--- title: How a Four-Person Support Team Coordinates 500 Cross-Border Peer Mentors description: Learn about the importance of a comprehensive online student support ecosystem and how it can improve student retention, engagement, and well-being. This blog presents empirical evidence and statistics to support the claim that online support services are crucial for student success. image: https://blog.vygoapp.com/hubfs/hf_20260723_003803_8f4fc42b-3063-4d2b-83ea-a007a679a8be-1.png --- [![vygo\_logo\_brown\_343434](https://blog.vygoapp.com/hs-fs/hubfs/vygo_logo_brown_343434.png?width=128&height=50&name=vygo_logo_brown_343434.png "vygo_logo_brown_343434")](https://vygoapp.com/) Open main menu Close main menu - [Blog](https://blog.vygoapp.com) [Student Engagement](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-engagement) [Student Retention](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-retention) [Student Wellbeing](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-wellbeing) # How a Four-Person Support Team Coordinates 500 Cross-Border Peer Mentors [Vygo Team](https://blog.vygoapp.com/author/vygo-team) [Share this blog post on Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=I+found+this+interesting+blog+post&url=https://blog.vygoapp.com/how-a-four-person-support-team-coordinates-500-cross-border-peer-mentors) [Share this blog post on Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://blog.vygoapp.com/how-a-four-person-support-team-coordinates-500-cross-border-peer-mentors) [Share this blog post on LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.vygoapp.com/how-a-four-person-support-team-coordinates-500-cross-border-peer-mentors) ![](https://blog.vygoapp.com/hubfs/hf_20260723_003803_8f4fc42b-3063-4d2b-83ea-a007a679a8be-1.png) Scaling a targeted, course-specific academic peer mentoring network across hundreds of individual subjects usually triggers an immediate staffing crisis. If your support strategy requires program coordinators to spend their working weeks manually reading expressions of interest, tracking student calendars, and managing matching emails via spreadsheets, your operational architecture is broken. It is a model that caps your program's reach and guarantees staff burnout. At many higher education institutions, expanding a mentoring network to support thousands of students means pleading for additional operational budget to increase staff headcount. Yet, in the current economic climate, university resources are tightly constrained, forcing departments to do substantially more work with fewer resources. The challenge is no longer just about reaching more students; it is about scaling your impact without crushing the small team running the engine on the ground. We spoke with Daniella Hutchings, Senior Coordinator Peer Mentoring at the RMIT University Library, to unpack how their team completely bypassed this resource bottleneck. With an internal team consisting of just four permanent, full-time staff members, Daniella's department successfully coordinates over 500 active student mentors supporting more than 200 distinct, subject-specific courses across campuses in Melbourne and Singapore. ## **The Blueprint for Lean Peer Mentoring Operations** RMIT’s academic mentoring program is highly complex because it is explicitly subject-based. Rather than running a generic, generalized student help line, the library team embeds high-achieving peer volunteers directly into specific, historically difficult course units across all four university colleges. Mentees connect with mentors who have achieved top grades in that exact subject, allowing them to ask targeted questions about assessment expectations, lab requirements, and study techniques. The sheer volume of potential matching combinations across 200 courses makes manual oversight impossible for a four-person team. To remain lean and protect staff capacity, RMIT systematically automated the entire administrative lifecycle of the program. By building automated workflows and utilising data models, the team completely streamlined their mentor invitations, Expressions of Interest (EOI) screening, onboarding pipelines, and end-of-semester certificate generation. The system hands full calendar autonomy over to the students, completely eliminating the need for staff members to manually intervene. This structural automation allows the lean team to focus on mentor development and program quality control. When you look at your peer programs, are you limiting your scale because your staff are trapped under manual matching processes? [**Watch the full webinar on demand here.**](https://discover.vygoapp.com/how-rmit-delivers-academic-mentoring-at-scale-with-a-lean-team-get-your-recording) At Vygo, we're focused on making student success achievable at scale, helping institutions build the systems, support and infrastructure that let more students thrive, persist and graduate. If you'd like to explore what scalable student success could look like at your institution, get in touch with the team today. [Book A Meeting With Vygo](https://vygoapp.com/au#cta) ## Related Articles [![](https://blog.vygoapp.com/hubfs/clever-men-smart-women-standing-with-books-looking-camera.jpg)](https://blog.vygoapp.com/transforming-peer-mentoring-at-coventry-university) [Student Engagement](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-engagement) [Student Retention](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-retention) [Peer Mentoring](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/peer-mentoring) ### [Digitalising Student Support: How Vygo is Transforming Peer Mentoring at Coventry University](https://blog.vygoapp.com/transforming-peer-mentoring-at-coventry-university) [Chris Baker-Brown & Hannah Giles](https://blog.vygoapp.com/author/chris-baker-brown-hannah-gardner) [Read More](https://blog.vygoapp.com/transforming-peer-mentoring-at-coventry-university) [![](https://blog.vygoapp.com/hubfs/portrait-joyful-multiracial-friends-standing-row-near-railing-street.jpg)](https://blog.vygoapp.com/the-first-6-weeks-that-matter-most-where-continuation-is-won-or-lost) [Student Engagement](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-engagement) [Student Retention](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-retention) [Student Wellbeing](https://blog.vygoapp.com/tag/student-wellbeing) ### [The First 6 Weeks That Matter Most: Where Continuation Is Won or Lost](https://blog.vygoapp.com/the-first-6-weeks-that-matter-most-where-continuation-is-won-or-lost) For many students, the decision to continue at university is not made at the point of withdrawal. [Gaurav Deva](https://blog.vygoapp.com/author/gaurav-deva) [Read More](https://blog.vygoapp.com/the-first-6-weeks-that-matter-most-where-continuation-is-won-or-lost) ### Resource Hub - [Blog](https://vygoapp.com/blog) - [Case Studies](https://vygoapp.com/case-studies) - [Podcast Network](https://vygoapp.com/podcasts) - [White Paper](https://vygoapp.com/whitepaper) ### Explore Vygo - [Support Management](https://vygoapp.com/support-management-platform) - [Cohort Micro Ecosystems](https://vygoapp.com/cohort-support-ecosystem-platform) - [Enterprise Support](https://vygoapp.com/enterprise-support-ecosystem-platform) ### Other - [Our Story](https://vygoapp.com/about) - [Student Login](https://web.vygo.app/) - [The Mentor Academy](https://www.thementor.academy/) ### Download Our White Paper Follow us on Facebook Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram