Being a Mentoring Program Coordinator is an incredibly rewarding experience that positively impacts the lives of many. And while mentoring programs don’t fully run themselves (even though Mentorloop can do a great deal of the heavy lifting!), they do require a point of contact that can steer the program in the right direction for the organization that is running one.
Let’s start with the basics:
What is a mentoring program coordinator?
A Mentoring Program Coordinator (or as we affectionately abbreviated to, “PC”) overall guides the Mentoring Program’s journey. They inform the program architecture by making decisions on the program’s purpose, population, and timeline.
They promote the program to recruit participants who may best fit the program’s purpose and decide on matching criteria that might need to be captured when participants sign up for their program and decide on the program’s matching style and techniques that will be used from a selection of matching methodologies.
What activities does a mentoring program coordinator undertake?
Most of the hard work is actually at the beginning of a program, where a number of decisions are made in order to create a program tailored to your organization. This is generally referred to as the ‘program architecture’.
Having an understanding of how the following areas are important to your organization, is guaranteed to set you up for success:
- Purpose
- Population
- Timeline and Recruitment Style
- Matching Styles and Techniques
- Any apps or integrations that need to be connected
Once you’ve got the structure of your program sorted, it’s time to bring your participants in with recruitment and launch activities.
A Program Coordinator generally leads:
- Recruitment
- Launch
- Promotion / Marketing
- Identifying mentoring champions
Want to learn more? Check out our free resources:
At this point, most of the hard work is done!
Mentorloop’s measurement tools make it easy to understand mentoring activity and impact. You’ll likely check in here and there for the following activities:
- Manages any future recruiting, selection, and matching process
- While extremely rare, working with individual mentoring pairs to resolve any issues – Mentorloop allows and encourages participants to flag any inappropriate behaviour to the Program Coordinator.
- Communicates regularly with mentoring participants using Tags and Bulk Messaging features
- Keeps track of where participants are at with Mentorloop’s Milestones. There’s no need to worry about assisting participants through their journey, as Mentorloop’s Nudges meets them where they’re at with a wealth of supportive resources.
- Program evaluation over the course of the live program and att the end of the program – Mentorloop makes this easy by surfacing qualitative and quantitive data that tells your mentoring narrative.
- Launching a new cohort or promoting another intake, or even another specialised program.
Top Mentoring Program Coordinator FAQs & Tips
Of course, this varies from program to program as there are many ways to run one!
In corporate settings, we generally see Program Coordinators dedicate a few hours a week to managing their program and keeping on top of any recruitment or reporting that they would like to undertake. It can be even less for programs that are ‘always-on’ and allow participants to dip in and out at their leisure.
In other cases, such as industry associations, this role may be more intensive, as the Mentoring Program is often a product that they offer to paid members. In these programs, we see a greater deal of structure with multiple cohorts recruited throughout the year.
To learn more about this, check out our mentoring program admin time comparison tool.
Download our handy guide to promoting your mentoring program. Packed with easy-to-follow steps and real-world examples! Download Guide.
The Mentorloop platform allows for a number of ways to match your participants. Whether that’s manually matching, using the smart algorithm or allowing participants to self-match. Participants can participate in ‘group loops’ (group mentoring) or even browse through recommendations that the platform has surfaced for them. Of course, you may choose to mix and match these options.
If you’ve never run a mentoring program before, it can be daunting but it doesn’t have to be. As with any program or project, preparation is key. And if you already know why some mentoring programs flop, you can take steps to avoid the same pitfalls. So here we’ve collated the 7 common reasons mentoring programs fail.
Want to know more about the day-to-day of running a mentoring program? Hear from award-winning mentoring program coordinators Andrew Corfield and Kate Lloyd:
You can learn more about running an award-winning mentoring program from Andrew and Kate by watching the full fireside chat:
Being a mentoring Program Coordinator is an incredibly rewarding experience. The most successful PCs typically use mentoring software such as Mentorloop, as it makes it easy to build, scale and measure a winning program. And with ongoing resources, you’ll be on your way to building your best program yet.
Get started now and build your Mentoring Program in just 4 easy steps. Explore the platform with pre-filled data and don’t pay a penny until you’re ready to launch and start inviting your mentors and mentees.
