Building Attention for Youth Tutor/Mentor Programs - Strategy

In January 2019 I wrote an article titled "What the Heck Am I Trying to Do?" The graphic below is one of many that visualize the goal of drawing attention, ideas and resources to every volunteer-based youth serving organization in Chicago.  I've been trying to do this since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

There are dozens of articles on this blog that share this strategy, and that encourage leaders in every big city with areas of concentrated poverty, to adopt it.  We launched the Tutor/Mentor Connection in January 1994 (after a year of planning), with the four-part strategy that I show with the concept map below.

While Step 1 of the strategy focuses on collecting information that can be used to build understanding and find better ways to help youth in high poverty areas connect with extra adults who help them move through school and into work, Step 2 focuses on public awareness, needed to get people to look at the information in Step 1.

While I've described the public awareness strategy in many ways, I realized today that I seldom shared the concept map that shows this strategy.  Take a look. 

This strategy is based on my 17 years working in retail advertising with the Montgomery Ward Corporation, between 1973 and 1990.  Every year we spent millions of dollars on weekly print, TV and radio ads intended to draw shoppers to the 400+ stores we had in 40 different states.  Every month our ads had different themes, timed to what customers were thinking about. So in August we had Back-to-School themes, while in May we had Mother's Day and Graduation themes. Obviously in December we had Christmas and Holiday gift-giving themes.  

So the T/MC built events that were timed to the rhythm of tutor/mentor programs. In August we focused on volunteer and student recruitment.  In November we drew programs together to share ideas while at the same time built awareness of the need for dollars to support every tutor/mentor program in Chicago, with the goal of influencing year-end giving.

While we never were able to get a radio campaign off the ground in February when programs were beginning to look for new volunteers to replace those who dropped out over the holidays, we did build on the January National Mentoring Month attention.  In May we held a year-end conference, to celebrate work done during the year, share ideas, and point people to work needed to launch improved programs when the cycle begins to repeat in August of the next school  year.

Without many dollars for advertising or public relations our strategy aimed to generate media coverage of our events. Our social media and newsletters aimed to draw visitors to our website, library and lists of Chicago youth programs.  

Our goal has been to influence actions people take to help others get involved, to help youth tutor and/or mentor programs grow in more high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities. 

On this page you can see news stories that were the result of repeating these events every year. 

Graphics like the one at the right try to visualize these ideas. You can see it in this article, and, in this article, you can see how interns shared it with their own projects. 

Another graphic that I've used often is the one below, emphasizing the 12 years it take for youth to move through school and the additional years it takes to get into a job and a career.  Kids who have a diverse network of adult support have better opportunities than those who don't.  Living in high poverty areas reduces the reach of your network. Being part of organized, on-going, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs can help expand networks of support.

Through all of this I've tried to motivate other people to use their own media and celebrity status to draw people in their own network to this information.  

I'm still doing that. If you share this article, you're taking that role. 

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