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Membership Management

Building Member Ambassadors at Your Small-Staff Association

MemberClicks Avatar MemberClicks June 5, 2017
Table of Contents
2 min read

You’ve probably read here and there about the importance of having member ambassadors. These people advocate on behalf of your association. They share your blog posts, retweet your tweets, promote your upcoming events, etc.

Sounds great, right? But the problem lies in acquiring member ambassadors. How do you actually get your members to participate in such activity?

One word: rewards. People are more inclined to do something when there’s something in it for them.

That said, why not consider creating a formal member ambassador program? It could look something like this:

  • Send out an email (or a few emails, rather) asking your members to sign up to become member ambassadors
  • Explain that if they sign up, you’ll send them emails with content to share on their various social media sites
  • The more they share, the more points they’ll earn (and points = prizes)

Now what kind of prizes are we talking? Well it could be anything! A shirt or mug with your organization’s logo, a discount on event registration, a free webinar of their choice, etc. The point being, though, that they get something for their time and effort.

Now you might be wondering, how can you actually track this? Well there are a few different ways you could go about doing it:

  • You could ask your ambassadors to send you reports – One option to track who’s actually sharing your organization’s content is to ask your ambassadors to send you monthly or even quarterly reports, showcasing their social media activity (as it relates to your organization, of course). These reports could be as simple as screenshots in a Word doc. You could then allocate points accordingly.
  • You could ask your ambassadors to tag you and/or use a certain hashtag in their posts – To take the burden of reporting off your members, you could ask your ambassadors to tag you in their posts and/or use a certain hashtag. That way, you can easily check in to see who’s actually sharing – and how often.
  • You could take advantage of social media ambassador software (yes, there is such a thing!) – Now if your ambassador program is pretty big (we’re talking hundreds of members), you may want to turn to some kind of software. Believe it or not, there IS software out there designed to help you implement a successful social media ambassador program. (One option: SocialToaster.)

Now as you can see, there are a MULTITUDE of ways to set up/execute a member ambassador program. But the point, again, is to reward your members for engaging with and advocating on behalf of your small-staff association.

Do you have a member ambassador program in place? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

And for more tips on engaging your members and potential members through social media, check out our free social media guide!

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