Are you running or planning to run a mentoring program without mentoring software and are curious to see what it’s for? Are you unsure about what you should expect to find in mentoring software or need help deciding which one is right for you? And the big question:
How do I start a Mentoring Program?
In this post, we demystify what mentoring software really is and how you can get started.
Let’s get to it.
What Is Mentoring Software?
Mentoring Software is a platform that facilitates easier management of a mentoring program by streamlining time-consuming administrative jobs. It typically assists with tasks such as matching and managing participants, providing resources, collecting feedback, tracking progress, and reporting, among others.
Why Do I Need Mentoring Software?
When building a mentoring program, the focus early on is usually why a mentoring program is needed and the benefits for the organisation. But anyone who has ever run a program before will tell you that the work involved becomes quite a big issue pretty quickly. The admin burden – managing the matching, troubleshooting, measuring, reporting, etc. – on top of the current workload of the coordinator, can be a lot. That’s what mentoring software is brilliant at and why it’s not just a nice-to-have when you’re running a program (especially large or multiple ones), but instead, a must-have.
What Key Features Should Mentoring Software Have?
Any mentoring software needs to make admin easy for program coordinators. That usually translates to a standard list of features that more or less fall under these categories:
- Participant Management
- Matching
- Momentum Management
- Support and Resources
- Analytics and Reporting
- Integrations
Depending on which software you go with, there may be differences.
With Mentorloop, you get all of these features and more.
Participant Management 🗂
Instead of manually adding participants, their contact info, matching notes, etc. onto a spreadsheet, mentoring software simplifies this process. This is done by either allowing participants to apply and fill out profiles by themselves or a simple upload of an employee contact list.
Matching 🎯
Most, if not all, mentoring software will have ways to simplify this process for you. It can be through an algorithm that matches your cohort based on certain criteria, or allowing your cohort to Self Match.
Mentorloop’s truly equitable matching algorithm is like no other. While other matching algorithms pair participants individually, often producing a score (eg. 90%), Mentorloop considers and analyses your entire cohort to ensure every individual receives an equitable match. Based on pairing over 50,000 matches, Mentorloop’s smart match has maintained a satisfaction rating above 96%.
Momentum Management 🚀
Many mentoring software options will also have tools to help you maintain your program’s momentum in various ways. Mentorloop helps you keep your participants engaged through automated emails, in-app messaging, and/or notifications.
The “Milestones” Journey on Mentorloop guides your participants as they move through their mentoring journey. A step up from just providing them with a static library, Mentorloop surfaces personalised resources for participants depending on where they are in their mentoring journey, nudging them gently in the right direction.
Support and Resources 📚
Mentorloop’s vast and ever-growing Resource Centre of everything mentoring is accessible to you and your cohorts. Our HelpHub is also full of easy-to-follow tips in case someone has any difficulty.
And for the Program Coordinator, Mentorloop also has tons of resources to guide you in managing every aspect of your program. From getting started, marketing your program, recruiting participants, and all the way to relaunching a program or scaling a pilot, we’ve got everything you need to help you run your best mentoring program yet.
Analytics and Reporting 📊
No program coordinator wants to be manually doing their metrics, especially for a large program! So most mentoring programs will have some form of reporting data made available to you.
Mentorloop’s Sentiment Feedback Analysis System feeds quantitative and qualitative information to your Program Dashboard so you have live, real-time data on how individuals and mentoring pairs are faring, as well as the health of your entire cohort. This removes the need to wait until the conclusion of the program to perform a survey. This also allows programs to be ‘always on’, embedding a culture of mentoring in your organisation.
Integrations 📲
Your mentoring software should adjust to the way you work, not the other way around. With seamless sign-ups, frictionless scheduling, the ability to set availabilities on your preferred calendars, and many other features, Mentorloop’s integrations weave mentoring into your ecosystem instead of making you adjust to how the platform works.
But wait, there’s more! Here at Mentorloop, we like to offer more than your stock-standard features. 😉
Go for Flexibility 🤸🏼
Mentorloop doesn’t come in the form of a downloadable app – instead, it’s a cloud-based web app that can be used on any browser on a desktop, tablet, or mobile. And because Mentorloop doesn’t require you to download yet another app 🙄, you can make sure your participants avoid that dreaded app fatigue. Besides, we integrate with many of the tools you already use anyway. 💁♀️
Our Commitment to Building ‘Personal Advisory Boards’ 🧍🏿♀️🧍🏻♂️🧍🏻♀️🧍🏽♂️
Unlike other mentoring platforms, Mentorloop will never limit the mentoring potential of an individual by billing by the number of mentoring relationships within a program. The number of mentoring relationships an individual can access with Mentorloop will always be unlimited. This allows participants to access multiple mentoring relationships to satisfy a variety of interests and needs.
Choose B Corp Certified! 🌏
Mentorloop is the first mentoring software provider in the world to obtain a B Corp certification, being certified since its inception in 2016. That means we’ve been certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.
At Mentorloop, we take our B Corp certification seriously, making sure our ethics and values underpin everything we do. We want Mentorloop to be a tool for positive change and our B Corp certification is a way for us to state this intention and hold ourselves accountable.
We also work with the B Corp network – helping to provide the community with mentoring support in key impact areas.
Mentorloop has many other features that allow you to build, maintain, and manage the momentum of your program, customise your program, manage your participants etc., just as other software have their own. It’s important to keep in mind what’s useful to you when choosing which one to go with.
Keen to learn more about how Mentorloop can ease the admin burden of running a mentoring program?
You can get your program started in just four easy steps:
