the engagement levels of their ambassadors and the quality of the content they have been submitting which reinforced how beneficial this session was both for the ambassadors and the admins. 

I want to share with you some key tips from this workshop and hopefully, inspire you to meet up with your ambassadors and work more closely with them, particularly when it comes to different marketing campaigns. 

5 tips for working with student ambassadors:

1) Enabling your ambassadors to meet each other and chat about their experiences as well as share feedback with you is incredibly valuable.

2) You can count on your ambassadors to help you with ideas as well as to create great content for your marketing campaigns.

3) Your ambassadors are very receptive to suggestions and feedback as long as you find the right channel to communicate with them (and meeting face to face from time to time might be just the right way!). This will save your team a lot of time chasing ambassadors to answer messages or respond to content requests.

4) Your ambassadors value the experience and skills they are building in this role, sometimes more than the rewards or compensation they are offered. So make sure you highlight that in the recruitment process and remind your ambassadors that they can use the TAP Career Reference when they apply for jobs or internships.

5) Your ambassadors are a fountain of information when it comes to understanding what matters to your prospective students, so ask them about their university research process and what was important to them at the time and you'll most definitely get a lot of ideas for different campaigns you could run. 

Student ambassador workshops are excellent collaboration and feedback opportunities

It's incredible how many great ideas and insights the ambassadors were able to share in the 2-hour session and how receptive they were to learn from each other's experiences and work together to come up with different content, blog, and FAQ suggestions. They were very keen to share their feedback on how their experience as a student was and what could be improved as well as simple things like what means of communication they prefer when it comes to their responsibilities as ambassadors. 

While it is nice to meet in person, it may be difficult to get all the ambassadors together, so don't shy away from running a similar session online. It's all about getting people together and allowing them to chat with each other and feel like they are valued members of your team. 

You can read NCUK's article about this event here if you're curious to find out more about their work with digital student ambassadors.