General Resources and Q&A with Christopher Margadonna:
- Video recording of Q&A portion with Christopher Margadonna – LINK
Breakout Room Notes:
IDEAS/THINGS WE’VE TRIED:
- Social Media Posts: adding more community content. Asking followers to “tag a friend” or share page with friends
- Incentives: Bring a “possible mentor” to be entered in a drawing for a gift card.
- Social Media Post: An anonymous profile of a mentee to attract a mentor with the same interest.
- Programs wanted to try the word of mouth campaign that involved having mentors tag their candidates in social media with a specific hashtag (within a certain time frame then the organization would follow up with any hashtags during and after that period).
- Seemed like a few programs didn’t really have or adapt their current mentor recruitment plan to COVID and were just doing recruitment randomly. They were encouraged by the idea of tracking their efforts and being intentional.
- Programs were excited by the notion of targeted recruitment and we discussed the difference between mentor eligibility (the bare minimum of acceptable) vs the value of drafting a series of “ideal” mentor profiles and then creating recruitment campaigns to seek out those who fit their profile(s).
- Bring a virtual friend event went ok…but not great.
- Taking existing mentors in the program and asking them to follow, like and share to build your following
- Can MENTOR Colorado provide a model or provide a social media mentoring program who has a strong social media presence as a model to follow?
- Find lunchpals on Facebook, Instagram, twitter and LinkedIn.
- When possible some organizations are using face-to-face events (following the CDC guidelines, masks and social distancing to maintain the mentor relationships.
- Holding outdoor activities
- Holding a lot of virtual group events and doing some one-on-one meetings in breakout rooms in between.
- Games – Bingo Night, Trivia, Jeopardy
- Being intentional to meet the needs of students
- Denver BBBS has a “Black Mentor United” male group meeting once a month to discuss with young men what is happening in today racial injustice, policing, kids in school
- Tabling events have been difficult, no one signs up, but provides visibility of the program, which can be important
- Lunch and Learns at companies – a mentor that works there will plan/host it, and the mentoring organization will come in and present
- Ambassador program – people who talk to their networks about becoming a mentor, word of mouth, mentor recruitment challenge (mentors tell their stories to their own networks to recruit others)
- Need to set realistic expectations with mentors, rather than saying that mentoring is always easy and fun
- We don’t just want warm bodies – we need to be pretty selective
- Give an incentive to attend an info meeting
- Connect with other organizations to collaborate on recruitment
- The Big Network (a networking event every other month at a brewery or somewhere else, where mentors each bring a friend)
- Social media recruitment, newspaper, radio – doing same but targeting Latinx group – shadowing organization’s traditional recruitment while targeting specific community
- CU Boulder – virtual volunteer fair
- Recruiting all over the world because it’s virtual
QUESTIONS/RESOURCES STILL NEEDED:
- Considering the idea of creating different mentor recruitment pitches based on different motivations. Orgs were curious to try this but didn’t feel like they knew where to start.
- Delayed matching – how do we keep volunteers engaged until then
- What are themes that organizations are using for social media?
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