How to Create a Mentorship Matching Program

Mentorship gives growing companies and communities the opportunity to invest in their talent, share knowledge across silos, and give leaders a stronger pulse on what’s happening. Learn how Meetsy enables you to make all these types of Match Programs with ease. Mentorship matching tools are available on the top-tier plans.

Overview:

Meetsy has all the tools and resources you need to create a great Mentorship Match Program. 

Foundation for a great Match Program:

  • Signup questions that surface the expertise of your mentors and interests/goals of your mentees
  • Audiences that group people that you wish to match 

Next, you’ll be ready to create the Mentorship Match Program:

  • Facilitate seamless matching between mentor and mentee:
    • 1. Allow the Match Program to run for one or multiple cycles.
    • 2. Choose match dates and how many times each mentor and mentee meet before being matched with others.
  • Create Match Program Questions and Audience Rules that create the conditions for great matches.
  • Set great conversation topics and prompts for each meeting that facilitate effective conversations and learnings.
  • Measure learnings and outcomes with Post-Meeting Feedback Surveys.

Foundations: Setting up your Meetsy group to run great Mentorship Match Programs

The first step to creating a great Mentorship Match Program is asking your members effective signup questions which power how audiences are formed.

  • Asking great signup questions will result in full, engaging profiles that will empower and motivate mentors to fully explain how and why they’re an expert, and mentees to share what they want to learn, what they already know, and what they want to accomplish in the field of interest.
  • Signup questions will enable you to categorize and group your mentors and mentees into audiences based on everything from location, years of experience, field or sub-specialty, interests, goals, and more. These audiences power the Match Program! Once you’ve created your signup questions, create Smart Audiences that will categorize people based on their responses.

Creating the Mentorship Match Program

Now that you have the foundation set, you’re ready to create your Mentorship Match Program!

Go to your Admin menu, then select Match Programs, then select +Create new.

What sets a Mentorship Match Program apart from a regular Match Program? The Number of Meetings per Match, and the Meeting Prompt tools. Here’s how to set up your Mentorship program with these available settings in mind.

1. In the Match Details tab, author the topic and description. Consider explaining the purpose and goals of the match program in a way that will motivate and excite invited members to participate.

2. Choose the first Match Date, which is when you want to launch your program. Select a date that gives you enough time to fill the program with enough participants, and enough time for the participants to complete their profiles and questions.

3. If you’d like to have the program repeat, (i.e. mentors and mentees to be matched with different participants after their program is over) choose the cadence that works best for your participants. Remember to choose a cadence that will occur only after the Number of Meetings per Match (below) has had a chance to complete. Participants will not be matched again until they complete their run of paired meetings.

  • For example, choose 3 weekly meetings for each pairing and then set the program to run every 4 weeks, otherwise participants will miss the next round of match notifications sent on the next Match Date.image.png

4. Choose the Meeting Duration.

5. Consider enabling Auto Scheduling. When this is enabled, meetings will be scheduled automatically on participant’s calendars when they enable Allow Direct Scheduling in their personal account settings and have synced their calendarimage.png

6.  Choose the Number of Meetings per match.

  • When choosing the number of meetings, consider how many meetings it will take for the mentor and mentee to accomplish the goals and learnings. And keep in mind that the duration of the program should not run longer than when match notifications are set to repeat, because new match notifications will not be sent to those who have not yet completed their current run of meetings.image.png

7. Set your Meeting Prompts. Choose the topic of each session and create prompts that will help your mentors and mentees reach their goals.

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  • Note that prompts can be edited after they are set. 
    • Admins can change prompts anytime they want, most commonly from cycle to cycle. 
  • When a match is scheduled, mentors and mentees can view the upcoming session topics to help prepare them for the next meeting, and edit the prompts in their match discussion window as needed.

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  • During the video conversations, participants will see the prompts to the right of the video, and can click on each prompt as they go through the conversation.

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8. Choose the preferred Visibility settings.

9. Select Save changes and then scroll to the top and select the Match Logic Tab. 

Setting your Match Logic

10. Select if you want to include Match Program Questions by choosing Based on match questions or Match users randomly. Most match programs should choose Match users randomly.

  • Match Program questions are different than Signup Questions, in that they
    • are only asked to the participants of that match program.
    • can create audiences that are accessible only within that match program.
    • can refine how people are matched. 

If you chose Based on Match Questions, select Choose from Library or +Create new question to author your own. You must choose an ignored, preferred, or required setting when selecting a question.

Here are some tips when choosing this setting.

  • An example of a good Required question: 
    • perhaps you have Mentorship Match Program for engineers, but engineers in your network code in multiple languages and a goal of your program is to only match engineers who code in the same language. Ask: “What language do you code in?” Then add the options, and set the questions response to required. This will require that the algorithm only match those who have responded with the same coding language answer.
  • An example of a good Preferred question: 
    • You program is connecting investors with startup founders, and some of your investors prefer talking to founders who are less than 1 year into the creation of their startup and some investors prefer founders have more than 2 years into their work, but the balance between the audiences is somewhat uneven. Set this question to preferred, which will match founders and investors who have responded similarly to the preferred question but will still match those who do not meet this criteria.
  • An example of good Ignored question: 
    • “Are you a mentor or mentee?” If you set them to ignored, the audiences created within this question won’t only be watched within their audiences, and you can create an audience rule in the next steps to match mentors with mentees.
    • Further context: Two of the most common types of matches in Meetsy are matching group A with group A, or matching group A with group B. For the latter, you want to mark the question as ignored to tell Meetsy it’s not important they have the same answer in order to match but create an audience within Meetsy so you can use it in an Audience rule in the next step”

11. In order to successfully create a Mentorship Match Program, you need to select the mentoring and mentee-ing audiences that should connect by creating Audience Rules. To do so, select Yes, only specific members should be matched.

When creating audiences rules, you can choose from the audiences you have created in the Members tab or based on the questions you’re asking in universal signup questions and . You can also create audiences from within the dropdown menu by selecting the down arrow, then scrolling to the bottom of the list and selecting +Create new audience.

  • Note that audiences created within the Match Program are only accessible within that Match Program. You cannot manage them in the Admin:Members tab. You will be able to manage them in the Members tab created within the Match Program edit menus, which appear after create the program. 
  • Here is an example of a mentorship program between new hires and veterans at the Commsor company.image.png

12. Select whether or not you want leftovers to match and still have a chance to participate, by toggling on or off the Match Left Over Users setting. This can be helpful when audiences are uneven but you want everyone to have a match. 

13. When to Stop Receiving Matches is populated by the audiences you choose to match together in the previous step.

This setting is important for mentorship programs where there are mentors that should be matched with mentees more than once, but mentees are only participating in one match before they should no longer be matched. For example, in this program, new hires only have one match but veterans are matched with new hires repeatedly as they are hired to the company, or until they turn them off.

If you do not wish to limit either audience, leave the setting for both audiences to when they turn matches off on their own.

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14. Choose whether or not to add Short profile questions at Signup. These are contextual and viewable during the video conversations between matches. 

15. Select save then continue to the Review tab. Edit the final settings and appearance of the match program, then generate the signup link!

Your program is ready. Now that your program is read to go, consider creating a survey for participants to respond to after each match has finished their series of meetings. You can view the meetings that have been scheduled in the Meetings tab and invite more people to attend the match program in the Invite tab.  You can manage the members, and audiences created just for this match program, the Members tab that is generated.