From Spreadsheets to 750 Mentoring Matches: How The Royal Society of Chemistry Scaled Mentoring
with Laura Woodward,
Career and Professional Development Advisor, Royal Society of Chemistry
with Laura Woodward,
Career and Professional Development Advisor, Royal Society of Chemistry
The Royal Society of Chemistry supports more than 45,000 chemical scientists across academia, industry, and education worldwide — and for years, its mentoring program ran almost entirely on one person’s time and a set of spreadsheets. Since launching with Mentorloop in December 2024, RSC has nearly tripled its mentoring partnerships, expanded specialist programs for underrepresented members, and turned hours of manual admin into a task that “often takes just a click of a button.”
For years, mentoring at the Royal Society of Chemistry ran on the goodwill and hours of one person. Laura Woodward, Career and Professional Development Advisor, managed onboarding, training, matching, email introductions, and relationship troubleshooting — all manually, all alongside her other duties, for a membership organisation supporting over 45,000 chemical scientists worldwide.
“Growth really was limited by relying on time-consuming spreadsheets and that sort of manual matching process,” Laura explains. The more members who registered, the more individual details had to be weighed for every match — making it nearly impossible to scale, and even harder to run specialist parallel schemes for specific communities. Because everything depended on people flagging issues themselves, management of the programme was largely reactive rather than proactive.
Since moving to Mentorloop in December 2024, that picture has changed dramatically.
The impact reaches beyond the numbers. RSC’s talent pipeline programme for underrepresented members in chemistry now welcomes over 100 mentees a year, with stories including a mentee who secured an internship through their mentoring partnership. A guest speaker on an RSC resilience webinar credited practice interviews with their mentor for helping them land their current role. Across the board, mentoring quality scores have held consistently at 4.1 or above.
One piece of feedback captures what the programme is built to do: a mentee described their mentor as going “above and beyond” in supporting their transition from PhD life into employment — and said the experience had inspired them to give back by mentoring others in turn.
"I think that really epitomises what we want to achieve," Laura says, "which is someone getting that support during a career transition, and then being inspired themselves to help others going forward."
Reporting has also transformed how RSC operates day to day. What used to take hours of manual matching now takes minutes, and monthly demographic and participation reports — once a heavy lift — are now “often a click of a button.”
Looking ahead, RSC is targeting 1,000 mentees matched with a mentor by May 2027 (on track), with plans to reach an additional cohort by 2030 working with 700 registered mentors. The organisation is also expanding support for teachers, women, and members who identify as disabled, and is seeing internal traction — with RSC’s own staff now using the platform for an internal mentoring programme.
"Get started. Think about who needs support and what that support can look like... start with a small cohort and then build from that point."
Career and Professional Development Advisor, Royal Society of Chemistry
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"Mentorloop has absolutely helped facilitate our ambitions to support our members with their career goals and aspirations."
– Laura Woodward, Career and Professional Development Advisor, Royal Society of Chemistry
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