I find it interesting the different ways that the advocates are taking to approach their work with their departments. I have one advocate that is primarily off-campus who is choosing to do a lot of their work by email, and approaching the departments to get information circulated, and she is getting some really good responses.
On completely the opposite end of the scale, I have a couple of advocates that are utilising reading groups, school meetings and seminars to spread the word using leaflets and their own enthusiasm, also having the same great results.
This week coming up, as I am going to be away, I have asked them to start putting their experience into words, helping to collate some FAQs for the website, as well as investigating the different tools that ORCID provide to ‘Link works’ and writing up some short guidance that we can use to support our academic staff in the use of the ORCID site to its full potential. We are also going ‘old school’ and some of the teams are going to be putting up posters in their schools and across campus in postgraduate spaces, staff rooms and offices, so you won’t be able to escape the message!
We have also just taken possession of our first official merchandise! 
Postcards have been created that contain the key ORCID 1, 2, 3 motif as well as some plain-language benefits and the internal page for more information. We decided on postcards because the message was so simple, filling a flyer or leaflet would have been very laborious and ORCID is such a simple idea, it just wasn’t needed.
We have also received business cards. These were the idea of the advocates, as I said before, and they look great. They wanted a simple, easy to transport way of giving the URL and some contact information for more details. Now I think about it, business cards are a good idea for another reason, they stick around. I know this seems to be my rationale for more than one of the merchandising products, but someone who thinks ORCID is a great idea and goes away clutching a leaflet, the leaflet is going to get screwed up, torn, coffee spilt on, used to write down a phone number. A business card is less likely to get screwed up, and will stick around in a pocket or wallet until rediscovered, still intact to remind them what a good idea this was.
The team are on their way to collect their business cards as I type – I’ll let you know what they think!