TipStart Ambassadors are making a difference

Who remembers the free pens? Maybe you remember the gut-wrenching smile of the man stood by the roll-up display and table covered in leaflets? A university Freshers’ Fayre increasingly resembles a digital Evening Standard article: 15% what you want to learn about, 85% corporate spam. Universities are fertile ground for securing customers, candidates and users. I think I once managed to pick up a legal firm-branded umbrella.

One of TipStart’s greatest challenges is how we break through the noise, find the individuals we think our programme can add value to, and get them signed up. Enter the TipStart Ambassadors.

As much as Angus and I love spamming the inboxes of university careers services, we’ve found that their capacity consistently underserves the demand of their students. It is not uncommon to find only 1 or 2 full-time members of staff in a university careers department, supporting up to 30,000 graduates per year. Lots of academic departments get tasked with the process as a corporate contribution, without additional funding. The Times Higher Education magazine has written about these challenges on a number of occasions.

TipStart Ambassadors were our solution to this challenge. Now we can’t take credit for this as a novel and new idea. Lots of organisations and firms use students as ambassadors. But that doesn’t mean we’re not trying to be different. We’ve received plenty of invaluable feedback about how companies use and abuse students for their own gain, in ambassador-style programmes.

Our Solution

So how is our solution different and why do we think students will want to become TipStart Ambassadors?

1. Community. A fundamental principle of TipStart is that we are re-constructing professional networks to be more equitable. We’re taking the old boys out of old boy networks. We bring all of our Ambassadors together to collaborate and share advice and experiences. They also have direct access to the senior leadership team of TipStart, and our range of contacts across industries. In the future, we want to add bespoke learning and development offers to the experience.
2. Arms-length partnership. We don’t tell our Ambassadors how to find and recruit TipStarters. We recognise that each university context is different and the position of our Ambassadors in that context will also be different. We certainly draw on our experiences to offer advice about specific challenges, but we look to our Ambassadors to manage their own process. However, if our Ambassadors need anything - from flyer designs to video content - we provide it quickly and to a high standard (thanks Richard!).
3. Evolution. We are happy to admit now and will continue to believe that our ambassador programme isn’t a fixed entity or set of rules and benefits. Because we are in direct contact with all our Ambassadors, we will continue to adjust how the programme works to best meet the needs of the students we want to get involved with TipStart. By becoming a TipStart Ambassador, you can be definitive in how we bring TipStarters into our platform - it’s pretty exciting and is a great form of professional work experience, ahead of starting your career.

We’ve already got Ambassadors signed up at a number of universities and for now, we are restricting to one person per university. So if you’re interested in getting involved, head over to our public Notion page, where we have all the information and the form to sign up. It would be great to have you.