No Limits is a youth charity based in Southampton, offering information, advice, counselling and support to children and young people across Hampshire, Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight. This year we are working with our first celebrity ambassador. Many charities have celebrity ambassadors who help them raise their profile, increase fundraising and endorse their brands. But was it for us? Learning from others and our own experiences, we are delighted to have made the leap and feel more confident in developing this part of our communications strategy. Here is what we have learned about appointing an ambassador.
1. Understand your objective
Charities work with ambassadors for a range of reasons – to boost fundraising, raise awareness, endorse their work, gain media coverage. It was important to be clear on our objectives as this would affect who we would approach. We wanted someone who could build our social media following among young people, ensuring we reach more young people with our online support offer. We also wanted someone who could raise our profile locally, to help boost awareness of our work and help with fundraising.
2. Know your intended audience
This was a trickier one for us. We wanted to raise our profile with potential supporters, most of whom are older, to maximise our fundraising. But we also wanted to increase our social media following among our service users – those aged 11 to 25 – to enable our online support to reach more young people. In addition, we wanted someone who our youth workers would be able to relate to and feel positive about. Our audience is local rather than national, so we didn’t seek a celebrity with national reach instead opting for someone who was well known and liked in Southampton and Hampshire. Identifying and prioritising our audiences in advance was helpful when considering our options.
3. Do your research
We spent several months researching people who might be appropriate for No Limits, fitting with our objectives and target audiences. We wanted someone with whom we could form a relationship, who would be genuinely engaged with our work and share our passion to help young people. We wanted them to have a demonstrable link to the young people we support so our service users could relate to them – perhaps some lived experience or an existing role which showed synergy and understanding. We wanted them to share our values. We were also hoping for someone who had some profile locally and had connections which might be useful for us.
4. Consider your approach
We identified Ellisha-Jade White, a young businesswoman and social media influencer from Southampton who had briefly appeared in the third series of Love Island. Ellisha is inspirational for our young audiences, having set up several successful businesses at a young age. She cares deeply about mental health and campaigns on issues relevant to young people. She is a social media influencer and has a large number of followers both locally and further afield.
We approached Ellisha directly via social media and explained why we wanted to work with her in particular, what difference we thought she could make, how we thought she could get involved (we gave her a few options) and how we thought the relationship might help her. We made it clear we were hoping for a long-term, meaningful relationship rather than a one-off event appearance. We met her at our Advice Centre – the hub of our support – and let her see first-hand the work we do.
5. Focus on stewardship
Happily for us, Ellisha was keen to be involved. It was important to agree from the outset the role we envisaged for our ambassador and the activities we wanted her help with. Stewardship is an important part of ongoing success – ambassadors should be treated in the same way as a major donor, with the management of the relationship being a priority. Stewardship is managed by our fundraising and communications team, although some of our youth workers have also helped cement the relationship as Ellisha’s involvement has grown.
We’re early in our journey but are so pleased we’ve got a positive ambassador relationship in place. The benefit of having someone who truly believes in the charity’s work is that the relationship can be long-lasting and helpful. But it is the role of the charity to enable that genuine involvement.
We agreed a schedule of activities for Ellisha, to match her enthusiasm to get on board. By creating an initially busy period, we were able to really embed her into our charity’s work. We “launched” her as our ambassador which resulted in local media coverage. She has promoted our fundraising events across her social media platforms reaching a much wider group of potential supporters than we can. She has written content for social media and inspired young people in our Work Club by talking about her own experiences setting up her businesses. She has also created connections between other local companies and No Limits, offering us new relationships and additional opportunities for young people.
We are now considering how we might develop our involvement of ambassadors further, including involving ambassadors with different interests, skills and connections, such as business and fundraising, to help us advance our work across the organisation.
