Ball State launches County Ambassador Program
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Ball State University has unveiled plans for a student-to-student engagement initiative designed to help all 92 Indiana counties with talent attraction. Beginning this fall, the university’s County Ambassador Program will see students serving as spokespeople for their home counties and touting job opportunities and quality of life benefits in those communities to their fellow students.
“We’re really well aware of the needs for talent attraction all over the state, and so we’ve been working to that end for quite a while in helping industry partners think about how do you tell the story more broadly about what your needs are in your area of the state,” said Jeff Eads, director of industry engagement at Ball State.
Eads told Inside INdiana Business the student ambassadors will first connect with local leaders to understand what assets are available in their county.
“When the students are thinking about jobs today, it’s different maybe than they used to,” Eads said. “It’s not just, ‘Where’s a good job, and where’s the good paying job?’ It’s really, ‘What will I be doing? What will I be doing when I’m not working, too?’ There’s a whole scope of things.”
Ball State also plans on providing programming sessions for the ambassadors focusing on topcis such as the importance of promoting quality of place, how to tell a compelling story about their county, and best practices and parameters of promotion on campus.
Once the ambassadors get a sense of what their county has to offer, Eads said they will take that information to their peers on campus
“We certainly think there’s a really important place for our state leaders to tell our students, ‘Hey, we want you to stay in the state,’ and we have projects geared towards that, too,” he said. “But this particular program is going to allow these students, peer to peer, walk into class, during class, over the dinner table, in their residence halls, to say, ‘Hey, I love my community. I love growing up in my community. Here’s what we did in our free time.'”
Eads said the program provides benefits for not just the counties themselves, but also a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in those communities that may not have the resources to go on campus and directly interact with students.
Ball State said the goal is to make students aware of the opportunities available in Indiana so when they graduate, they decide to stay in the Hoosier State.
“This new Ambassador Program will bring in highly skilled talent across the state as the IEDC continues to bring in future-focused industry like semiconductors and EVs and grow existing industries like life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and transportation,” Indiana Economic Development Corp. Vice President of Talent and Workforce Tony Denhart said in written remarks. “As the state builds out its economy of the future, initiatives like this will help ensure that students know of all the opportunities on their doorstep.”
Eads added the program will also help the ambassadors themselves take a close look at their own counties and how they’re making their own decisions.
“If they’re thinking [they] want to go because there’s a great music scene in this other town somewhere else, or there’s great things to do outdoors, or there’s a great community, once they start digging deep in their own community, I think they’re going to probably realize, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of that right here in Indiana, including a fantastic job market and a great cost of living. I don’t have to look somewhere else. It’s right here.'”
Ball State said the county ambassadors will also bring more awareness to the university’s other engagement initiatives, including faculty externships, business and executive programs, and the Indiana Connection Lounge.
The students chosen for the program will initially sign up for one academic year, but that could extend to multiple years if they choose. Eads said the first goal is to find ambassadors for all 92 counties, but adds there certainly could be more than one ambassador to a county.
“We have about 150,000 [alumni] in the state of Indiana; they’re in every county,” he said. “But when we look at the map across where they land, we know those are greater concentrations in certain counties than others. And so I think one area of growth will be really helping students understand the opportunities in every corner of our state and every county and make sure that that story is being told really well, so that they can make good decisions.”