As the Student Sponsorship Coordinator (SSC), you are worth your weight in gold!
Your primary responsibility is to be a communicator. You are the connection point between our precious students and the sponsors who support them around the world. Integral to a rewarding student-sponsor relationship is communication, and that is the first responsibility of the SSC. You are the communicator between MITS as a community and our donors as a community through mass broadcast outlets such as our blog and social media profiles. You are also the communicator between students and their sponsors on a personal level through personal emails, Facebook messages, handwritten letters and so on.
Your secondary responsibility is administrative. The exciting task of getting to know new students and entering their biographical information into our database is in your wheelhouse. When someone registers as a new sponsors through our website, you get to match them to a student. You will also help us keep our records in shipshape by maintaining & updating the Student Sponsorship Database on an ongoing basis.
This role is tremendously important on a financial level. Monthly student sponsorship with MITS costs $75 per month, or $900 per year. Multiplied by 100 students, that’s $90,000 per year that MITS brings in as a result of YOU managing the sponsorship program well. This income enables us to house, feed, educate, train & love on each of these students as if they are our own. That said, the sponsorship program does not fully fund the work of MITS. The majority of our annual operating budget is supported by donations from individuals and churches. The cost to MITS of housing, feeding, clothing & educating each student is far greater than $75/month, and MITS covers the overage out of our general operating budget. This means that if a student is unsponsored or if a sponsor drops from the program or misses a payment, there is no direct effect on that student. The sponsorship income simply offsets the cost of running Made in the Streets, it does not fully fund our work. In short, if a sponsor misses a month or gives less than $75 or gives more than $75, there is no change to the level of care, sustenance & education the student receives.
COMMUNICATION:
The primary responsibility of the Student Sponsorship Coordinator is communication.
Social Media posting & Blogging
One of the expectations of your role is that you compile content (text & photos) to post to our social media. Each week, you are expected to make one post to our facebook & instagram accounts. What you post is up to you, but try to really tell the story of how great our students are and how they're changing their lives for the better every single day. Pro tip: use Facebook's "schedule" feature to write all your posts for the month in one sitting and schedule them to roll out weekly. Every month or so, you will be asked to write a short article to be posted to the MITS blog.
Connections
Another expectation of your role is that you foster a personal communication or interaction between each student and his or her sponsor 4 times per year (or every 3 months). We call these interactions connections. A connection can be as simple as emailing a photo and a quick note about the student/activity in the photo to the sponsor. If the student has a facebook account, it might mean helping the student sign on to his or her facebook and write and send a meaningful message to their sponsor. Another great connection idea from past SSCs is to sit down with a group of students to help them handwrite letters or greeting cards that you will later carry back to the United States (talk to Joel to get some tips for organizing students to write letters). Be creative. Make it fun for you and for the students. Pace yourself!
ADMIN WORK:
The secondary responsibility of the Student Sponsorship Coordinator is administrative work.
Email
You are to be available as the primary email contact for questions about the Student Sponsorship Program. Your email address for all these communications is sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org and the password is Sponsorship.1 (please don’t change the password). This email address is listed on the MITS website as the primary point of contact for the sponsorship program. When someone registers to become a sponsor, the registration form will arrive to this address. When a sponsor has questions about the program, they will get in touch with this address. When you send connections, please do so from this address. If you would like set up an automatic forward from sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org to your personal account, please feel free to do so. Talk to Cecily if you need help with that.
Student Sponsorship Database
Each sponsor's name, address, email, their student's name and birthdate are organized in a spreadsheet located on Google drive, called the Student Sponsorship Database.
The database is located in the Google drive account associated with sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org. As you send connections, add students, and match them with new sponsors, please double check the information and update incomplete information in the Student Sponsorship Database as often as you can. Sponsors tend to move and get new email addresses and students graduate and move on. When you send a connection, perhaps take the time to ask if a sponsor's mailing address has changed.
Pro tip: Because multiple people have access to the Student Sponsorship Database on Google drive, please update it in the online version. Don't download it to your computer and make updates locally. That will create multiple copies of the database with different information that will be hard to reconcile.
Auditing the Student Sponsorship Database
If you are the SSC in January of a given year, please perform an audit (check for correctness) of the information in the Student Sponsorship Database. Leave graduating students in the database for 6 months after graduation, then delete them and ask the sponsor if they would like to reboard with another new student.
Adding New Students to the Database
Any time MITS brings in a new student, they need to be added to the Student Sponsorship Database. Meet the student(s) asap to get to know him or her, and get an accurate spelling of their name & birth date. Add their name and birthdate in the proper tab, according to their birth year. If the student is younger than the youngest tab, make a new tab for their birth year. Highlight their row in the spreadsheet to show they are unsponsored. Take a (well-lit and smiling!) photo and if you can, gather some information about his or her story. You'll use this information in the welcome email you send to his or her new sponsor.
Onboarding New Sponsors
When someone wants to sponsor a student, they register as a new sponsor through our website in the Sponsorship section. The form they complete will arrive in your Gmail inbox (sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org). When you receive that form, follow these steps:
When a Student Leaves MITS
Because you are on the ground in Kamulu, you are frequently one of the first people to know when a student graduates or runs away. While a graduation is very happy and a runaway is very sad, they are both important reasons for you to communicate with their sponsor.
Staff Resources
Work Load
Like the other solo interns, your weekly work responsibilities earn you compensation in the form of free housing at Kamulu for the duration of your work with us. Your weekly work load is not to exceed 20 hours each week. If you find you are unable to meet your expectations & goals in 20 hours/week, please talk with Cecily about adjusting your expectations. We want you to enjoy your time with us and a healthy work life balance is a crucial part of that!
Your primary responsibility is to be a communicator. You are the connection point between our precious students and the sponsors who support them around the world. Integral to a rewarding student-sponsor relationship is communication, and that is the first responsibility of the SSC. You are the communicator between MITS as a community and our donors as a community through mass broadcast outlets such as our blog and social media profiles. You are also the communicator between students and their sponsors on a personal level through personal emails, Facebook messages, handwritten letters and so on.
Your secondary responsibility is administrative. The exciting task of getting to know new students and entering their biographical information into our database is in your wheelhouse. When someone registers as a new sponsors through our website, you get to match them to a student. You will also help us keep our records in shipshape by maintaining & updating the Student Sponsorship Database on an ongoing basis.
This role is tremendously important on a financial level. Monthly student sponsorship with MITS costs $75 per month, or $900 per year. Multiplied by 100 students, that’s $90,000 per year that MITS brings in as a result of YOU managing the sponsorship program well. This income enables us to house, feed, educate, train & love on each of these students as if they are our own. That said, the sponsorship program does not fully fund the work of MITS. The majority of our annual operating budget is supported by donations from individuals and churches. The cost to MITS of housing, feeding, clothing & educating each student is far greater than $75/month, and MITS covers the overage out of our general operating budget. This means that if a student is unsponsored or if a sponsor drops from the program or misses a payment, there is no direct effect on that student. The sponsorship income simply offsets the cost of running Made in the Streets, it does not fully fund our work. In short, if a sponsor misses a month or gives less than $75 or gives more than $75, there is no change to the level of care, sustenance & education the student receives.
COMMUNICATION:
The primary responsibility of the Student Sponsorship Coordinator is communication.
Social Media posting & Blogging
One of the expectations of your role is that you compile content (text & photos) to post to our social media. Each week, you are expected to make one post to our facebook & instagram accounts. What you post is up to you, but try to really tell the story of how great our students are and how they're changing their lives for the better every single day. Pro tip: use Facebook's "schedule" feature to write all your posts for the month in one sitting and schedule them to roll out weekly. Every month or so, you will be asked to write a short article to be posted to the MITS blog.
Connections
Another expectation of your role is that you foster a personal communication or interaction between each student and his or her sponsor 4 times per year (or every 3 months). We call these interactions connections. A connection can be as simple as emailing a photo and a quick note about the student/activity in the photo to the sponsor. If the student has a facebook account, it might mean helping the student sign on to his or her facebook and write and send a meaningful message to their sponsor. Another great connection idea from past SSCs is to sit down with a group of students to help them handwrite letters or greeting cards that you will later carry back to the United States (talk to Joel to get some tips for organizing students to write letters). Be creative. Make it fun for you and for the students. Pace yourself!
ADMIN WORK:
The secondary responsibility of the Student Sponsorship Coordinator is administrative work.
You are to be available as the primary email contact for questions about the Student Sponsorship Program. Your email address for all these communications is sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org and the password is Sponsorship.1 (please don’t change the password). This email address is listed on the MITS website as the primary point of contact for the sponsorship program. When someone registers to become a sponsor, the registration form will arrive to this address. When a sponsor has questions about the program, they will get in touch with this address. When you send connections, please do so from this address. If you would like set up an automatic forward from sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org to your personal account, please feel free to do so. Talk to Cecily if you need help with that.
Student Sponsorship Database
Each sponsor's name, address, email, their student's name and birthdate are organized in a spreadsheet located on Google drive, called the Student Sponsorship Database.
The database is located in the Google drive account associated with sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org. As you send connections, add students, and match them with new sponsors, please double check the information and update incomplete information in the Student Sponsorship Database as often as you can. Sponsors tend to move and get new email addresses and students graduate and move on. When you send a connection, perhaps take the time to ask if a sponsor's mailing address has changed.
Pro tip: Because multiple people have access to the Student Sponsorship Database on Google drive, please update it in the online version. Don't download it to your computer and make updates locally. That will create multiple copies of the database with different information that will be hard to reconcile.
Auditing the Student Sponsorship Database
If you are the SSC in January of a given year, please perform an audit (check for correctness) of the information in the Student Sponsorship Database. Leave graduating students in the database for 6 months after graduation, then delete them and ask the sponsor if they would like to reboard with another new student.
Adding New Students to the Database
Any time MITS brings in a new student, they need to be added to the Student Sponsorship Database. Meet the student(s) asap to get to know him or her, and get an accurate spelling of their name & birth date. Add their name and birthdate in the proper tab, according to their birth year. If the student is younger than the youngest tab, make a new tab for their birth year. Highlight their row in the spreadsheet to show they are unsponsored. Take a (well-lit and smiling!) photo and if you can, gather some information about his or her story. You'll use this information in the welcome email you send to his or her new sponsor.
Onboarding New Sponsors
When someone wants to sponsor a student, they register as a new sponsor through our website in the Sponsorship section. The form they complete will arrive in your Gmail inbox (sponsorship@madeinthestreets.org). When you receive that form, follow these steps:
- First, find out if MITS has any students who need sponsors.
- Next, pick a student for the sponsor, based on the preferences they have provided (if any)
- Then send a welcome email back to the sponsor (1) thanking them for their registration, (2) introducing them to their student (attach a photo if you have one!), and (3) asking them if they have any questions about the payment process or program. This welcome email counts as a connection.
- Last, add the sponsor’s information (provided in the registration form) to the Student Sponsorship Database.
- If there are no students waiting for sponsors, that's awesome!! Inform the new sponsor that they have been added to the waitlist and will be notified as soon as we have a student in need of a sponsor.
When a Student Leaves MITS
Because you are on the ground in Kamulu, you are frequently one of the first people to know when a student graduates or runs away. While a graduation is very happy and a runaway is very sad, they are both important reasons for you to communicate with their sponsor.
- In the case of a graduation, it is customary for sponsors to continue their sponsorship for 6 months after graduation, because MITS continues to support our graduates for at least that long as they get settled in their own living & working situation in the real world. If you are the SSC during graduation season (December), please send a connection to sponsors (with a photo if you have it!), informing them their student has graduated and asking them to continue sponsoring for 6 more months. After a student has been graduated for 6 months, please send a connection to the sponsor, telling them their commitment to the MITS student-now-alumnus is complete, and asking if they would consider re-boarding the program with an unsponsored student. Update the Student Sponsorship Database!
- In the case of a runaway, please wait until it is confirmed the runaway will not be returning to MITS. Once you are absolutely certain the student will not be returning, please send a sensitive connection to the sponsor, informing them their student has run away and will no longer require sponsorship. Ask the sponsor if they would consider re-boarding the program with an unsponsored student. Update the Student Sponsorship Database!
Staff Resources
- Our donations and finances are processed in Nashville by Ericka Maple who is a MITS board member. Please connect with Ericka if you or a sponsor have any questions about payments. ericka@madeinthestreets.org
- Most of our senior MITS staff in Kamulu will be able to tell you which students are new and therefore will need sponsors. Start by asking Joel, Moses Okoth, Irene, or Angie.
- Reach out to Cecily if you’re confused about anything else! cecily@madeinthestreets.org
Work Load
Like the other solo interns, your weekly work responsibilities earn you compensation in the form of free housing at Kamulu for the duration of your work with us. Your weekly work load is not to exceed 20 hours each week. If you find you are unable to meet your expectations & goals in 20 hours/week, please talk with Cecily about adjusting your expectations. We want you to enjoy your time with us and a healthy work life balance is a crucial part of that!