Turning Your Students and Members into Ambassadors for Golf & Its Health Benefits4 min read

Everyone in golf is in agreement – more golfers are good news for the sport. But to get there then it requires some joined up thinking from all of golf’s stakeholders.

These stakeholders include your very own army of students that you coach and members/visitors to your facilities, and leveraging this band of merry golfers can help golf’s cause, as well as your own.

As you will read in this issue of IGPN, there are many health and well-being benefits that come from taking part in the sport, so we’ll use these as a basis for getting your army on-board and spreading the gospel of golf…

Get All Your Staff Involved

You and your facility’s staff all need to be aligned with your plans and also embody exactly what you are after from your ambassadors. They need knowledge and information in order to reflect what you want to portray.

Every staff member that could have an interaction with a client or customer (and even those who might not) can be educated with top-line information about the benefits of golf to different demographics’ health and wellbeing.

Short, sharp bits of info that they can be armed with when speaking to people about the sport and why they should get involved.

Promote the Benefits in Your Facility and to your Clients

A key thing with getting people on the same page as you is ensuring they are aware of information and engaged with it.

Create some resources [the Confederation of Professional Golf will have some soon for you to use as well] that you can use on noticeboards around your facility, or in your Pro Shop for example, that show the benefits of the sport. Materials like posters, infographics, leaflets, etc. are great items to get in front of people.

Having on-site information is the first step – then you need to get people engaged with the materials so including a section in regular email blasts to your databases can help support your actions and activities and can also allow you to share great examples of how golf is benefitting people in various different forms such as news items, feature articles or videos.

Create a Programme or Team

A great way of getting the message out there would be to build a team of ambassadors from your facility with people from key demographics represented.

A good place to start could be with you in the middle as the group leader and include a couple of members of staff from around the business along with a couple of males and females from differing ends of the age spectrum. Ideally these people will be the opinion leaders from the facility – when these people speak or act, others pay attention.

The individuals you pick should be willing to join in with the activity and embody the message you are trying to get across. They can act as on the ground troops for your armies to infiltrate their demographics and get the messaging out there to educate others and spread the word.

Activate Your Ambassadors

Once you have a team of ambassadors who are exemplifying your message then you need to activate them and leverage their knowledge, peer groups and influence within them.

For example you could have your more ‘youthful’ ambassadors promote a fun day or charity fair at the facility to their social groups and make sure that the event is on their level and of interest.

Or you could record some interviews or write a short blog post using your ambassadors as case studies to show how their social, mental and physical health might have benefitted from playing. This could go on your website, blog and shared on social media and you could even contact your local media to see if they would like to use the information in a piece about golf’s health benefits.

Once you have some ambassadors on your side then they can be a really useful asset to you to help promote the benefits of the sport as well as your own facility and services.

This article originally featured in International Golf Pro News. Visit the IGPN Page to find out more and subscribe for free.