Glendon’s eAmbassador Team
The eAmbassador Team was borne of a shoestring budget and a mission to revolutionize Glendon’s nonexistent digital recruitment strategy.
Its founding principle: to use social media and blogging platforms to offer prospective students a glimpse into campus life that was unfiltered by the marketing department.
Within 3 years of the program’s inception, the eAmbassador positions had become a coveted role on campus, with the team size having tripled due to a robust applicant pool due in no small part to word of mouth, eAmbassador visibility in campus leadership positions, and a solid recruitment/succession plan.
Team structure
Paid vs volunteer
Throughout my tenure on campus, the core team existed as a group of 5-6 paid students and was supplemented by an equally-important team of 10-11 volunteer bloggers.
The paid team was held to a higher standard of accountability than the volunteers: they demonstrated a firm grasp on what it took to build a digital persona and consistently created stellar content. I often relied on them as leaders and mentors for the more junior students.
I often framed the volunteer roles as great introductory or “trial” runs for junior students; it was an opportunity for them to try on the blogger role to see how it fit before jumping in with both feet. As with most volunteer roles, these students had a smaller hourly commitment per week than their paid counterparts.
Training + Development
I believe that a key component in management — especially with managing student volunteers who work remotely — is frequent contact, ample support, consistent + friendly feedback, and a lot of gratitude. Nobody wants to participate in a program where they feel unappreciated, forgotten, or taken advantage of.
To this point, our team training structure involved a kickoff bootcamp weekend where we would review the goals of the role, fundamentals about the business of student recruitment, some self-reflection exercises to help them develop a persona, and more.
From there, we ran monthly “in-services” where the team could come together in a safe environment to share successes, brainstorm challenges, and learn from each other.
We also used a private Facebook group to connect with each other between in-services, where we’d often share memes and jokes, ask questions, and give each other shout-outs about particularly poignant posts.
A photo taken from an eAmbassador’s t-shirt during an orientation week event
Measurement + success
In addition to the eAmbassadors’ influencer status on campus, this team was regularly rated by incoming students as a significant factor in their decision-making processes and became the foundation for much of the other work that I did at Glendon.
As the team matured, the paid team also became a source of new content for the recruitment portfolio, assisting – in addition to their eAmbassador blogs – with content ideation and social community management for our institutional Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr accounts.
Other places my work with student content creators has been featured:
Conference talks: An Army of Students: Leveraging student talents to create stellar content and showcase campus community
#PSEWEB blog: 10 resources for training student content creators (that won’t break the bank): 2019