The Ultimate Guide: Running a Successful Student Ambassadors Program

💡 Driving student-led engagement is so crucial because it encourages student to student connections and makes it easier to attract the community to utilize the resources that they may not know about otherwise.

Why did UTRGV start the Blackstone Launchpad Student Ambassador Program?

Problem:

• Since their Blackstone Launchpad Center is not located on a campus, they stuggled obtaining student traffic, having visibility into life on campus, and stability with students and staff
• They wanted to have more of an impact on empowering students and getting them involved
• They wanted to increase student engagement in their entrepreneurship program

Solution:

• Creating a student-led ambassador program to increase entrepreneurial engagement within each University and the community at large

4 Month Step-by-Step Timeline for Launching a Student Ambassador Program

Biggest challenges to overcome when driving student-led engagement:

• Figuring out how to attract student ambassadors
• Figuring out the best way to train ambassadors and make them experts on everything Blackstone Launchpad offers
• Figuring out how to make the ambassador experience impactful, enjoyable, and meaningful for the students
• Figuring out how to treat student ambassadors like full-time members of the team

Solutions for creating a successful program:

• Through trial and error, decide how many ambassadors would be a good fit for your school - UTRGV decided having two at each school would work best
• Dedicate two full weeks to onboarding and training the ambassadors on their main tasks - UTRGV has three main tasks for ambassadors
• Have check in calls with the ambassadors every week
• To make them feel like full-time, professional employees, create business cards and email signatures for the student ambassadors

Give Your Ambassadors Direction and They'll Run With It

UTRGV Ambassadors' primary responsibilities:

1. Tabling Events
2. Professor Outreach/Classroom Presentations
3. Student Organization Presentations

Setting Incentives

In order to do this, they created the milestone system - set goals for your student ambassadors to reach:

• Each of the 4 ambassadors has 3 milestones of 250 students reached
• Every milestone = $50 gift card for student ambassador

Tracking Metrics

So far, out of the 3,000 student outreach goal, they have reached a total of 1,371 students in just 4 months.📈

How the student engagement increased across the campuses because of student ambassadors:

• 758 students were engaged through tabling events
• 539 students were engaged through classroom participation
• 74 students were engaged through student organization presentations

“One of our main goals is for students to sign up onto StartupTree so that we have them in our distribution list and they know all about our programs. It will be more efficient and effective than tracking by paper. Starting this fall, each Ambassador will have a tracking link. When they have their tabling events or send out emails, they will easily be able to track and share their student engagement with us.” - Stephanie Mendez, Manager at UTRGV Center for Innovation and Commercialization

"Having tracking links is wonderful because you can see where everyone is coming from. Since we started the program 4 short months ago, we were able to double our StartupTree users and engagement within StartupTree." - Natalia De La Garza, Blackstone Launchpad Ambassador Lead at UTRGV Center for Innovation and Commercialization

Creating a Positive Work Culture

How to empower your student ambassadors:

• Have professional development opportunities - Encourage student ambassadors to participate in entrepreneurship bootcamps and events to increase their entrepreneurial knowledge.
• "It is mindblowing when you genuinely trust your students."
• Provide incentives and motivations - Have events where they can go to connect with like-minded individuals.
• Provide an experiential learning opportunity - Work hard, play hard, and pay it forward.
• Have an overall student-led program with flexible schedules - Create the best possible experince you can for your student ambassadors. You are lucky to have them!
• Give the student ambassadors control over their schedules and ownership of where and when they want to hold events.

Running an Ambassadors Program: Best Practices

1. Spend time onboarding and creating personal connections

• Team Building exercises and icebreakers
• Create an ideal opportunity to increase employee engagement and morale

• Provide resources and structures for the student ambassadors to follow
• Have these items for them to made the presentations and events easier
• Create a rough syllabus for the student ambassadors to follow

• Leave flyers and brochures for them to pass out

• Provide small goodie incentives or snacks to increase engagement
• Physical incentives must be things that others actually want
• Create interactive games

Closing Tips from UTRGV

Do’s:

• Be Proactive - Go look for students, don’t wait for them to come to you.
• Create Personal Relationships - Networking and creating personal relationships opens a lot of doors; it will increase engagement from the student body.
• Be strategic with Outreach Efforts - Collaborate with university departments and student organizations to get the word out; have them refer students to your department.
• KPI's - Keep track of where engagement is coming from to see what works best; tracking links provided by StartupTree are useful.

Don'ts:

• Cold Emailing = Not Effective - Give time to create personal relationships with professors and deans.
• Don't wait for students to come to you - Again, reach out to students!