Guest Experts are everywhere, you just have to look for them! Sometimes, they find you. To make that possible, we'd recommend creating a form that anyone can use to express their interest.
<aside> 🧠Read all about guest experts.
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Once you have the form, link to it on your website, because people will go there to find out how they can get involved. Having a form also creates a way for you to organize and coordinate your funnel of guest experts. You can share the link with people who tell you they want to be guest experts, as a simple and clear next step to following up on their interest. You can even send the link to people who you think should be guest experts, to nudge them towards getting involved.
Here's an overview of our guest expert interest form. Click on any image to expand it.
We use Google Forms (which is free!) for our interest forms.
We use the beginning of the form as an opportunity to cover the basics:
Next, we get their contact information.
Then we ask them for more information about what they have to share. These three questions cover most of the different kinds of guest experts we welcome into our space.
It's also really important to ask them about their experience and comfort teaching children and youth. Being a guest expert means teaching kids, so it's really good to establish their experience and comfort levels right off the bat.
A lot of grown-ups want to help, but they're busy during the afternoons, which is when a lot of Assemble programming is happening! So we're always sure to find out their availability.
We also want to get clear about what kind of arrangement they're looking for. This is really good information to have, whether you've got a tight budget or a fat one.
One last thing that's really good to know: have they been to Assemble before? A "No" definitely isn't a deal-breaker, but it means they might need more background before coming onboard spaceship Assemble.
We end with an open space where they can tell us anything important we didn't ask!