Blog Exchanges as part of Marketing Strategy

In Chicago we're mourning the killing of another student. People are calling for gun control laws (which I support) and I've heard some say they will put up a $5,000 reward to catch anyone who kills a youth in the future.

I wish the city leaders would spend some time looking at the availability of non-school tutoring, mentoring, learning, enrichment and jobs programs in the 60612 zip code where Crane High School is located (which is where the most recent shooting took place). Then develop a T/MC type strategy aimed at helping the existing programs constantly improve, while helping new programs form in under served areas.

On the Program Locator section of the T/MC site, I only see three organizations offering any kind of tutoring and/or mentoring during the non-school hours to teens in this zip code. If there are more, we don't have these programs in our database.

One of the challenges we face, as a small non profit organization, is reaching out to all of the organizations in the Chicago region who do any type of volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring to teach them to list their organizations in the Program Locator, and to keep the information current. Another problem is finding the talent and technology support to keep our web services working and easy to access.



However, the biggest challenge is a lack of advertising dollars to reach out daily to all of the people who want to see schools improve, poverty reduced, violence end, and youth more prepared for jobs and careers. This map illustrates the many different interest groups who need to be connected to this community-wide problem.

Without advertising and public relations dollars, too few people find the information we maintain in the Tutor/Mentor Library, or the directory of tutor/mentor programs we host. Thus, we're innovating new ways to build public awareness, and this is by blog exchanges. Click here, here and here to see three places where tutoring/mentoring is the subject of bloggers around the country.

If you'd like to connect with us, in this blog exchange strategy, we'd like to hear from you. It's one way we can increase public attention for all of us.