6 Steps to Launching an Employee

Advocacy Program Your Team

Wants to Participate In
An employee advocacy program can deliver major benefits for
organizations of all sizes, including increases in brand trust, shorter
sales cycles and more opportunities for earned media. But it’s not a
set-it-and-forget-it endeavor.

With the right amount of support, your coworkers can become your most
essential brand advocates. Use this checklist to create a launch plan that
encourages maximum participation and supports long-term success.
Getting started
There is a not-so-secret component to all successful employee advocacy programs:
participation. Before planning your program launch, familiarize yourself with four of
the most common employee participation blockers: bandwidth for content, motivation,
hesitation and awareness.

Bandwidth for Content Hesitation

Advocacy programs thrive on Every post on social media requires

content. If you’re light on items to
circulate, bulk up your catalog by
curating an even mix of owned and
external share-worthy pieces.
some degree of confidence.
Vanquish any nerves or
awkwardness by providing
employees with training sessions to
sharpen their social skills.

Motivation Awareness

Employees are more likely to
participate in the program if they
see how they can benefit from it.
Outline exactly what’s in it for them,
whether that be incentives, public
recognition or growth
opportunities.
More often than not, people don’t
participate because they simply
forget. Sending out weekly
reminders of all the content
available for employees to share
could be just what you need to get
people active.

Check out this in-depth guide to employee advocacy for more tips on
overcoming these blockers. You’ll also find success stories from brands who
have launched successful programs of their own.

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Sponsorship
Before you start planning your launch strategy, secure an executive sponsor. The right
partner will help you lay the groundwork for a strong program launch by using their
influence to get people excited to participate.

□ Schedule meetings with department heads to identify an executive sponsor.

During these meetings, be sure to highlight how their team specifically can benefit from advocacy
efforts.

□ Host an abbreviated onboarding session with your executive sponsor.

For the sake of time, try to condense this into one or two sessions. Do this before your public
program rollout so they can assist during launch.

□ Draft internal communication templates for your executive sponsor.

If you expect your sponsor to assist in onboarding, ongoing awareness and recognition efforts,
give them a starting point to minimize their time commitment.

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Onboarding
When it comes to program onboarding, think long term. Structuring milestones over
an extended period of time will make advocacy efforts more manageable for
employees, thus increasing the stickiness of your program.

□ Create a 60-day onboarding plan.

Ensure your employees make advocacy a consistent part of their work routine by creating an
onboarding plan that extends over the course of three months. Here are some dates and
milestones to include:
■ Program invitation emails
■ Weekly content round-ups
■ Social media training sessions
■ Incentive updates

□ Outline expectations and workflows for contributors, including team liaisons,

executive sponsors and employee advocates.

□ Curate owned and external content.

Launch with at least 12 pieces of content, as well as sample social copy to get your team
inspired. Here are some content types that get shared often:
■ Industry research
■ Awards
■ Product announcements
■ Thought leadership

□ Group employees into cohorts to streamline rollout.

To maximize employee engagement, onboard in groups. This will stagger out your workload
and theirs.

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Advocate Training
Empower your advocates with a list of resources they can use to brush up on social
media best practices. If you’re using an advocacy solution like Sprout’s, be sure to
include platform walkthroughs and guides as well.

□ Create a directory of self-service tools and resources.

Possible topics to cover include social media 101 tips, the power of social selling or creating
content for social media.

□ Assemble a personal brand toolkit.

Help your employees stand out on social by providing them with images and copy direction
that can be used to build out their personal profiles.

□ Schedule social media training courses.

Use these sessions to go over best practices, advocacy success stories, your organization’s
social media policy and more. This is also a great time to share inspiration from other brands
that are

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Recognition
The success of your program lies in making participation feel worthwhile to your
colleagues. Show appreciation for their efforts by outlining a creative recognition
strategy that appeals to all team members.

□ Publicly document your recognition strategy for all employees to reference.

Your recognition program should reward employees (or teams) at different stages as their
advocacy efforts mature. Gift cards and free lunches will likely work in the beginning, but they
can become less enticing as your program evolves. Future-proof your strategy by deciding on
channels for public recognition and working with managers to come up with high-value
rewards.

□ Establish a point person for incentive distribution.

□ Create an expense tracker to monitor spend on incentives.

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Communication
Consistently sharing updates on your employee advocacy program is one of the
easiest ways to gain internal traction. Make the work easier on yourself by delegating
and working ahead where you can.

□ Establish a point person for program awareness and recognition efforts (this could
be someone from your communications team, your social team or even a content
marketing manager.)
Whether it’s through email, intranet or an internal messaging system like Slack or Microsoft
Teams, consistently remind your team about the program and give updates on new content to
share.

□ Work with your executive sponsor and internal communications team to develop a
manageable cadence for updates and reminders that won’t overwhelm
employees.

□ Draft copy templates for program awareness and recognition efforts.

Copy templates can help streamline your day-to-day efforts and ensure the longevity of your
program

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Measurement
Having an employee advocacy program is nice, but having a program that produces
results is even better. Work with your executive sponsor to outline what success looks
like for your program, and don’t be afraid to readjust as you go on.

□ Identify priority KPIs to track.

KPIs can vary from internal (like program adoption rate and profiles added) to external (relating
to brand awareness, social selling, recruitment, etc.) Rather than trying to track them all, focus
on options that best align with your department and business goals. Here are some examples
to pick from.

□ Identify advocate KPIs and provide resources on how employees can monitor their
progress for themselves.
Empower your advocates with training on how to find and interpret LinkedIn and Twitter
analytics, so they can track their personal engagement rate and network growth over time.

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About Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers deep social media listening and analytics, social
management, customer care and advocacy solutions to more than
25,000 brands and agencies worldwide. Sprout’s unified platform
integrates the power of social throughout every aspect of a business
and enables social leaders at every level to extract valuable data and
insights that drive their business forward. Headquartered in Chicago,
Sprout operates across major social media networks, including Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Learn more about our advocacy solution here.

Get started with Sprout Social today

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