As the manger of the Planet Blue Ambassador program, I always get excited when I see growth in the number of Planet Blue Ambassadors across campus each year—across all three U-M campuses. Back when I started in this role in 2018, I remember the student interns who I was supervising at the time being really excited that we had just reached 3,500 campus community members certified as Ambassadors. Knowing the Ann Arbor campus is around 100,000 strong, I was less overwhelmed and more motivated to see how high we could push the number.
These days, we’re at over 9,000 Ambassadors and growing daily. Last month when the Office of Campus Sustainability published their 2024 fact sheets, we were right around 9,200 total. Then, when I was drafting this blog post, we were at 9,281 in Ann Arbor, 212 in Dearborn, and 86 in Flint. It’s encouraging to see the numbers grow each day whether that’s because of groups of students and staff getting together for our lunch-and-learn training workshops or even just by interested individuals completing the Canvas course on their own. But for all these years, the number has mostly just been… a big number. I haven’t had the opportunity to dive into the participation data in order to figure out who these individuals were, which schools and colleges were participating the most, if we had engaged more students versus employees, or in general, what percentage of the campus community we had, so far, impacted.
But, thanks to some assistance from our Web Manager in the Graham Institute as well as staff from Human Resources and the Registrar’s Office, I was finally able to learn a little more about our Ambassador community, and I figured I should share it for those of you who are curious about how your school or college stacks up.
If you are curious to know what percentage of people in your specific unit, class, or club is Planet Blue Ambassador certified, send us an email at pba-information@umich.edu with the uniqnames of people in your group, and we can share that info with you. And, more importantly, if you want to up that percentage, simply request a group training or share our quick Canvas course with your team.