ONLYOFFICE Campus Ambassador Program: results, enhancements, challenges

We have been working closely with ONLYOFFICE campus ambassadors since we started this program five months ago. Continue reading to learn more about the progress.

About Campus Ambassador Program

ONLYOFFICE Campus Ambassador Program is a program organized for college students around the world. It aims to help students develop their soft and hard skills, and contribute to our open-source project by creating contents, organizing activities and recommending talents.

Now we have several students from different schools and places working together as a team. Anyone who is passionate about open-source software is welcome to join us. Click here to learn more.

What tasks they accomplished

Over the last several months, our campus ambassadors have greatly demonstrated their talent and completed many tasks to help more people getting to know ONLYOFFICE and open-source software. Most of the tasks are as below:

• Create and post articles and videos about ONLYOFFICE products on different platforms.
• Repost ONLYOFFICE official articles and activities to share with others.
• Present their thoughts and suggestions in weekly online meetings.
• Answer users’ questions about software on the forums.

What experience they got

Through the execution of different tasks, students are learning through practice. Let’s see what they have learnt:

• Office skills proficiency. By using ONLYOFFICE and creating tutorials they get to learn and practice office skills, which will be very helpful to their future studies and work.
• New media operation. With constant focus on users’ needs and hot trends, they are gradually improving in creating interesting and helpful content to the audiences.
• Better time management. The working hours are quite flexible, most students have learned how to balance schoolwork, life and internship to complete tasks in time.
• Self-taught learning. Although we are glad to guide ambassadors at any time, we still try to give them enough space, so that students could do their own research and develop self-study skills.

How they feel about the program

Most of ONLYOFFICE campus ambassadors feel satisfied about the internship experience, especially about the flexible working hours and productive atmosphere.

Yuren Wen from Hong Kong Shue Yan University shares her experience as an ONLYOFFICE ambassador:

During this period of time, I feel that the workload is relatively moderate, and I’m not over stressed. The atmosphere is also very friendly and open, with seniors willing to share their experiences and knowledge which allows me to always get timely help and guidance when I encounter problems.

What’s new

Now the tasks have become more personal as we focus on the strengths of each student. For example, Jiayu Shan prefers creating instructions and tutorials. We would try to customize his tasks according to his interests. If your major is accounting, and you are good at calculations, your tasks can be focused on spreadsheet operations and tutorials, or on creating useful templates for students of the same interests. We are open to any suggestions.

What’s more, we improved the program by introducing a new system of points and rewards. With each task completed, the student can get the corresponding points. Rewards will be given after the points reach certain amount, such as branded items, additional points, certificate or recommendation letter from ONLYOFFICE.

Challenges to take on

Although we have been working smoothly together and have achieved some good results, there are many challenges on the way too.

First of all, we would like to interact with each of the students more to get the best results. In fact, there are twice as many ambassadors as our team members in charge. Thus, one of the vital challenges to us is to make the process more automatic and personalized at the same time.

Secondly, for now students are mainly performing the tasks they’re given. We would like to encourage them to be more active and free to unleash their creativity and thoughts.

This is a new program for us which involves trial and error, but we are constantly improving it. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

How to become an ONLYOFFICE campus ambassador?

Interested in joining us? Please submit your resume to marketing@onlyoffice.com, mention “[campus ambassador] name + school + major + grade” in the title.