arts ambassador blog

Your Ambassador Programme will be unique to your project or organisation but this simple checklist should give you a good framework to start off with.

• Choose your Approach
- Choose whether you just want to promote the odd event or whether you want to develop new audiences over the long-term
- Think carefully: can you afford the time, money and effort required to do this properly?

• Research & Development: Part 1
- Conduct any audience research or community consultation required

• Planning
- Confirm your project partners
- Plan your monitoring and evaluation: brief all partners and staff on monitoring procedures and schedule regular project reviews
- Design a draft Exit or Continuation Strategy

• Finance
- Calculate likely costs
- Decide how you will finance the project: earned income, fundraising or both?
- Approach potential sponsors and partners

• Management
- Decide on the number and type of Ambassadors you need and whether you will need a Project Manager
- Consider what extra benefits you can offer your Ambassadors
- Consider whether you need a panel or a community forum
- Organise an administrative and meeting space for your Ambassadors if needed
- If required, decide on a ticket distribution system with Box office
- Look at how communication is to be conducted: via briefings, meetings, emails etc

• Recruitment
- Decide whether your Ambassadors will be paid or voluntary
- Create a formal or informal ‘job description’.
- Recruit Project Managers and Ambassadors

• Research & Development: Part 2
- Allow time for your Ambassadors to find new contacts and build relationships
- Allow time for relationship-building between project partners

• Get Started
Put your Ambassador programme into action!

• Exit Strategy
- Put your Exit or Continuation Strategy into action or revise.

A client recently asked me to create a short set of Do’s and Don’ts for her new ambassador team in terms of publicity activities. This isn’t really a set of Do’s and Don’t, more a set of questions its worth asking yourself before you send your team of ambassadors out to spread the word. You can also find a lot of Do’s and Dont’s for ambassador programmes in general, in the free Guide to Working with Arts Ambassadors but this list below is an updated quick list for agreeing publicity boundaries with a new team.

The list covers some common pitfalls but remember, in reality a good, creative ambassador team will come to you and make you consider lots of things you hadn’t thought of before (which is great), so don’t think of this as the definitive list.

Creating Guidelines
Think about the areas shown below and then create a set of guidelines. Detail which actions must be cleared with you first (eg. putting your logo on a piece of print they have created).

Then discuss these areas with your ambassador – they may suggest things you want to add or eliminate from their action plan. A discussion may draw you to reconsider some things, for example, you may set a guide of ‘no Press contact’, but then realise an email sent to a local community newsletter is not the same as sending one to The Independent newspaper.

Below are some key subjects that you may want to consider discussing with your ambassadors:

• Their Plan of Action
What are they proposing to do? Asking your ambassadors to create an action plan serves several purposes:
- The team can share ideas with each other
- You can spot any potential problems or opportunities
- You can set benchmarks for activity levels
- You can support your ambassadors properly and acknowledge them when they’ve done the work

I did this with one team of ambassadors who were initially reluctant to share their word of mouth ideas. “We know what we are doing” , they protested. However, once they shared their top tips they found that they all had very different approaches. This was very enlightening for them and for the project manager.

• Care of Your Brand
Get clear: what are the things you do and don’t want your ambassador to say about your brand? You can’t really be too prescriptive about this – you want your word of mouth to be natural and in their own words but there may be some things that would be a complete no-no.

• Press, Publicity, PR
Do you want your Ambassador to do the following?
- Send out their own press releases? To Community newsletters? What about to The Guardian?
- Create their own flyers? With your logo? on them?
- Conduct radio interviews on your behalf? With Community radio? What about mainstream radio stations?
- Do presentations on your behalf? At the Local business breakfast? Women’s Institute?
- Send out mass emails?

• Meeting Targets
Let ambassadors know that its better to find out why potential attenders say no to an offer than to push them to attend an event to meet ambassador programme targets. Train them in what they could offer if people say no. How about asking them to join the mailing list?

• Record-Keeping
Think about what kind of information you want your ambassadors to bring back to you, eg, let ambassadors know its useful for them to ask contacts to join a database/mailing-list. Yes its obvious to you, but unless you ask it may not happen.

• Times of Contact
Ambassador teams can be very enthusiastic and request a lot of your time and attention. When do you as a manager want to be contacted? Are there set times of the week you are happier to have a call outside of any set meetings?