Cultivating Community Ambassadors: Online Community Meetup Recap

The Online Community Meetup ended another successful year with an open forum on the topic of super fans and ambassador programs.

Bea Dominguez, online community curator at TechSoup, kicked off the meetup with an overview of TechSoup’s Ambassador Program. Then people discussed how they’ve implemented ambassador programs and shared lessons they’ve picked up along the way.

Why Have an Ambassador Program?

Ambassador programs bring more members into your community by drawing upon the enthusiasm of your super fans.

Ambassador programs harness the authentic voice of your super fans, which is more powerful than traditional marketing at spreading your organization’s message.

The TechSoup Forum Royal Court, TechSoup’s oldest online community, has provided many lessons for structuring its current ambassador program. Community managers also echoed these lessons as they discussed similar programs at their organizations.

If your organization is looking to implement an ambassador program, it helps to keep the following in mind:

1. Make Time, Give It Time: Cultivating community evangelists requires first having a community from which to recruit potential ambassadors. It will also take time to devise the structure of your program. Even after defining your program and recruiting community evangelists, it will take additional time for your program to produce results.
2. Know Your Community — Identify Potential Ambassadors: Not every super fan has what it takes to be a community ambassador. As one meetup participant pointed out, there is a difference, and often a fine line, between ambassadors, power users, and elders. Trust also comes into play as ambassadors should be capable of being responsible stewards of your community and organization’s values and mission.
3. Start Small, Grow Big: It is better to have a small number of truly passionate ambassadors than a large number of partially or minimally engaged community members. Empower your ambassadors while also moving other potential ambassadors up the ladder of engagement.
4. Communicate and Define Guidelines: How your organization structures its ambassador program depends on the size of both your staff and your community and how many volunteers you need to help manage your goals. The structure of your program should be clear so ambassadors know what is being asked of them.
5. Recognize Your Ambassadors: It was agreed that creating super fans requires recognizing community members for their contributions. Recognition can come in many forms, from a thank-you tweet to taking someone out for a coffee. It's worth remembering that attaching a price to any transaction changes the perceived value of an action — so don’t structure rewards like you would compensation.

Participants also took some time to explore the negatives of super fan communities. Specifically, maintaining ambassador programs requires check-ins with your ambassadors.

The nature of volunteering means that as personal circumstances change, program ambassadors might not have full capacity for engagement. A good community manager will be able to recognize this and intervene.

Proper intervention can ensure that a community member will come back at their previous capacity with renewed enthusiasm for serving the community and organization.