Nowadays, every initiative, project, and activity can be measured and tracked. However, when it comes to people programs like mentoring, it can get hard to get the data to reflect what’s really going on. Yes, the numbers are there, but which ones are relevant? What do they mean in relation to other data points? In this article, we share some simple ways to track mentoring program success.
What Should I Be Tracking and Measuring ?
The first question to ask when it comes to mentoring program measurement is “What exactly should I be measuring?” At Mentorloop, we have 5 main areas that we encourage program coordinators to keep an eye on:
- Program Growth
- Matching
- Participant Growth
- Program Health
- Contextual Feedback
Let’s dive into each of them:
Mentoring Program Growth
One way to know if your program is achieving success is by tracking how much it’s growing. It’s also a good way to know if your marketing and recruitment efforts are successful.
If you’re running an Always-On program, have a look at whether the number of participants is increasing, decreasing, or remaining steady. For those running On-Off programs or recruiting in Cohorts, simply comparing the previous sign-up round’s sign-ups with the current one is the way to go.
On Mentorloop, the Participants chart on your Program Dashboard tells you exactly how your program is developing over time and if you’re meeting your recruitment targets. Your Insights will also tell you how you’re tracking towards your recruitment target or how many new participants have signed up over a period of time.
Match Rate
Tracking how much of your program’s cohort is matched with a mentoring partner is a great indicator of success. After all, the whole point of a mentoring program is to create mentoring relationships. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on those who are yet to find a match in your program and try to keep that number down.
Mentorloop’s Matching chart on the Program Dashboard keeps you on top of this. It tells you how many connections you’re making and helps you track whether you’ve got stragglers and people who still need to be matched. Matching Insights will also tell you if you have draft matches waiting to be approved or if your participants have matched themselves recently.
Participant Growth
No matter how big and engaged a mentoring program is, it’s all for naught if the participants aren’t growing. So this is obviously vital. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on how your mentors and mentees are tracking towards their goals. You can do this manually through surveys, but mentoring software makes this tricky task way easier.
On Mentorloop, we use Milestones to tell you who is at what stage of their mentoring journey and highlight the progress your participants are making. You can also use the Goals feature to see what kind of goals your participants are setting and the progress they’re making towards these goals.
Program Health and Sentiment
The success of a mentoring program doesn’t just rely on its growth but also on the program’s health and therefore the health of the relationships within it. Are your participants having a good experience with their mentoring partners? Are their meetings going well? To track this, it’s best to simply ask. Obviously, this is tedious and time-consuming to do one-to-one, so mentoring software is the way to go here.
On Mentorloop, Sentiment gives you real-time feedback and analysis of your program’s health. This helps keep you on top of the ratings participants are giving their meetings and general mentoring experience. It gives you an easy-to-understand chart with a quantitative representation of program health, tells you how your program’s health is trending over time, and allows you to dive into the context should you want to.
Contextual Feedback
We always say that the human aspect of mentoring should never be taken away from measuring your mentoring program. It’s why we never measure mentoring programs via the hours participants spend in mentoring meetings or other vanity metrics. However, we admit that it can be difficult to measure this. Manually, you can send out surveys or arrange feedback sessions, of course, but the easiest way to do this is to enlist the help of mentoring software.
At Mentorloop, we don’t believe in reducing people to just numbers because we believe that mentoring, at its core, is all about human connection. So we make sure that you get to keep a finger on the pulse of your program through Highlights. Highlights gives you the latest activity in your program – be it new people joining or contextual feedback from your mentors and mentees.
Reporting On Your Success
Gathering all these data points together and presented in a way that’s easy to understand can be a tedious task. However, it’s a necessary one if you want to ensure that everyone sees value in your program and ensure its future. This is why we’ve made this task easy for you if you run your program on Mentorloop.
Monthly Digests
We send you a monthly email that gives you a snapshot of the previous month of your program. It includes data on all of the areas mentioned so you can have a quick look at how your program performed in all fronts in the previous month.
Downloadable Reports
Need a more in-depth report on your program for leadership and other stakeholders? With Mentorloop, you can download a PDF version of your report at any time for any purpose.
Keeping track of how your mentoring program is doing is an integral part of running it. With Mentorloop, you can do this effectively without even breaking a sweat.
Keen to get stuck in? Get started with Mentorloop Pro.
