From Fifty Expected Participants to Hundreds without Adding Staff Workload
with Hannah Quirk,
Community Manager, Emerging DO Platform at AOiA
with Hannah Quirk,
Community Manager, Emerging DO Platform at AOiA
When your mentoring program runs on manual matching, growth has a ceiling.
AOIA hit that ceiling early, until Smart Match and Self Match changed what was possible. What followed wasn’t a modest uptick; participation grew from an expected 50 to the hundreds, with members returning cohort after cohort. Here’s how a community-driven mentoring platform turned staff workload into member-led momentum – and what it could mean for your own program.
Does this sound familiar? You know your community wants mentoring. Experienced members are ready to give back, and newer members — especially those in rural areas or highly specialized fields — are asking for guidance they can’t always find locally. But every attempt to run it manually turns into a bottleneck: matching takes hours, growth stalls, and the program becomes a maintenance burden instead of a member benefit.
That was AOIA’s exact starting point. Community manager Hannah Quirk saw the demand clearly, but without the right infrastructure, matching participants was time-consuming and made the program difficult to grow or sustain.
The capability that changes the equation: with Mentorloop’s Smart Match, AOIA built strong mentoring connections at the start of each cohort without manually reviewing every application. Self Match let participants with more specific needs find their own right connection — further reducing staff workload while giving members more ownership of the experience.
The result wasn’t incremental. AOIA expected around 50 participants in year one. Participation grew into the hundreds – far beyond projections – and many members return across multiple cohorts, a direct signal the program delivers lasting value, not just a one-time engagement.
Proof it works beyond the numbers: mentors and mentees who first connected through Mentorloop began meeting in person – at conferences, at school events. Students gained real clarity on their next career steps. Mentors, seeing how easy and rewarding the process was, started asking to be matched with more mentees.
As Hannah puts it:
"We were helping create relationships that could continue well beyond the formal program."
That’s what a mentoring program looks like when the infrastructure gets out of the way — connections that outlast the program itself, and a pipeline of mentors who keep opting back in.
AOIA is now extending the model into other departments and tracking mentees through their careers so they can return as mentors — building a self-renewing cycle without adding headcount to run it.
If you’re weighing whether a mentoring platform is worth the switch from a manual process, start here: book a walkthrough to see how Smartmatch and Self-match would apply to your community’s specific matching challenges.
Community Manager, Emerging DO Platform at AOiA
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"We've also seen many participants return from multiple cohorts, which is a strong indication that they continue to find the value in the experience."
– Hannah Quirk, Community Manager, Emerging DO Platform at AOiA
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