Knowing what your mentoring program’s participants’ journeys are like will help you make sure they have a great experience. Therefore, we thought we’d put together this piece to help Program Coordinators (PCs) have a feel for what the experience is like for their participants.
First, we’ll lay out the things your mentors and mentees may be worried about, then we’ll dive into how mentoring software can help alleviate these issues.
Common Pain Points
Your participants might be worried about, or have trouble with, the following parts of a mentoring program:
Matching
When first joining your program, prospective mentors and mentees may not know how to go about finding good matches. This is why it’s always a good idea to have an onboarding guide ready to go once they sign up, and explain what type of matching style you’ll be using. This could be:
- Self Matching: This style empowers your people to self-select their mentoring match.
- Smart Matching: This allows your software to help select the best matches based on certain criteria participants have shared.
- Manual Matching: This is when PCs select the best matches based on what they know about prospective mentors and mentees.
Lack of Engagement
Another common problem is a lack of engagement one mentoring partner sees from another. While this can be due to a myriad of factors, it can be hard to not take it personally. Reassure your participants that things happen, and that maybe it’s not the best time for their partner to be involved in a mentoring relationship. But not to worry! There are still plenty of people who would make a great match. On the other hand, if the two want to continue with the match, then there are a lot of activities (see below) you can suggest that can help get them out of their mentoring rut.
Progress
As your participants move along with their mentoring relationships, they may reach a point at which they’re unsure of how to proceed. This is a great time to step in and provide some resources that can help them get unstuck, whether that’s a refresher on SMART goals and feedback or a list of mentoring activities.
Connections
It’s common for program participants to feel anxiety about making connections. Ease this anxiety by equipping your people with all the tools they need to know if someone is a great match, how to make an introduction and more.
How Mentoring Software Can Help
With mentoring software like Mentorloop, a lot of these pain points can be alleviated. That’s because Mentorloop has:
Guardrails
Milestones and nudges can help participants move forward and/or stay on track, ensuring their goals are being met and their mentoring partner isn’t left in the lurch.
Milestones help you track where participants are in their journey, segment your participants by milestone, and eventually turn mentees into mentors over time. On the other hand, timely, contextual nudges guided by quality content keep each individual on track to achieving those mentoring milestones.
Resources
Mentorloop has a ton of resources for your participants, like those you’ll find on our Helphub. This includes information on:
- How to find good matches
- How to nail first meetings with mentoring partners
- How to be a good mentee or mentor
- And more
And the good stuff doesn’t end there. We also hold regular webinars that your participants can take advantage of.
A Dashboard
Our dashboard makes it easy for you, the PC, to see how the program is progressing and who needs a helping hand. It makes it easy for you to review everything in one place, as it provides information on everything from participants, matching, and milestones to sentiment and highlights.
The PC Academy
We’re here to guide you all the way through your mentoring journey, and not just with the Mentorloop app, but also with our aforementioned HelpHub and the Mentorloop PC Academy. Whereas the former covers topics like getting started, matching, building momentum, measuring your success, and more, the latter will help you with the more nitty gritty stuff like participant filters, sending monthly bulk messages, and more.
Knowing what your participants’ journey is like will help you support them better, and Mentorloop is equipped to help you do that.
