Welcome to the first of our monthly updates here at PR Ramp!
Going live just shy of 24 days ago, August has been a hectic month with lots of challenges and learnings.
We’re taking a moment to reflect on our growth, share some changes we plan for initiatives going forward (the core remains the same), and some feedback we’ve received from mentors and students alike.
We do this in the spirit of total transparency to everyone involved.
Since we’ve launched:
Our website went live: prramp.com
We’ve more than doubled our mentor roster - from 40 at launch to 100+ professionals across every seniority level and sector.
We’ve divided the roster page into four categories: Agency, Corporate, Government & Non-Profit.
We’ve created an FAQ page to address common questions from mentors and students alike.
Over 50 mentees are either currently receiving guidance to be paired with the right mentor, or have completed their session with a mentor. You can see feedback from the sessions on our LinkedIn page, where we reshare all posts from mentees.
We want to thank every professional, professor, student and graduate who has supported our initiative, encouraging potential mentors and mentees to reach out. We’re proud to say the majority of participants come from word-of-mouth referrals.
Our Process
If you know of any student or graduate (2 years out from graduation) who could benefit from speaking to someone on our constantly growing roster, encourage them to reach out to us! Our process is simple:
Potential mentees email us at comms@prramp.com stating they’re interested.
We set up a call with the mentee to discuss their goals, interests & challenges, and suggest a few mentor options.
We share a short questionnaire that mentees fill out, which we then share with mentors to give them a quick snapshot of the mentee’s interests and challenges, and so they can determine that they’re suited to address them.
Upon the mentor’s willingness to take on the mentee, we connect them both by email.
The mentor and mentee can take it from there, or they can coordinate and reach out to us at PR Ramp to send out a Zoom link for the chosen time slot.
We act as both filter and facilitator, with our process informed by three of the biggest concerns mentors shared before we went live:
Ensuring mentees are committed and will attend the mentorship session they sign up for.
Ensuring mentees choose the mentor best suited to speak to their interests and challenges.
Ensuring mentees come prepared to take up the better part of the scheduled hour. The onus is on the mentee to carry the conversation, not the mentor.
Our Social Channels
Check us out on our social channels, where we focus on content relevant to students and recent graduates.
Arvind Bining, our social media manager, is always hard at work researching good content and resources students and grads will find value in. We currently use two social channels.
Linkedin: PR Ramp
Share mentorship profiles bi-weekly, three at a time.
Share mentees’ posts on their mentorship session experience.
Twitter: @pr_ramp
Share short excerpts from the books we’re reading, or have read - these aren’t quotes that are easily found on the internet.
Share articles we’ve read.
Share mentor profiles.
Share mentee posts on their mentorship session experience.
Share advice mentors have shared with mentees.
Occasional polls/questions to determine other student concerns/needs.
Celebrate student/grad achievements
Share job opportunities
If you have any resources that you’d like us to share with our audience - job postings, other initiatives, articles, good books to read, etc. - please reach out to us at comms@prramp.com, or on any of our social channels. We promote anything that benefits students and grads, especially those at no cost.
Feedback so Far
From Mentors:
Session length is capped at 1 hr, but sessions have varied from 30 to 60 minutes (A few great conversations have gone over). We’ve considered shortening the sessions down from 60 to 30 - 45 minutes, but feel reserving one hour is best.
Some mentors have suggested requiring mentees to submit some questions beforehand, but many mentees have preferred a more open conversational style. The short general questionnaire we already have mentees fill out should give mentors a snapshot of mentee interests and challenges.
Many mentors have gone beyond the scope of our ask; mentors are continuing to stay in touch with some of their mentees, offering other assistance like mock interviews and resume reviews. Our ask has always been just for the one hour, but we’d definitely hoped to see organic relationships form in our initiative, and are very glad to see this.
From Mentees:
We haven’t received a single score below 8 out of 10 on the value of the mentorship sessions, and aspire to narrow the gap towards the perfect score from every mentee.
Every mentee feels they’ve been paired with a mentor well suited to address their interests and challenges.
Most mentees have commented on the personalized nature of our communications as one of our strongest points. We take pride in this.
Mentors have suggested that we hold group sessions - 1 mentor to 4-5 mentees - but the majority of our mentees have preferred the intimacy and attention of the 1-on-1 sessions. However, some have been open to considering group sessions on a second go around, and we’re working on implementing this.
There has been a consistent request for a free of cost job portal that aggregates internship/entry level job postings. This resource exists: Generation PR runs a job board for new professionals to the field, free of cost. Please share this with any who would find it useful.
Note of interest*: In our initial questionnaire, we always ask mentees to rank these four options from 1-4 (1 being of highest priority) : Creative Freedom, Growth Opportunities, Salary, Good Work Environment.
To our surprise (and perhaps no one else’s), Good Work Environment and Growth Opportunities are most commonly ranked the highest.
We will be sharing this and other such findings in detail later on.
Focuses for September
As we continue to grow and learn, we’re working on streamlining our processes and addressing some of our pressure points.
Increased Outreach for Students/Recent grads: We’ve had a steady flow of 2-3 mentees reaching out daily for the past two weeks, and expect this to continue. In the meantime, we encourage our participants and supporters to continue sharing this initiative with those who could use a mentor. Our process virtually guarantees connection with a mentor, and every mentee thus far has found it immensely valuable.
With the start of the new school year, we’ll be reaching out to PR/communications program coordinators to share our initiative with the incoming classes.
Upon expansion of our team, we’ll consider using Instagram to reach our target audience.
We’ll reach out to individual professors across colleges to share this initiative with graduated and graduating classes. Professors and other educators have more direct access to students/graduates in need of our service.
Calendly Integration: For the initial screening call a member of the PR Ramp team has with mentees reaching out, we’ll set up a calendar on the website. Mentees can directly and quickly schedule the 15 min call.
Expanding our Team by Two: Our team of 3 has risen to the occasion countless times throughout this month, but as we continue to grow, we could use a bit of help. We’ll be putting a call out soon enough for two passionate students/graduates to join us.
Gov’t & Non-Profit Professionals: We are immensely grateful for the outpouring of support from agency and corporate professionals. We wish to offer the same diversity of options to mentees seeking advice in the government and non-profit sectors, and will focus our efforts here.
Buy Me a Coffee: As we grow, so do our costs. We will never put the burden of cost on students/graduates, and instead plan to appeal to the supportive communications community to help wherever they can. Ideally, PR Ramp runs on support from the PR community, for the PR community.
We’ll put out a call early in September, showcasing our exact costs up front. The donations will only go towards website hosting/addons, Zoom subscriptions, and other operational expenses. Any funds in excess will be set aside and visibly accounted for, to be used in future initiatives.
We’ve been footing the bill so far, and will continue to do so if we don’t receive enough in donations to cover our costs. Mentors and mentees can rest assured that our initiatives will proceed unhindered regardless.
The Other Parts of the Engine
If you’ve been seeing the feedback on our LinkedIn page, you’ve seen a lot of mentees thank PR Ramp and myself (Daanish). I appreciate this, but I want to draw attention to two people who have worked tirelessly since launch: pitching tactics, taking the reins on implementation, and remaining steadfast under the insane growth this past month.
Our beautiful website, our elegant logo, and our expansive roster design are all the amazing work of Phil Kim. A Humber graduate with PR Ramp since months before our launch, Phil has been consistently pitching, criticizing (constructively) and transforming the ideas we’ve had since conception. He handles all things website and design, on top of his internship and freelance business producing dance videos. Feel free to reach out to him to see his works - beauty in motion, they are. Literally.
If you follow us on social (LinkedIn: PR Ramp/ Twitter: @pr_ramp), you’ve seen the consistent value we aim to bring. Arvind Bining, another Humber graduate, works diligently to produce content useful and relevant to students and recent grads. Only content we ourselves consume (who better than recent grads to decide what’s useful for recent grads) pass through her filter and show up on our channels. Reach out and say Hi! She loves connecting with other passionate folks.
Without these two, none of this would have been possible. The three of us look forward to growing our student-focused association, learning and tackling our challenges together.
Feel free to reach out with any questions, concerns or suggestions! You can leave a comment here or email us at comms@prramp.com.
We’ll send these progress reports at the end of every month: subscribe to receive them straight to your inbox!