If your match rate isn’t as good as you’d hoped, there’s no need to get to the panic stations just yet. Here are 5 ways you can improve your match rate:

Share the participant matching guide

If your program relies solely on participants to Self Match, consider re-sharing our Self Matching Guide for mentors and mentees. Your participants, especially your mentees, might just have some apprehension going into the matching process and need a bit of guidance and support. 

Filter for unmatched participants and use the bulk messaging feature to save time.

Consider a blended approach

Consider giving your participants a hand with matching using a Blended Matching style. Stepping in to manually match participants who have yet to find matches after a couple of weeks immediately fixes your match rate issue, but it does require quite a bit of time investment. This doesn't mean that your participants will no longer be able to find their own matches, just that you are able to step in and make matches for those who might be struggling.

For more on Blended Matching, check out this article and our guide on the 5 Key Ingredients for Successful Matching.

Consider using the algorithm

If you’re finding that your match rate is relatively low and you don’t have the time to match participants manually, you might want to consider an upgrade to our Enterprise offering which allows you to use Smart Match. The algorithm matches all your participants for you and all you have to do is approve the drafts. From here, all you have to do is monitor their experience in the first few weeks to see how everyone is going and then assist those who aren’t having a great time.

For more on troubleshooting bad matches, click here.

Create a sense of urgency

Sometimes, all participants need is a little push in the form of deadlines or timelines. 

Giving your cohort a matching deadline encourages them to get a move on with finding a match or sorting through their requests and accepting/rejecting requests. 

Another way to create a sense of urgency is by having events that mark progression in your program. If you make your cohort aware that there will be some check-in events during certain points of the program, it can encourage them to find a match early on so they can take full advantage of attending these events.

Advice from our Customer Success Team

Take advantage of the Dashboard Introduction Message:

"In your settings tab, use the Program Coordinator loop introduction message feature to update your participants of any deadlines so that they are aware of what is happening. You can let them know dates such as when you will be creating matches. For any other changes down the road, such as enabling the self matching feature, use the bulk message feature to save time and notify all your participants in one go!"

So, those are our best tips on how to address a less-than-stellar match rate. We hope you've found this useful!

Once you’ve sorted your match rate, it is then all about keeping the engagement up. For our best tips on how to do that, check out this article.

Good luck!