So You Want to Nominate a Tableau Ambassador…

Adam Mico
3 min readJun 28, 2020
Credit: Tableau (via Twitter)

This year there are six groups of Tableau Ambassadors waiting to serve. Tableau’s community (with self-nominations) provides a pool of candidates to choose from to team with Tableau to help navigate the future of the product and our community. Here is Tableau’s introductory blog post on the nominations from Amanda Boyle.

Many people wonder what makes a person ‘worthy’ of ambassadorship. It’s incredibly important now as we focus on the next wave of incredible talent and making sure all voices are heard. We all have our criteria, but what’s important is that you consider the following…

  1. Diversity of selections — We should be focused on not only selecting people we may be close to, but all consider the need for all voices to be heard and role models to be seen by people who want to be part of an inclusive community. Our ambassador groups in the past have been wonderful, but we must strive to improve representation.
  2. Excellence in one or more areas — We want our ambassadors to be great in at least one area, but we don’t want representation in a vacuum. Think hard about the people you select. Will they be seen? Can they contribute to multiple groups? Most importantly, what type of impact will they have?
  3. Will they honor their commitment? — Being an ambassador is a year-round volunteer commitment. They are a very small sample of a robust group of talented, creative, intelligent, and thoughtful people. You want to consider strongly whether that person will be steadily pushing our family forward and not stop once announced.

Tableau’s nomination forms are great, but it helps to see everything on one page to make sure you have what you need to make a coherent case for your nominee. To help you navigate, I developed a template.

Please note: This was not created at Tableau’s behest, but something I wanted to develop to help me sort out my nominations and help others do the same.

Ambassador Nomination Template (link to form)

…gives you the chance to look through what you need and be able to copy and paste right into your nomination forms. All necessary external links are there for you to get background and context.

Usage Notes

  • The link to nomination form with its introduction is in Cell A6.
  • There is no tracking of personal information on this template. People with or without a Google Account can use this form. There are no other ‘tricks’ here, so feel free to use confidently.
  • To use… Select File >> Download to download in a variety of formats. Otherwise, if you have a Google Account, select File >> Make a Copy to access a copy of the form. If it still doesn’t make sense, select this link for a quick video tutorial. If you still don’t get it, feel free to find me on Twitter or LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to help.
  • It includes links to access parts you need to get to in the document, so you can quickly access where you need to go as displayed below.
  • It also has grouping, which means you can hide/unhide sections not relevant to you by selecting the ‘-’ or ‘+’ on the left side of the group on the sheet as seen here:

Music Morsel

Since it’s the 45th anniversary of my birth, I thought my music morsel this week would be my favorite ‘birthday’ song. Enjoy!

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Adam Mico

Data Visualization and Enablement Leader | Data Leadership Collaborative Advisory Board Member | Tableau Visionary + Ambassador | Views are my own