Building & Growing The Community At Mello With An Ambassador Program
8 weeks, 8 ambassadors, and a memorable community-first experience. My journey with supporting the Mello App on the second edition of their ambassador program.
This article is an adapted version of the original Program Review Blog Post published on the Mello Blog.
In September 2020, I have reached out to Anna-Lena, founder and CEO of Mello, to offer my support with their community-building work.
Mello is a Berlin-based but internationally available app for parents and families to connect, support each other and build their trusted village.
Anna-Lena designed the first edition of the Ambassador program back in summer 2020 and when we had the chance to chat about a potential collaboration, we were both excited to find ideas on how to improve the format and the experience for the second edition.
After 3 months of design, execution and progress tracking work, I am happy to share our journey and Mello’s success story with a community-first Ambassador Program.
Mello launched the very first Ambassador Program in September 2020
The first edition was launched in September 2020. It had a lot of resonance and a big success.
However, the Mello team also realized that the program activities weren’t fully helping ambassadors achieve what is at the core of Mello's mission: building meaningful relationships with other parents and finding their village.
This is why, by the end of 2020, we started to plan the second edition with a strong community-driven focus and a full intention to create a program that could provide a real experience of community-building, both for future ambassadors and for all the Mello parents.
Building A Community-First Program
Parenthood shouldn’t be a lonely experience.
Yet, cultivating meaningful relationships can be quite time and energy-consuming.
By combining a technical solution (the Mello app) with community-oriented activities (the ambassador program), we aimed to create a low-effort but effective experience that could concretely help ambassadors 1) build their community supported by the Mello app, 2) spread the Mellove to get more parents excited about the community.
Client Love
“Margherita reached out to us shortly after we’ve finished our first ambassador program. She offered me to review the first program and give us some community building suggestions.
She had so many great ideas and I could tell I’m talking to a real community expert. I asked her to manage our second ambassador program”.
Anna-Lena Gerber, CEO and Founder of Mello
Effective Experience
After carefully reviewing the feedback from the first edition ambassadors and investigating more technical data on the engagement and retention level, we identified the core program’s technical and community priorities and a strategy to implement them in the program execution.
I helped the Mello team design a program with a strong focus on the community experience, and I did so by choosing to center the activities around a progressive community-building process.
The activities were based on six core steps to help ambassadors get real about the what and how of their experience with building their village with Mello.
Low-effort
We wanted to give our ambassadors the possibility to participate at their own pace and times.
We created a weekly email with a list of suggestions for their one core action and a mini-training to get more guidance on how to achieve their community-building mission for the week.
Every week they were free to pick their preferred activity, action or bonus task depending on their personal availability and choice.
A Win-Win Ambassadorship Experience
Mello strongly values the contribution that ambassadors provide to the team.
This is why we specifically created a program that could offer real value to Mello as much as it could offer to the ambassadors.
Every week, we have created a mini-training on community-related topics to provide ambassadors with practical tips and know-how on how to best use the Mello app and other community-building techniques for their own “build your village” purpose.
To strengthen the community spirit within the ambassadors, we also hosted weekly ambassador calls and got together on a regular basis throughout the six weeks.
During the calls, we had group check-ins where we exchanged progress and valuable feedback.
On the other hand, we asked ambassadors to challenge their skills and support us by getting creative with some content creation tasks (Challenges).
They really did an amazing job by creating content that connected other parents: they shared their experiences and expertise through blog posts, mini-guides and personal interviews that could benefit the rest of the Mello community.
The Success
We had more than 25 people applying for the program.
We interviewed more than 20 candidate ambassadors.
We shortlisted 8 ambassadors from international and diverse backgrounds and with diverse parenthood experiences.
During the program weeks, Mello registered some good results in the ambassador program’s weeks: higher retention, a higher number of messages sent in the app, new sign-ups, and more engagement in the feed.
We revamped the Mello blog with a series of amazing content written by our ambassadors:
Two interviews, three blog posts, and two mini-guides. Read them here.
Client love
With an extremely ambitious, hard-working, patient attitude, she created an amazing experience for the 10 parents who participated in our program.
From the very beginning of promoting the program, over selecting the candidates, leading the whole program, creating virtual experiences together with the parents and to handing over a perfect continuity plan for our business.
She did all of it. She worked extremely independently and at the same time alway was keen on listening t o our feedback and implementing it.
Anna-Lena Gerber, CEO and Founder of Mello
Experience Design
We launched the Mello Experiences, a series of ambassador-led events hosted by and for the community.
We had our first Mom Circle with 12 moms joining (add picture).
We had our first Mello Community Talk with 10 people.
We really helped our ambassadors build their community:
“[The program] made me engage more with other parents on the Mello App. I also discovered and utilized many other functions that the App provides. The program created an opportunity for me to go out and meet with other parents”.
“The program gave me that extra encouragement I needed to actually get out there and meet parents. I was shy or skeptical in my first try and the program helped me a lot”.
Our ambassadors participated in many user interviews and provided us with ongoing feedback on the app and the community experience.
They shared their ideas for initiatives and improvements and supported our work in creating an honest, but loyal environment for us to be able to integrate a more and more community-informed approach into the app development.
To facilitate the program, we launched new features to make it even easier to optimize the parent research and look for families with matching criteria, such as common interests, languages they speak, location and topics they like to post about.
Lessons learned...
The second edition of the ambassador program was also a great learning process. While we tried to keep the program on a low-effort level, the program structure was for some of the ambassadors too demanding.
We have chosen to work with Mighty Networks as our ambassador dashboard, however, the experience wasn’t as positive as we expected. Using a not yet so common interaction platform has its pros and cons, and we definitely experienced more cons than pros.
Our ambassadors were not particularly familiar with MN and found out that it took them too much time and energy to navigate a new tool.
We helped parents to build meaningful connections, but we have seen further improvement potential in how Mello can help ambassadors achieve this mission, for example by focusing on more local activities and topic-specific experiences.
We did pretty well in terms of diversity, but this program primarily attracted moms. Mello really wants to make sure dads are part of the community experience as much as moms are!
Client Love
I’m happy we decided to get her on board of our Mello-team and can recommend her to every team who considers to build a community program. I’m looking forward to having more projects with her together in the future!
Anna-Lena Gerber, CEO and Founder of Mello
Coming Soon...
I have built a continuity plan so Mello will soon open the ambassador program to an ongoing VEP (Very Engaged Parents) community experience.
The continuity plan aims to expand the ambassador community by having a call for ambassadors on a rolling basis and give the chance to the most engaged parents to be part of the ambassador experience.
The Mello team is going to share some updates on the Mello VEP Experience very soon.
Are you planning to build an ambassador program around your community-first product?
Drop us an email and book a free consultation session at hello@thisfairforce.com.