The short answer and the good news is: no, not really! It does not have to be a full time job.
When you scale, your role as a Program Coordinator changes slightly. As you learn from your pilot and get the hang of running a mentoring program, your focus turns more to recruitment and keeping your match rates and engagement up - both tasks that can be managed quite easily, especially with the help of mentoring software.
So, you can still run your program in about 30 minutes a week with Mentorloop if you take advantage of these features:
Your Dashboard
The Program Dashboard allows you to see your entire program at a glance. No matter how big your program is, it will surface the data you need in a way that’s easy to understand. The Insights on your dashboard charts also make your data actionable - taking the hard work out of figuring out how to improve your metrics.
Filters and Bulk Actions
Say you’ve got 20 or more people who need a nudge to find a match, simply filter for participants ‘without a match’ and send just one bulk message. Filters and Bulk Actions ensure that most management activities can be done in bulk.
There will be certain areas where you might see a change:
1:1 messages from participants
When you scale, the increase in the number of participants can come with an increase in the number of messages you receive.
How to manage this:
To avoid having to walk everyone through either technical issues or certain how-to’s, take advantage of the Participant Help Hub. Send your participants links to specific articles instead of explaining how to do something yourself, or even just remind them that it’s there to explore.
Also, periodically suggesting some mentoring best practices via your Recommended Reading lists is a great way to get in front of any issues in your participants’ mentoring journeys.
Tip from the Mentorloop team:
"Mentorloop helps you set your participants up for success through our recorded 5 Steps to Mentoring Success webinar for mentors and mentees. It goes through tips on making the most out of their mentoring journeys and the basics of using Mentorloop - all things that you might get asked about early on. As you gear up for your program, make sure you send the recording to them. Also, if you’re on Mentorloop Enterprise, speak to your Customer Success Manager regarding bespoke webinars and whether these would suit your cohort’s needs."
- Kristin
Keeping track of participants without matches
You may need to keep a closer eye on whether your participants are matched when you are running a Manual Match, Self Match, or Blended Match program.
How to manage this:
This one is pretty easy. You can filter for unmatched participants regularly, with the frequency depending on the kind of program you have. If you’re running a Self Match program, you can then send your unmatched mentors and mentees a bulk message with tips on finding a match. If you’ve chosen to Manually Match your participants, you can simply match these participants straight away.
Troubleshooting
Having more participants means there’s also more room for things to not click the first time around. Anticipate a few more instances where you need to intervene.
How to manage this:
Dealing with issues in your program will obviously depend on what kind of issues are happening. For more in-depth tips on how to manage issues in your program, check out our guide on when to intervene in your program and how to deal with bad matches.
Tip from the Mentorloop team:
"Remember that scaling a program means putting continued effort into recruitment. A brilliant way to maximise your time is to focus on concentrated intakes as you scale. This ensures time spent promoting the program may be only a few times a year and encourages a flurry of sign-ups and activity - often too, word-of-mouth throughout an organisation. We also see many choose to bake mentoring program recruitment into their onboarding processes and employee lifecycle - inviting participants to join a program during employee milestones such as when they first join the organisation, receive a promotion, or transfer departments."
- Emily
Scaling your program means making mentoring more accessible to more people, opening them up to more opportunities, more variety, and larger networks. As a result of this, you may see people having multiple mentoring relationships and building their Personal Advisory Boards. This is the wonderful thing about scaling your mentoring program. And it’s why Mentorloop is built to support you as you scale - so you can continue growing and making an impact without having to break a sweat to do it.
Tip from the Mentorloop team:
"As you scale, you can use your monthly reports as a regular spot-check for any significant changes. A more detailed check-in every quarter is also a good idea - just to make sure no one is falling through the cracks. Remember, Mentorloop is built for scale, so as long as you keep an eye on your reports and your dashboard, there’s no need to worry about whether you’ll need to increase your time commitment as your program grows."
-Grace