Engaging People Part II - Your Steering Committee

In our last post we discussed some of the most common challenges organizations face in reaching people in their awareness program, and effective way to overcome them.  This blog continues that theme with a second method, utilizing your Steering Committee.  A Steering Committee (or Advisory Board) is a team of  5-10 volunteers from different departments throughout your organization.  The primary purpose of these advisors is to provide feedback and suggestions on how to improve your awareness program.  This is a long term group, they help sustain your awareness program's life cycle. However, you can also leverage these volunteers to be your security awareness ambassadors, they can help reach out to the different departments in your organization.  They can help explain to others the value of the awareness program, or in some cases if properly trained the can answer specific questions about security.  Perhaps even have a train-the-trainer program where these ambassadors can help do local security awareness presentations.  The end goal here is you cannot do everything yourself, leverage your Advisory Board to help reach others and engage.   The best part is this has the potential to be a positive feedback loop.  The more your volunteers interact with others in the organization, the more feedback they can also provide on improving your security awareness program.