Who should I choose as my school's Arbor Champion?

What is an Arbor Champion?

The Arbor Champion(s) is the Key Arbor user(s) in the school trained to support others and communicate the rollout plan clearly to all school stakeholders.

Their main tasks will include:

• Data Migration
• Coordinating Training
• Other setup-specific tasks

Arbor Champions are the individuals appointed in your school, group or MAT who will help to support and drive the transition to our MIS. Along this journey, we’ll be providing you with a wealth of support and resources, doing everything that we can to make sure that you love our platform. However, while we can give you plenty of support and share all the right resources, ultimately it’s what you do with it that makes the difference. A great Arbor Champion, or team of Champions, enables us to magnify the support we’ll be providing along this journey and, ultimately, ensure that Arbor is a huge success for you.

To help you to select the right Arbor Champions, here are three things to keep in mind:

They have the time, and want to participate regularly, all year round

A great Arbor Champion is someone who is accessible and available to staff when they need support most. Senior leaders make great Arbor Champions when it comes to driving whole school buy-in! There are times in the school year, however, when other commitments demand their focus, which might pull them away from this project. Why not think about pairing them up with a member of staff who has more free time, or even think about creating a small project team to share the work?

They’re great communicators and will be eager to share their knowledge

Having the ability to communicate new learnings, upcoming updates or exciting new opportunities across the school makes for a great Arbor Champion and will enable us to greatly amplify the impact of all the support we have in place for your school.

They represent their stakeholder group

Successful change projects always take into account the different stakeholders within your school and support them accordingly. Your school office team will have a different set of goals for using Arbor than your leadership team will, for example, and it’s great practice to appoint an Arbor Champion for each group in your own school to maximise the support they have access to as they transition to Arbor.