Turning Employees into Champion Advocates for Long-Term Success

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Episode Summary

Sarah Hankins takes the hot seat on this episode of Behind the Post with host Alina Dallal to talk all things employee advocacy at CBIZ. With an impressive cohort of 2,700 advocates, Sarah dives into how she runs their successful advocacy program and how she plans to keep their momentum going throughout 2024.

From finding the right balance of content to the types she creates, Sarah dives all in with the best practices you should implement for any advocacy program. She also shares her top tips for keeping advocates engaged, including quarterly training and gamification ideas to hold their interest in the long-term – she even created her own spin on Spotify Wrapped to create an “Oktopost Wrapped” campaign at the end of 2023 to showcase their results to her team and shoutout there top performing advocates.

Communication is the foreground of any successful employee advocacy program. Sarah candidly shares how she supports her team while also learning from her advocates on ways she can better her program and continue to create more relevant content.

Running the employee advocacy program led Sarah to trade Zoom calls for an incredible tour of CBIZ’s offices across the U.S., which they called the “Oktopost Roadshow”. With pitstops to 12 offices across the country, Sarah met her advocates in person to further encourage participation and provide them with the guidance they needed to become champion advocates.

Even if we aren’t all lucky enough to tour the States on a company budget, Sarah leaves many practical tips that we can still use to train, support, and coach our advocates for success.

Hot Topics:

• How to write for different personas in your organization
• Why communication and support is so integral for a successful program
• How you can learn from your advocates to improve your strategy
• Tips and tricks that help her keep her advocates engaged

Meet Sarah

With marketing and teaching experience in her back pocket, Sarah is the Marketing Content Specialist at CBIZ. She manages both their corporate social media profiles and employee advocacy program, creating engaging content and helping build the company’s and its professionals’ brands. She’s even on LinkedIn even in her dreams.

When she’s not posting or dreaming about LinkedIn, she’s singing karaoke, adding to her impressive CD collection, or hanging out with the love of her life — her Irish terrier, Lucy.

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