How a Four-Person Support Team Coordinates 500 Cross-Border Peer Mentors
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?
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.
