#announcements

I haven’t done this before launching an advocacy program. When I launched the community on Influitive for Demandbase, I asked people to share how they’d like to participate in the community and used Laura Ramos’ 4 types of advocacy as the options. 1) Teach and Learn from others, 2) Share honest experiences with others, 3) Find career opportunities, and 4) Collaborate on big projects.

That helped me offer the right requests to the right people. If I were asking before starting the program, it would be 1 on 1 calls with top advocates, sharing that I’m putting together an official programs for our top customers and wanted to know what would entice them to join. Do they want opportunities for speaking (& their career), or just to help others, are they more focused on networking? Do they want to earn rewards, what kind?

And, at least for me, I wouldn’t tell them it’s our advocacy program. That doesn’t feel exclusive, it doesn’t feel special. So I’d come up with a few ways to name it, that makes them feel good.

So many miss this step and I think it’s such an important one! I’m not sure if you program is in a platform or not, but some questions to include:
which collaborating activities they’re most interested in (speaking, 1:1 ref, content, networking, etc.)
Why they’d want to participate (ex: growing their brand, rewards)
Preference on joining a platform vs outreach for opportunities
How they’d like to be rewarded.
Also helpful is how often they want to engage/go into your program to get a better sense of expectations.
Lots more options, happy to chat!

We have external branding (we're combining Snyk Champs and Snyk Ambassadors). We do already ask in our Snyk Champs sign up form what activities they would be interested in. I think it would be good to just get a gut check on where their motivations lie to help inform that what we are offering them resonates. Our new program will have a lot more benefits for our customers (as it should!)

Thanks @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) and @Kiely (Monteiro) Hajjar this will help me focus on what I ask! Super helpful as always 😀

Good luck! In a previous role, they didn’t want to ask customers because they thought it would look like we didn’t know what we were doing, but it’s a HUGE help in building a program they actually want to be a part of

I think since we're relaunching it could be an opportunity to get some feedback!

I ask customers as often as I get the chance because people's priorities change, their availability changes (esp with people picking up so much work from lay offs of team members). I think it's a great time for an update.

Another way to get updates outside of a form is send an offer to meet with you to make the intro (if not met already) and get some feedback on their participation in the program, see how things are going, and if theyre enjoying one thing over another sort of thing.

Some customers will ignore the request and others will be up for it. (basically same information different format for ppl who like face to face)

We love to do that but don't have time to do it with everyone 😢 (hopefully one day we will) Our preference is to have a 30 minute call to learn more about them and their experience with our solution. it's the best!

We lost over 25% of our references in the last year due to people changing companies/roles and being laid off 🤯

Wow that's nuts!

25%, 🤯

Ya it's basically a perfect storm situation right now 😂 Great suggestion - we LOVE the 1:1's. We write a summary of the conversation and post it in a Slack channel called customer stories and then tag in the account team and or anyone else (e,.g. product marketing) who we think would be interested in that customer story based on what they said!

I love that you share it internally as a customer story! Im sure the other teams really love and appreciate that too 😄