Great Social Media Idea: Thanking Mentors

Buckle up, lovely blog readers, because we've got a doozy on our hands today.

Check out this incredible video from Southern Utah University, that the wonderful and - as you will see - very talented Jessica Young sent to me via the submission box. (Hint hint.)

I won't go into too much detail because you should just watch it, but I might recommend that you have some tissues handy just in case a some rapscallion starts chopping onions nearby. (By the way, if you think I didn't use "rapscallion" for the onion/scallion pun potential, you are very wrong, my friend. Very wrong indeed.)

Because of the passion, investment, devotion and dedication of SUU educators their students leave their classrooms with...

Posted by Southern Utah University on Thursday, March 24, 2016

I mean... right?!?! Incredible, incredible stuff. And terrific execution.

Not surprisingly, it blew up their Facebook page with thousands of views and hundreds of shares, and the comments section really is something special.

Here's what Jessica wrote about the project:

“My office has been creating a video series, “Choose SUU,” to show to potential students, with each video highlighting a different aspect of what makes this University great.

Today we published the latest installment of “Choose SUU” spotlighting our faculty and staff. We always say, “at SUU, your professor knows your name,” but this time we wanted to prove it. So we put out a survey asking students to write a thank you note to an SUU mentor, and within 3 hours we had more than 100.

We then selected 10 professors/staff, who had no idea what was going on, and had them read their note. Afterward the student who wrote it would come in. It brought out the most authentic and real emotions, and we couldn’t be prouder of the results. Check out the video and read some of the comments made. As the person behind the camera, the tears are real.

Hope you enjoy it as much I had producing it.”

Big kudos to Jessica and SUU for such a great project, and to all you #hesm folks - there's still time to make something like this happen on your campus! End of year is always a great time for this type of videos, and I could even see something very similar coming from just the graduating seniors, as sort of a "thank you" to the people that helped them along the way to walking across the stage.

Something tells me this idea is going to be "borrowed" quite a bit.  :)