Managing Your Ambassadors Remotely

There has never been a more important time to have a digital student ambassador scheme.

As prospective students and applicants face uncertainty and anxiety about their Higher Education future, a friendly face to support them on their journey can make a huge difference.

We’ve previously shared top tips for recruiting those ambassadors remotely – and now we want to share some tips for managing and motivating your ambassadors from afar.

Here are four top tips for keeping your crack team of student ambassadors together and motivated, even while you’re physically apart.

Facilitate communication between ambassadors

So many ambassadors enjoy being part of the ambassador community that can foster on campus – meeting new friends and socialising outside of work. I’ve written an entire blog on that community feeling and how you can nurture it.

But when you’re separated, it might seem almost impossible. It doesn’t have to be. Keeping your ambassadors connected is a great way to help them feel closer.

One way you can do this, that you might not have considered, is using Unibuddy Live! You can host your own group chat amongst ambassadors, where they can discuss concerns and issues they may have experienced.

Of, if you’re not using Unibuddy Live, you could ask your ambassadors to create a Facebook or WhatsApp group for them to vent/discuss!

Virtual social events

At Unibuddy we’ve been doing fun social events when we can. Last week, we had a quiz on Zoom – where each team member sent in a fact about themselves, a baby picture or a true/false statement about themselves and we had to guess who’s who. 

These sort of virtual socials are a great way to get to know each other if you didn’t already, or keep the community spirit alive if you did!

If you’ve got the budget, a small prize or maybe even a JustEat voucher for all your ambassadors to ‘share’ a takeaway would add to the event.

Check-in with them

It’s a hectic time at the minute, and it can be easy to forget, but checking in with your ambassadors is still as important as ever.

Make sure to check-in with them from time to time. If you’re using Unibuddy, you could use our Broadcast message feature to reach out to them. Or, you could drop them a personal email or set up a 30 min google hangouts/zoom call. 

Talk over any issues or concerns they may have around their workload or the conversations they are having. It’s a crazy time for everyone, so they might just be grateful for an opportunity to chat about being stuck at home or studying remotely. 

Recognition

We’ve always talked about the importance of making sure that the ambassadors feel recognised for their efforts. How do you do that when you are working apart? 

When working on your own all day it’s difficult to see the impact of your work on the wider picture. Even some positive feedback on the impact they are making goes a long way. 

By sharing some top-level statistics with the student ambassadors, they can start to understand and see the impact they’re having. You could try sharing weekly or monthly statistics on how many conversations have been had overall. Or, if you can, how many of the students they spoke to accepted their offer. 

All of these strategies will help your ambassadors to feel like part of something, part of a community, even though they’re at home on their own.