Building a Mighty Ambassador Network Using a Virtual Hub

A dedicated advocacy ambassador is worth their weight in gold! When our clients find a person who will devote their time to understanding their issues, has a powerful story to share and desires to build relationships with policymakers, we counsel them to nurture these individuals through an ongoing Ambassador program. By giving them an opportunity to serve as an ambassador for your organization, you keep them engaged and motivated to activate when needed.

At CURA Strategies, we’ve found that a well-organized and easy-to-use virtual hub makes an ongoing Ambassador program exponentially more effective and efficient. Our clients’ ambassadors are loving the on-demand resources, training and community they have found online using our platforms. One example is our work with building and maintaining the Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) Foundation’s ambassador program: Advocacy Champions Network (ACN).

Since launching the PKD Foundation’s ACN online community in the fall of 2023—and with ongoing vigilant management—we saw significant improvements in advocate engagement. Collectively, PKD’s ambassadors have attended more meetings with legislators, drafted letters to the editor (LTEs) and op-eds for local publications, and secured more proclamation requests in recognition of PKD Awareness Day. During this year’s August Recess, PKD’s ambassadors submitted seven PKD Awareness Day proclamations to various states, drafted and pitched op-eds for inclusion in their local publications and scheduled in-district congressional meetings to capitalize on legislators’ time home from Capitol Hill. The resource hub also helped CURA facilitate a successful Virtual Advocacy Day for the Foundation this past year, which involved nearly 110 advocates from 30 states participating in 120+ congressional meetings—a significant increase compared to the previous year when we did not have as robust of an online platform in place.

Learn more about CURA’s award-winning work with the PKD Foundation. We recently won the Women in GR award for Excellence in Communications in Advocacy for our work with the PKD Foundation!

Based on our experience in building online communities for the PKD Foundation and other clients, we’ve identified four key tips for building an effective online grassroots advocacy community:

1. The platform must be easy to administer, customizable and user-friendly.
Customization is essential. Your advocacy platform should cater to advocates of varying levels of experience while being accessible across all devices. Online hubs should be both mobile and desktop-friendly, ensuring that all advocates can easily navigate the platform. It should also be user-friendly and be password protected so you provide a safe space for conversation.

While there are many out-of-the-box platforms available that offer scalability and flexibility for advocacy groups, including Mighty Networks, NationBuilder and Mobilize, we prefer to use Mighty Networks for its ease of use, scalability, affordability, and robust community-building features. The platform also allows you to measure member engagement, contributions and interactions (more on the importance of measurement later in this blog). This feature allows you to cater to individual advocates in their personal journeys, providing them with a more personalized experience.

2. Make the platform a one-stop-shop for all Ambassador communications
The more ambassadors use and engage with the platform, the more efficient and effective your program will be. So, include all the critical information they need and continually point them to the hub to find answers and get updates. The hub should include most (ideally all) of the following features.

• Online Advocacy Training: Provide advocacy 101 training materials and videos such as the importance of advocacy, how to tell your story to policymakers, and the legislation process. Offer trainings in video format with transcripts and include a quiz to reinforce the key points. Completion of this training should be a prerequisite for being a member of the Ambassador program to ensure they master the fundamentals to be effective. For the PKD Foundation’s ACN online hub, we embedded the videos and quizzes from CURA’s Advocacy Academy training, which is available to the public.
• Resources and Material Hub: The platform should have a well-organized hub of resources including issue briefs, leave behinds and how-to guides such as drafting an LTE/op-ed or submitting proclamation requests across different states.
• Discussion Channel: Providing a closed online discussion forum keeps advocates engaged, promotes community, and allows ambassadors to share best practices, issue updates and lessons they have learned with one another.
• Calendar of Events: Having a calendar feature eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) the countless email exchanges with ambassadors by providing the schedule and logistical information for upcoming webinars and events all in one place. It also allows you to record events and make past events available on demand.
• Member Discovery Feature: Although not a requirement, including a discovery feature where ambassadors can find other members near them is also valuable for building your advocate network. The discovery feature for the PKD Foundation’s hub has inspired in-person meet-ups of patient ambassadors as they can easily see where other ambassadors are geographically located.

3. Provide Ongoing Training, Issue Updates and Resources to Drive Advocacy Wins
An online platform is not something you can “set and forget.” It requires a dedicated admin(s) to regularly monitor, post and react on discussion channels/forums, refresh materials and optimize the platform to meet the needs of the ambassadors. Our PKD ACN admin is in the platform at least twice a week to comment on posts. We also have email alerts set so we can see when a new community comment has been posted that requires timely attention.

Well-trained, well-equipped advocates are the cornerstone of long-term legislative success. In addition to mandating that your advocates take any trainings you offer through the hub, make sure you’re continually updating your ambassadors about legislative progress and new issues. You also want to create or refresh resources as issues and research evolve. Seek feedback from your ambassadors to make sure the resources you provide are helpful to them.

4. Measure What Matters: Tracking Engagement and Impact
Communicating the value and impact of advocacy can be hard, particularly to internal leadership. As the saying goes—if it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed. Having an all-inclusive, central hub allows you to more accurately track the efforts and progress of individuals and provides analytics on what resonates most with the community. By tracking high-performing posts, most downloaded content and training progress, you can tailor your content to your advocates in real-time. You can also see which ambassadors are the most engaged.

Are you ready to super-charge your ambassador program with a communications revamp? Or interested in starting an ambassador program? CURA can help! 

At CURA Strategies, we believe in mobilizing our clients’ missions, utilizing the expertise of our tested bipartisan team along with innovative tools to help advocates develop the skills they need to speak up on behalf of their communities. We did it for PKD Foundation’s Advocacy Champions Network. We can do it for you!

If we can help your advocates be better prepared for your next Hill Day—or establish and manage a standing ambassador network to be activated at a moment’s notice—let us know by reaching out to us today!