Over the last decades, research has become more digital, collaborative and open. Research openness has extended from articles to other research outputs, including datasets. Meanwhile, datasets are growing bigger and are requiring more financial and energy investments. In addition, the reproducibility crisis has highlighted the need for a cultural change in research data management, which most funding agencies are nudging by requiring compliance to the FAIR data principles. Institutions can help researchers address this new pressure through support from cross-disciplinary staff and librarians, and by implementing general data management tools. This basic and necessary initiative from universities most often translates into awareness campaigns and general training sessions that often end up overbooked, highlighting the growing interest of researchers in these issues. However, this central approach lacks the discipline-specific expertise needed to properly translate the general recommendations into actionable items. With most institutions being decentralised across many campuses, logic pushes towards relying on local relays. Inspired by their peers from Cambridge and TUDelft, the six universities in the Brussels-Wallonia Federation (FWB, Belgium) have launched, as a consortium, a community of Data Ambassadors (DAs). Sometimes called Data Champions, DAs are researchers acting as local experts who bring awareness in their immediate work environment (department, research unit…) towards data management best practices. DA networks have the advantage of automatically addressing another weakness of central support, that is, the lack of resources, by capitalizing on existing workforce with the relevant expertise. While lean in terms of spending, this approach does however point towards the issues of resources availability for such services. On top of these benefits, DA networks enable peer-to-peer support, which has been shown to be a much more efficient drive towards change than top-down initiatives. The FWB consortium ...