The CSCCE Network Ambassadors program, launched in September 2026, is our first formal champions program! We’re piloting the program over the next few months with approximately 15 members of our community of practice.
In this blog post, we share more about the program and our inaugural ambassadors, whom you can meet via a new page on the CSCCE website. We also shine a light on community champions programs in general, which we’ve supported the development of for many years through client collaborations.
About the CSCCE Network Ambassadors program
One of CSCCE’s strengths is that the members of our community of practice are deeply embedded across a wide range of contexts within the international STEM ecosystem – together bringing a broad landscape perspective on community building and collaboration, ranging from research collaborations to association-led communities of practice. We’re grateful for the input that they bring that help us to evolve our offerings to specific contexts (e.g., by enabling us to create resonant case studies that we swap into our trainings for specific groups). We also recognize the wonderful opportunity our broad community creates for us to reach into many different networks to share our free-to-download resources, and our training opportunities.
However, to date we hadn’t created a structured way to support our highly engaged members in sharing news from CSCCE back to their own communities and gathering their input on our resources at the same time. And so we created our Network Ambassadors program! A way of providing a clearer, bidirectional channel for these activities and giving formal recognition for those contributions.
In return for regularly sharing CSCCE news and giving us input, Network Ambassadors receive:
- A digital badge recognizing their contributions
- Access to a private channel in the CSCCE community of practice (hosted in Slack)
- The opportunity to attend up to four Quarterly Skills Share sessions every year that they are part of the program
- Clear pathways to contribute to CSCCE comms and content via requests for feedback and facilitated Slack threads
Our hope is that through this program we can both nucleate a new community champions network with the CSCCE community of practice to create a clearer, active channel for feedback, and ensure that more STEM professionals discover, access, and implement best practices in community building and collaboration through increased awareness of CSCCE and our work.
Community champions programs: Empowering emerging leaders in your community
We’re not new to champions programs – in fact we’ve supported the creation of multiple programs for clients, as well publishing numerous resources about them, some thanks to our community champions program working group which met in 2021/22.
In part 2 of our Community Participation Model guidebook series, we focus on the role of the community champion, and describe three main ways that champions tend to add value: MAINTAIN, GROW, and EVOLVE.
A figure describing the various roles of community champions. Image credit: CSCCE
- MAINTAIN – Champions support the day-to-day running of the community (e.g., by welcoming new community members or serving on the code of conduct committee).
- GROW – Champions support the growth and extend the impact of the community and its outputs (e.g., by referring new members or sharing resources outside the community)
- EVOLVE – Champions contribute to steering the direction of the community (e.g., by serving on a steering committee/task force or participating in focus groups)
A community champions program, usually run by the community manager,recruits community members to take on tasks and activities designed to either MAINTAIN, GROW, or EVOLVE the community, while also bringing champions together for peer support, training, and/or access to other resources.
Participants in the CSCCE Network Ambassadors program are primarily helping us to GROW our community, especially our learning community, by raising the profile of CSCCE in new niches of the STEM ecosystem. We hope they will also add to our ongoing ability to meet our members where they are, therefore subtly acting in EVOLVE mode, too – shaping our materials and potentially influencing future offerings.
Additional resources
i) Partnering with CSCCE on your next champions program
Over the years we have worked with clients on various aspects of their community champions programs, including:
- Program design and development – including programming, member recruitment, and communications materials
- Playbook co-development – supporting the creation of internal and/or champions-facing playbooks to codify key processes and templates, ensuring program sustainability
- Hosting trainings for a program – e.g., delivering a private cohort of one of our multi-week trainings or a Mini-workshop series
- Meeting design and/or facilitation – e.g., developing kick-off meetings and/or graduation celebrations
- Evaluation and reporting – design, deploy, and analyze feedback via surveys, exit interviews, and focus groups
If you’re interested in learning more, send an email to info@cscce.org, or review the Consultancy pages of our website.
ii) Free-to-download champions programs materials
We’ve also published several resources to inform how you engaged your community champions:
- Part 2 of the CSCCE Community Participation Model guidebook series focuses on the CHAMPION mode of engagement, in which emerging leaders within a community act in either informal or formal capacity to MAINTAIN, GROW, or EVOLVE the community.
- Together with the members of our working group, we developed a series of nine tip sheets that take you from the earliest planning stages of a champions program through troubleshooting to evaluation:
- Stage 1 | Making a case: Should you have a community champions program?
- Stage 2 | Inclusive recruitment: How do you find your champions?
- Stage 3 | Participation requirements: What are your champions expected to do?
- Stage 4 | Onboarding: How will you welcome your champions into the program?
- Stage 5 | Rewards and incentives: What are the tangible benefits to champions for taking part in your program?
- Stage 6 | Training and other support: How will you support your champions?
- Stage 7 | Increasing engagement: What do you do if your champions lose interest in the program?
- Stage 8 | Offboarding: How will you close your program? What’s next for your champions?
- Stage 9 | Evaluation: How did your program go?
- In our “garden metaphor” concept booklet, we share a series of essays that uses metaphor to explore diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, as well as creating champions programs for your members.
- And in a guidebook authored by participants in the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP), the “Advocacy Ninjas” Project Team presented data on the scope, characteristics and efficacy of ambassador programs in STEM.