Students need to know about your mentorship initiative. This edition of Mentor Collective’s Monthly Digest explores ways to enhance mentorship’s visibility across your institution–and also includes an exciting new product update!
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To make mentorship successful, it needs to be a visible and integrated aspect of the student experience. This can mean embedding mentorship into events such as orientation, tabling in common areas, branding your program in ways students will recognize, providing easy access to details and resources, campaigning in the student voice, and having your institution’s faculty, staff, and leadership celebrate mentorship. ICYMI: Watch our full webinar on this topic, including stories from our partners at York College at City University of New York (CUNY) and Florida Atlantic University! |
How Do I...?
...Brand My Program
- Integrate your branding into existing school branding, nomenclature, and cultural elements. For example, University of California, Davis students are called “Aggies” and they’ve branded their mentorship program as "First Year Aggies Connect."
- Add a video on your program landing page with testimonials from participants. Make it easy - use these templates! Don't miss this example from York College at CUNY.
- Leverage the Community page on your Partner Dashboard to grab stories from participants that you want to highlight in your marketing. Learn how here.
- Don’t forget tangible “goodies” - students love swag! Florida Atlantic University orientation leaders wear branded backpacks and polos, becoming “walking billboards” advertising their mentorship initiative.
...Ensure Accessibility
- Never charge a fee for participation. Offer multiple ways to engage such as text, in-person, virtual, or group events.
- Mentorship might be a new experience for participants, so provide the support they need to thrive. Leverage the resources available on the Participant Dashboard, share resources directly from your program landing page, or send out a monthly newsletter with prompts for mentors to ask their mentees.
- Market your program with identity-conscious language that ensures participants feel comfortable and included.
- Meet students where they are! At Holyoke Community College, they make their program visible to commuter students by setting up recruitment tables directly in the commuter parking lot. Hear Holyoke Community College’s many strategies for increasing visibility through accessibility.
...Embed into Student Life
- Market during orientation, matriculation, or other key transition points, rather than making your program a separate initiative.
- Include an opt-in to mentorship as part of incoming students’ enrollment checklists, highlight mentorship through cross-department promotion at new student orientation, or host celebratory events promoting mentorship in highly trafficked student areas.
- Ensure all faculty and staff speak to the value of mentorship in their student interactions.
- Peer-to-peer recruitment is powerful! Encourage student-led marketing efforts, such as live streaming and social media campaigns.
- Hear more about ways your peers leverage orientation, specifically, to boost mentorship’s visibility in our webinar on recruitment strategies.
📍 Need a starting place? → Visit our Recruitment Materials Library in the Partner Knowledge Center for examples from your peers, as well as templates for flyers, emails, social media posts, and more.
⭐ For more best practices on how to make your mentorship initiative shine, click below to watch our webinar, Make Mentorship Visible!
Product Update
We're excited to introduce new enhancements that give participants more control over their mentorship experience, including the ability to request a rematch with just one click. Participants can now easily connect with institutions for support, while partners can track mentorship re-engagement in real-time through our smart check-in system. Read more in our Partner Knowledge Center article, "Encouraging Mentorship Engagement."
Upcoming Education
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Assess the Impact of Mentorship September 4 / 1:00 PM ET
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Looking to measure the impact of your mentorship initiative on students' sense of belonging, retention, and academic progress? Our upcoming three-part webinar series is designed to empower you with the tools needed to run your own impact analyses and apply the findings to your institution's broader student success strategy. Register for all three here! |
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Community Colleges Partner Meet-Up September 18 / 10:00 AM ET |
Join a small group of your peers from other community colleges across the country in a casual roundtable conversation about trends in peer mentorship. Join your peers! |
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Uncovering the Matching Process October 1 / 10:00 AM ET |
Discover how our matching algorithm pairs mentors and mentees using institution-provided data and personalized criteria. In this two-part webinar series, we'll showcase how we create matches that drive meaningful mentorship connections. Sign-up today! |
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