Refreshing your programme cohort means stepping back inactive participants and keeping only engaged mentors and mentees active. This is useful when re-launching after a quiet period or preparing for a new intake. The right way to do this is to bench inactive participants, not remove them.
What does refreshing a programme cohort mean?
Refreshing a cohort means identifying participants who are no longer actively engaging and moving them to Benched status. This keeps your active programme data accurate, removes them from matching, and preserves their profile and loop history so you can bring them back quickly for a future intake, without asking them to start from scratch.
Benching is preferred over removing for this purpose. Removed participants need to be manually un-removed before they can be reinvited; benched participants can be reinvited in bulk from the Mentoring Bench at any time, with their profile pre-filled.
How do I bench inactive participants?
- Go to Manage program from the left sidebar and click Participants.
- Filter the list to identify inactive participants, for example, those with a Last activity date older than three to six months, or those with Loop capacity = 0 and no recent engagement.
- Select the participants you want to step back.
- Click Change status and select Benched.
- Choose whether to notify participants by email. This is off by default, if you've already communicated the change outside Mentorloop, you can leave it off to avoid duplicate messages. If participants are mid-loop or may not be expecting it, it's worth switching the notification on.
How to spot inactive participants
In the Participants tab, sort or filter by Last activity to surface people who haven't engaged recently. In the Mentoring Bench, filter for Status: Active and look for anyone with Loop capacity = 0/∞ and a Last activity date beyond your chosen threshold, these participants are still counted as active but aren't engaging, and are good candidates for benching.
What do participants experience when benched?
When a participant is benched:
- Their open loops are paused, no new messages or meetings can be sent or scheduled while benched.
- They won't appear in matching and won't receive new match suggestions.
- Their profile and loop history are fully preserved.
- They can choose to rejoin the programme themselves at any time, or wait to be reinvited by you.
- When reactivated, they pick up right where they left off.
How do I bring benched participants back for a new intake?
When you're ready to reactivate participants for a new cohort, use the Mentoring Bench at the organisation level. From there you can:
- Filter by programme, role, or status to find the right people.
- Select participants in bulk and invite them into an open programme.
- Their existing profile data is pre-filled in the destination programme's signup form, they only need to review and confirm, rather than starting from scratch.
Keeping participant profiles up to date
Encouraging participants to review and update their profiles when rejoining helps ensure matching stays accurate and your data is current for every intake. For a ready-to-use approach and message ideas, see How do I ask participants to review and update their profile.