A fundraising ambassador is a volunteer who lends you their voice and their network. They are not staff, and they are not professional fundraisers. They are alumni, students, parents, trustees, colleagues and friends of your cause who are willing to ask the people they know to give. Hubbub's ambassadors webinar defines the role simply: "I would define an ambassador as a volunteer that is willing to help your organization meet and hopefully exceed the goals you have." The work of an ambassador program is to find those people, make it easy for them to act, and keep them coming back. This guide explains how to do all three.

Why ambassadors work

The case for ambassadors rests on a stubborn fact about how people give: most of us do not respond to an institution asking for money, we respond to a friend. "One out of four people will give if asked by a friend," Hubbub's team explains. The conversion rate on a cold, branded solicitation from a development office is, by contrast, around 0.06 percent. When the ask comes from someone you know, you are far more likely to open the email, click and give. Ambassadors are how you put your appeal into the hands of people your supporters actually trust.

The second reason is reach. Social media platforms bury posts from institutional accounts, and those posts fade fast. "Social media messages usually have only like a minute to five-minute lifespan," a Hubbub consultant notes, "and if you're having more and more people post on your behalf, people are going to see it." A single post from your charity reaches a sliver of your followers. Fifty ambassadors posting in their own voices, to their own networks, on the same day, stack the odds back in your favor. You buy reach you could never buy with advertising, and you buy it with authenticity rather than budget.

This guide draws on best practice shared by Hubbub's specialists in their webinar "Creating engaged ambassador communities", and on the experience of institutions who have built ambassador programs around Giving Days and Challenge Weeks. It covers whether a program is right for you, how to recruit and brief ambassadors, the technology that makes them effective, how to motivate and gamify their participation, how they fit a Giving Day or Challenge Week, and how to steward them so the program compounds year on year.

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Is an ambassador program right for you

The most common objection comes from smaller teams, and it is usually wrong. "I'm a small institution, I don't have the resources to do all this ambassador work, why should I do it?" is a question Hubbub's team hears all the time. The answer is that you do not have to do everything. "One size does not have to fit all. There are different types of techniques that you can use, anything from toolkits to videos to lead volunteers. But the most important thing is you don't have to do all those. Pick and choose what you're comfortable with, but it is most important that you actually jump in and just try it, because you'll see a dramatic difference with a Giving Day or a campaign while using ambassadors than without." The entry bar is low.

What a program does need is one person who owns it. Recruiting, briefing, building journeys and keeping ambassadors warm is real work, and it competes for attention with the income targets that dominate any campaign. As a Hubbub consultant puts it, managing ambassadors "can seem a lot of work, and to be honest, it is. But if you have a team with alumni relations colleagues or volunteer colleagues or just a willing volunteer in your office who is happy to look after the management of those ambassadors, do use those colleagues to help you." If you can name one person, on staff or volunteer, who will own the ambassador relationship from recruitment through to the final thank you, you have the foundation for a program. If you cannot, start smaller: recruit a handful of lead volunteers, see what they generate, and grow from there.

A program also suits some communities better than others. Where affinity is strong, the format works even when the numbers are modest. Oxbridge colleges and schools, a Hubbub consultant notes, have "a smaller pool to call upon. However, that affinity within these communities is very strong, which makes them great for running giving days." A tight, passionate community of a few hundred can produce a more active ambassador corps than a sprawling alumni file with weak attachment. If your supporters genuinely care, you have ambassadors waiting to be asked.

Recruiting the right ambassadors

Recruitment runs in two waves, and the order matters. Start not with a mass appeal but with a small group of lead volunteers. These are, Hubbub's team explains, "people that can be on staff, passionate alumni, student employees, or enthusiastic friends and family that you think will be able to help lead the charge. You want these people to be your ones that will probably work a little bit harder or might have a little bit more time to dedicate than others, because the long-term goal is that then these people will then go and recruit their friends and family, and so on and so forth." Lead volunteers are not just your most active ambassadors. They are your recruitment engine, and their endorsement, sent to their own networks, is worth more than any email from head office.

Timing the second wave takes nerve, because most people sign up late. For a Giving Day, train and recruit lead volunteers "about three months before the day. This is probably at most. If you go any further than that, you might lose some momentum." The wider ambassador pool behaves differently. "Most ambassadors usually sign up just a few weeks in advance," a Hubbub consultant observes. "We're a last-minute culture, and usually people do things at the last minute." Do not panic when the early numbers look thin. The rush comes in the final two weeks, and often in the final week, so plan your recruitment communications to peak there rather than burning your energy too early.

Resist the temptation to set a precise ambassador target in your first year, because you have nothing to base it on. "Setting an ambassador target without running it first is very difficult to do," Hubbub's ambassadors webinar advises. "I'd recommend starting out with a few lead volunteers, seeing how many people are receptive to the idea, and then once you have a good idea of how many people you can have on board, then you might want to set an ambassador number." As a rough sense of scale, first-year goals have ranged from 20 to 30 ambassadors at smaller organizations up to 100 to 200 at larger ones, with the right figure depending heavily on institution size and engagement. The point of year one is simply to do it at all. "The whole point is that you actually attempted to do ambassadors for your first go around," Hubbub's team explains, "and then from year one to year two, just as we see a massive increase in Giving Days, you'll probably see a massive increase from ambassadors."

When you choose where to recruit, go where your audience already is. The right channel is not a fixed answer but a question about your own community. "It's the channels where your audience exists," a Hubbub consultant says. "So if you're after a particularly younger audience, I wouldn't say that Facebook is the place that you want to go recruit them from. If you're looking to recruit young ambassadors, you're going to be wanting to use channels like Instagram. Go where your audience is." Recruit on the platforms your supporters actually use, and lean on the channel where your own engagement is already strongest.

Briefing and equipping your ambassadors

Here is the mistake almost everyone makes: teams rush to recruit ambassadors before they have anything to give them to do. "A lot of people do make the mistake of trying to recruit them before they have any of the training materials done," the webinar warns. "I highly recommend that you want to begin by creating training materials for ambassadors before you start to recruit them." Build the kit first, then go looking for the people. An ambassador who signs up full of enthusiasm and is met with silence is an ambassador you have lost.

Sequence the kit after your branding, too, or you will only have to redo it. "You want to make sure that you aren't creating these materials before you've branded everything," Hubbub's team explains, "because once you have your marketing and your branding done, you're going to have to change it." For a Giving Day, prepare materials roughly four to six months out, once the look and feel of the day itself is settled, so the ambassador toolkit can simply inherit it.

Three kinds of material do the heavy lifting. Ambassador videos are short walkthroughs of the platform, the steps you want ambassadors to take, and your tips and tricks, including sample posts and testimonials from people explaining why they signed up. They let you train people who will never make it to a room. In-person workshops cover the same ground with handouts and face-to-face time, and they are where your lead volunteers come into their own. "If you can do in-person workshops, you're probably going to get a better return on your investment," a Hubbub consultant notes, "as these will have much more of an impact and get kind of the people that you know are going to be able to do the work for you." The centerpiece is the ambassador toolkit, a fully branded pack of ready-to-use posts, emails and images. "These are fully branded training packets with sample social posts and emails," Hubbub's team explains. "They tell your ambassadors kind of what exactly you need them to do. They make it easy."

A good toolkit follows a clear structure. The strongest example Hubbub cites is the University of York's Giving Day pack, and its shape is worth copying. It opens with a simple, branded checklist that tells ambassadors both what to do and when, broken into prepare-in-advance, get-excited, during-the-week and on-the-day phases. It tells them to follow the campaign accounts, sign up to the platform, plan posts ahead of time, and, crucially, to use their own words. "Using your own words gets the most amount of interaction," the webinar notes, "is when people will make their content their own." It hands ambassadors the campaign hashtag so posts stack together on a feed. It supplies images for social posts, profile photos and wallpapers. And it provides drag-and-drop copy for both social and email, with the dates already written in. The logic is simple: "Everyone has a busy day, so when you can just provide content that you can just literally drag and drop, copy and paste, it makes life a lot easier." You do the work so that your ambassadors only have to do the asking.

The technology that makes it work

Good ambassador technology removes the two things that stop volunteers in their tracks: not knowing what to post, and not knowing whether their effort mattered. Three features carry most of the weight.

The first is ready-made, shareable content delivered through a portal. Rather than emailing ambassadors a document and hoping, a portal pushes them a notification each time there is a new message to share, with the post written and the image attached. Warm people up to this habit before the campaign even starts, a Hubbub consultant advises: "Do start sending sharing messages through your Giving Day ambassador portal so that your ambassadors get used to seeing those notifications in their inbox, so that they get into the habit of sharing messages before the Giving Day." By the day itself, sharing is already routine.

The second is personal tracking links. On the Hubbub platform, each ambassador who signs up "will actually get their own unique URL, and it will track the number of clicks you get and the actual referred amounts that you raise on the Giving Day itself." This single feature changes the character of a program. It turns vague goodwill into measurable contribution, lets you thank people for what they specifically achieved, and gives you the data to prove the program works.

The third is a leaderboard with prizes. The Hubbub tool offers "different rankings, different prizes available for you to fill in," Hubbub's team explains. "We have a leaderboard, and whoever finishes within the top three or six will win a prize, and that's usually based upon the number of clicks that you get." A visible ranking turns individual effort into friendly competition, the subject of the next section. Underpinning all of this should be your campaign hashtag, so that ambassador posts aggregate on social feeds and, with enough volume, start to trend in your local area and reach people well beyond any single ambassador's network.

Motivating and gamifying participation

The mechanics of motivation are straightforward, and an ambassador who feels seen will act again and again. Start with incentives. "You want to make sure you're incentivizing your ambassadors with swag," a Hubbub consultant notes, "t-shirts from the university, water bottles, whatever you want to provide them." Pair the swag with the leaderboard prizes, and you have a structure that rewards effort without costing much. The webinar's own summary is blunt: "I have found that using a carrot on the end of a stick is the best way to go. It's a great way to get people involved."

The most powerful motivator, though, is not a prize but attention. During a campaign, alongside the public updates everyone sees, send individual ambassadors a personal note on their own progress. A Hubbub consultant is specific: "Consider sending individual emails to your ambassadors, sharing with them a personal update on their own progress. For example, the number of likes that they've generated, as well as the gifts they may have generated. This shows them that someone is paying attention to the impact that they are generating and encouraging them to keep going. And this is especially important if you have prizes and incentives for them." A leaderboard tells ambassadors where they stand. A personal email tells them you noticed.

Give people one thing to do at a time. The temptation is to hand ambassadors the full list and let them choose, but participation rises when each ask is single and clear. Break the journey into discrete actions: first, share the recruitment message to bring in others; then send an email on a named day; then share a story tied to a specific cause; and finally make their own gift just before the campaign opens, "encouraging them to be the first to participate so that they can spend the rest of their day encouraging participation through sharing." Each step is small enough to feel achievable, and the sequence builds naturally towards the campaign.

Two pieces of social proof make the whole thing easier. People are far more comfortable joining in when they can see others already taking part, so share examples from existing ambassadors early. "If you can create some of these internally with your lead ambassadors, they can help to demonstrate to others that people are already participating and that they don't necessarily have to be the first person." And remember that many ambassadors are motivated less by competition than by belonging. "Sometimes our ambassadors join because they want to feel exclusively a part of the team behind the Giving Day," a Hubbub consultant notes, "so if we can give them that access, then why not?" Behind-the-scenes updates and a sense of being on the inside cost you nothing and buy real loyalty.

Ambassadors in a Giving Day and a Challenge Week

Ambassadors are not a freestanding activity. They are the amplification layer that makes a Giving Day or a Challenge Week reach further than your own channels ever could. In a Giving Day, the rhythm is intense and compressed, often into 36 hours, and ambassadors carry the campaign across the gaps your institutional posts cannot reach. The ambassador journey maps neatly onto the day: a recruitment phase beforehand, with messages going both to those who have signed up and those who have not; real-time encouragement on the day itself, mixing calls to action with progress updates; and a wash-up phase afterwards. The cadence of that mix matters. "Mixing up both of these messages so that you can create an even balance that rewards your ambassadors as much as it thanks them," a Hubbub consultant says, "will go a long way towards getting them to take action again and again."

A Challenge Week works slightly differently, because the fundraisers are student clubs and societies promoting their own pages over roughly a week, but ambassadors are no less central to it. Here, ambassadors are the wider network each group rallies around its cause, and the numbers can be substantial: the University of York grew from 140 ambassadors in its first Challenge Week to more than 500 in subsequent years. In both formats the principle is identical. The institution sets the structure and supplies the tools, and the ambassadors provide the trusted, personal asks that convert.

One strategic choice consistently lifts ambassador engagement across both formats: giving people something specific to fundraise for. The institutions that do this best offer their ambassadors "lots of projects for the ambassadors to choose from and to get behind, which closely aligned with their own passions." A decentralized campaign, with a handful of headline funds plus many smaller projects from across the institution, lets ambassadors champion the cause they personally care about. "Giving ambassadors choice to be really passionate about what they care about" is, in the webinar's own words, one of the surest ways to deepen engagement.

Stewarding and retaining ambassadors year on year

The end of a campaign is not the end of the relationship, and how you handle the days after determines whether you have to rebuild your ambassador corps from scratch next time. Thank your ambassadors first, and thank them separately from your donors. "If you have the data available as to who your ambassadors are, consider sending them a separate or additional email than what you would send to your donors," a Hubbub consultant advises. "The personalization of receiving an email that's really specific to the reference of them being an ambassador could really go a long way towards creating engagement opportunities from ambassadors for future Giving Days." Ask them, too, to pass on thanks to the people they brought in. A simple thank you from an ambassador to their own network is, the webinar notes, what makes those people likely to come back next year.

Then, and this is what separates a program from an event, keep the relationship alive between campaigns. The institutions that do this best do not switch their ambassadors off for eleven months. The strongest examples "use their ambassadors year-round to not only create noise about Giving Day, but to also create noise around other activities that are happening around the institution. And these don't necessarily have to revolve around giving, they can be anything that involves people taking part, taking action, and making noise. This really helps them to keep ambassadors engaged between Giving Days and also helps them to create more ambassadors once Giving Day comes back around." An ambassador you have stayed in touch with all year is one who says yes immediately, and who has spent twelve months quietly recruiting their friends on your behalf.

This is why ambassador programs compound. The early adopters and lead volunteers join in year one. In year two, the people who watched them take part want in. "You'll have your early adopters and those lead volunteers that are really involved in your institution get involved in year one," Hubbub's ambassadors webinar explains, "and then for year two, you're really going to see an increase because you'll have those that did it in year one, and then you'll have people that saw what happened in year one and really want to get involved." Patience in the first year is rewarded with momentum you cannot manufacture any other way.

Measuring their impact

The hardest part of running an ambassador program is often justifying it internally, and the answer is to measure properly. Tracking links make this possible: with them, you can attribute gifts and donors directly to ambassador activity rather than guessing. A Hubbub consultant is candid that "one of the difficulties that we sometimes have with our ambassador programs is justifying the ROI against time and effort spent recruiting, training and encouraging participation. However, if you can start to look at that data behind your ambassador program, you can really quickly show that the time spent on ambassadors is very much worth it."

The numbers, looked at properly, tend to settle the argument. In the institutions Hubbub profiled, ambassador contributions ranged from a handful of percent of online gifts to a quarter or more. In one example from a more mature program, ambassadors caused 26 percent of online gifts in a single Giving Day. At the other end of the scale, an Oxbridge college running its first Giving Day saw ambassadors cause only 5 percent of gifts, which sounds modest until you learn that "without that 5 percent uplift from ambassadors, the Giving Day would have narrowly missed its target." A small percentage can be the difference between hitting a target and missing it, which is exactly the kind of result that earns a program its place.

Two cautions on measurement. First, in year one, measure participation rather than income. "In your first Giving Day, you may not see huge increases from ambassadors in particular," a Hubbub consultant cautions, so the right early metric is how many ambassadors you recruited and how active they were, not the dollars they generated. Second, expect the impact to grow. "This grows year on year. So while it may be 5 percent in year one, it may be 10 percent in year two, 15, it grows and it compounds. You'll start to see not only the number of donors grow, but the number of gifts caused by ambassadors grow as you grow and strengthen that ambassador program." Measure it, report it, and let the trend line make your case for you.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is a fundraising ambassador? A volunteer who promotes your campaign to their own network and asks the people they know to give. In Hubbub's words, "a volunteer that is willing to help your organization meet and hopefully exceed the goals you have." They can be alumni, students, staff, parents or any supporter willing to lend their voice.

Do ambassadors really cause donations, or do they just give themselves? They generate gifts from others, which is the whole point. When the webinar was asked whether ambassador figures meant their own gifts or gifts they generated, the answer was unambiguous: "They actually generated those gifts themselves, which is exactly what we want them to do." The one-in-four conversion rate on an ask from a friend is what makes them so effective.

How many ambassadors should we aim for? In year one, do not fix a precise target. Start with a few lead volunteers, see how receptive people are, then set a number. As a guide, first-year goals have ranged from 20 to 30 ambassadors at smaller institutions to 100 to 200 at larger ones, depending on size and engagement.

When should we start recruiting? Recruit and train your lead volunteers around two to three months before a Giving Day. Expect the wider pool to sign up late, often in the final two weeks, because, as Hubbub's team explains, "we're a last-minute culture." Plan your recruitment push to peak near the campaign rather than too far out.

Which social media channel works best? The one your audience already uses. There is no universal answer: a younger audience leans towards Instagram, an older one towards Facebook. Recruit where your supporters are, and lean on the channel where your engagement is already strongest.

Do small organizations have the resources to run a program? Yes, because you do not have to do everything. Pick the techniques you are comfortable with, toolkits, videos or lead volunteers, and start. The difference between running a campaign with ambassadors and without is, in Hubbub's experience, dramatic even at modest scale.

If your organization is a 501(c)(3), remember that gifts your ambassadors generate are generally tax-deductible for the donor, a point worth including in your toolkit copy.

Members' resource pack

Tools

Hubbub's Giving Day Simulator: model likely results before you commit to a target
Fundraising Copy Checker: sharpen your appeal and email copy
QR Code Generator: link in-person moments straight to a donation page

How to run a fundraising ambassador program