5 Ways to Engage Your Program's Mentors

Engagement takes student success programs from helpful to indispensable. Without engaged participants, programs can’t reach the students who most need support. 

We spend a great deal of time exploring how our partners can help mentors better connect with their mentees. But mentors need support, too! Mentors are invaluable to mentorship programs, and their needs may at times be overlooked in favor of mentees, who are less established in the higher education system and may have more pressing needs.

Let’s explore five effective methods for engaging your program mentors!

(1) Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Regular and thoughtful communication to your mentors will help them feel that they are part of a community, and help keep their mentorship participation high on their list of priorities. You can engage your mentors through tools like tailored email campaigns, fliers, and regular social media posts. Communicating regularly throughout the program timeline and using multiple channels will help reach the most people. 

The key to success with this strategy is to keep mentors’ needs top of mind when creating content for them. Provide resources, share success stories, and always make sure to let your mentors know how valued they are.

(2) Get your participants on board to help.

The best advocates for your mentorship program may just be your mentors and mentees! These are the people who see firsthand the difference a mentor-mentee relationship can make in a student’s life. Take full advantage of their enthusiasm and engagement by enlisting them to recruit more students to the program. 

You can encourage existing mentors and mentees to volunteer at sign-up events, or to share their personal experiences with the program in a written interview.  These anecdotes can help prospective mentors manage expectations about frequency and style of contact, the hard work of building these relationships, and any challenges they had connecting - as well as how valuable and rewarding they found it. Sharing the ups and downs of their experience, with candor, is important!

Mentees can become mentors once they’re more established within the institution, and they can also encourage their friends and peers to join as engaged, helpful mentors in a way that staff or administrators may not be able to.

(3) Integrate mentorship into other events and programs.

One of the best ways to both recruit new mentors and support current ones is to ensure wide-spread recognition of the mentorship program as a whole! A mentorship program that is well-known and widely recognized across your institution will be more rewarding and provide a natural avenue of recruitment. 

A little time spent on internal “advertising” can pay big dividends, so make sure it’s highly visible at key touchpoints for new students, including:

• Orientation and pre-semester activities

• Advising appointments

• Required courses for first-years

• Sign-up events for clubs, Greek life, and intramural sports

(4) Remind mentors of the benefits of mentoring.

Mentors are doing a wonderful, selfless thing by volunteering their time and energy for the program–but it never hurts to remind them of what THEY get out of the deal, too. 

• Talk to mentors about how they can use their mentorship experience in future job and leadership applications. 
• Give them examples of how to talk about their mentorship in a job interview, and provide them with a template of how to list mentorship experience on their resume. (You might be surprised how many of them won’t think of doing so until you bring it up!) 
• You can also give them regular information about any networking opportunities you can provide or point them toward. 

Let your mentors know that mentees are not the only ones being helped by this program; you’re invested in the mentors’ success, too.

(5) Tie together re-recruitment and recognition.

While it’s critical to bring in new mentors, don’t neglect the pool of experienced mentors you already have at your disposal. By showing public appreciation and recognition of the work of your mentors, you can help increase the rate who will sign up again. Here are a few suggestions:

• Call them out by name in an email newsletter you regularly send out to mentors
• Provide opportunities for mentees to share positive feedback or stories of how their mentors helped them 
• Host career-building events that help mentors position their mentorship experience on their resume and in professional interviews
• Develop awards and recognition opportunities for them at year-end award ceremonies
• Publicly recognize your mentors within the larger institutional environment, such as in a campus newspaper or organizational newsletter
• Create systems of peer recognition where mentors can show appreciation for each other

With these methods for mentor recruitment and engagement, you can expand your mentorship program and connect more vulnerable students with the resources they need.