A full-day interactive workshop for university staff responsible for finding, recruiting, and training student ambassadors to support student recruitment, widening participation, and outreach activity.
Tuesday 5 August 2025
9:30am to 4pm
Steamhouse
Birmingham
£275 + VAT (Early bird rate until 30 June)
40 spaces
Do you lead the student ambassador scheme at your university?
This training day has been designed for you.
You will learn how to:
Detailed descriptions of all three sessions can be found below.
We’ve all said the famous words: "Ambassadors are our greatest asset."
Ambassadors are authentic and inspiring. They have first-hand experience of student life on our campuses. And if we’re being honest, we couldn't manage visitor numbers at our open days without their help. Ambassadors are the reason why our flagship, business-critical events are a game-changing success.
Your hundreds of ambassadors will speak to thousands of prospective students, alongside tens of thousands of supporters and influencers, with the potential to secure millions of pounds worth of tuition fees.
This being the case, could we be doing more to promote the opportunity to become an ambassador? Are we attracting the right quality and quantity (and diversity) of candidates? Is our selection process enabling us to identify the strongest candidates?
Equally, is our training provision truly empowering and energising our ambassadors? Or are we simply going through the mandatory motions, doing the best we can with limited time? We hope this training day will offer you the opportunity to consider these questions, explore new approaches, and exchange valuable ideas with your peers across the sector.
This training is for any university staff member who is responsible for finding, recruiting, and training:
It will also help you find, recruit, and train ambassadors for every role they might be asked to undertake. This includes:
At UniTasterDays, our primary expertise is ambassadors who support student recruitment, widening participation, school liaison, and outreach roles. However, our training activities and insights can be applied to other ambassadors too, such as those supporting alumni relations activity. Therefore, if the sessions below sound valuable to you, please do join us!
We pride ourselves on delivering inspiring, interactive, and insightful training days. If you join us, you will experience a fun, feel-good training event, with hands-on activities and plenty of opportunity for participation.
We’ll grow your knowledge and network in equal measure. This is aided by group exercises, multiple refreshment breaks, and complimentary drinks at the end of the day. You’ll depart with a community of fellow ambassador leads from across the sector who’ll continue to support you long after the training day has ended.
The cost for this training day is £275 + VAT.
This is the early bird price, available until Monday 30 June. It will then increase to £300 + VAT.
There are discounts for multiple bookings, as highlighted on the booking form below.
It’s the best job of campus. Varied. Flexible. Well-paid. An opportunity to give back. We know that. But how do we get our students to know that? How do we cut through the noise of their busy lives? How do we get their attention and encourage them to apply, especially the freshers who have just arrived on campus?
This first session will help you promote your ambassador vacancies. We’ll look at the world-class basics of readability, the importance of an omni-channel promotional plan, and the difference between highlighting features, benefits, and stories. We’ll also explore the power of advocacy with some light-touch influencer psychology.
Next, we’ll consider the critical process of proactivity. At times, we’ll need to actively headhunt to secure ambassadors that reflect the full diversity of our student community. We might need to enlist the help of certain peers, professors, and platforms to find ambassadors with rare insights into certain courses and backgrounds and lifestyles.
To achieve this goal, we’ll end by exploring stakeholder engagement tools, influencer mapping, and online (and offline) social listening.
Recommendations, applications, interviews... This session will consider the pros and cons of each ambassador recruitment method. We’ll also reflect on effective questions to ask to get the most revealing insights into possible candidates.
Mostly, this session will advocate for practical assessment activities. After all, we don’t want students to tell us they’ll be a good ambassador. We want them to show us. For this reason, you’ll take part in a tried-and-tested-and-triumphant ambassador assessment centre!
Roll up your sleeves, brush up your interview technique, and wake up your hippocampus. This will be a fun and fascinating activity which allows you to experience the role of candidate and assessor in a single session.
Two months to recruit ambassadors... but only two hours to train them.
Often, we only have time for the mandatory sessions: CMA, GDPR, manual handling, child protection training, and possibly shadowing an experienced ambassador on a campus tour. But is that enough?
The student recruitment landscape is more challenging than ever. We need our ambassadors to deliver. And if we’ve spent enormous amounts of staff time (and therefore money) on recruiting our ambassadors, we should really invest in this final, critical step.
But how do we get the best out of our new recruits? What should we teach them? How do we teach them, so the knowledge is retained?
This session will equip you with several next-level training activities. You’ll begin by taking part in the activities yourself, channeling your inner ambassador. Next, we’ll return to our practitioner selves to review the activity and discuss the logistics around hosting the activity at your own university.
The exact three activities will be determined by you. We’ll make sure we are representative of the group to reflect how you will use your ambassadors: events, classrooms, exhibitions, messaging platforms, social media, or something else.
Either way, you can expect an engaging and enlightening session. Flipchart, dice, games, prizes, sticky notes, marker pens, maybe even the infamous unlucky dip... Fasten your seatbelts for a fun finale to our day.
Simon has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. During that time, he has led student ambassador schemes at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Throughout his career, Simon has supported ambassadors in a wide range of duties, such as on-campus events, classroom mentoring, exhibition staffing, phone-calling campaigns, online messaging, and social media activity. Prior to this, Simon participated in the mass recruitment and selection of student-staff at two students’ unions.
Simon has a particular flair for designing engaging training sessions, developed through his previous consulting and volunteering roles. Currently, he leads the training initiatives for UniTasterDays, including their quarterly training days in Birmingham, on-campus training for staff, on-campus training for ambassadors, and 6-week leadership course.
Past recipients of Simon’s training include AccessHE, London Higher, Manchester Metropolitan University, Queen Margaret University, Queen Mary University of London, St Mary’s University, the University of Salford, Zurich International School, and various HELOA regional groups.
Finally, Simon is an international speaker. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, SU Digital, SU Marketing Conference, and Utterly Content. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
You have your own expertise and experience to share as the managers, officers, coordinators, and administrators responsible for recruiting ambassadors.
This training will invite you to share your valuable knowledge, practices, and stories with your fellow attendees. We’d love to hear everything – your success and messes, your wins and wobbles – through group exercises and full-room discussion.
Rest assured, there’ll be no pressure to share. But if you do have wisdom to offer, and tactics to champion, then the floor is yours. There’s no ‘i’ in team. And there’s no ‘i’ in student ambassador.
If Birmingham is too far, then we’d love to come to you instead. We can deliver this training day (and many others) on your very own campus. This option is perfect for large teams or departments who would benefit from the same learning, perhaps at a future away day.
We also offer a selection of training days for student ambassadors. These training days are energising sessions designed to complement your own training, delivered in partnership with yourselves. You can learn more at the links below.