Case Study: The Mentorship Program

Over the last two years, we have been working together with a non-profit organization that needed a better way to manage their mentorship program. Once a year they put together experienced professionals with people looking for a position in the competitive Canadian job market. Mentors and mentees are put together as peers, so they collaborate over the course of 2 months, attending events, preparing resumes, setting up effective LinkedIn profiles, networking, etc.

To prevent mentors from moving on their own, possibly on different directions, while still giving some level of freedom to their guidance, the mentorship coordinators decided to create a sequence of steps that defines what to do, but not necessarily how. The steps gave consistency to the program, but on the other hand, it was harder to manage. They had to use a spreadsheet per peer and then consolidate those spreadsheets into one to finally understand what was going on.

After long discussions and experiments we discovered that Follow In Steps could solve these problems and bring efficiency to the program. They were already working with steps, so all they had to do was to create the steps and use the collaboration features of the application. But not everything just fit perfectly, so it took us some time to conceive, design, and develop features to benefit not only the mentorship but all other users. That’s why the app does not have concepts like mentor or mentees. It just happens to work for them as well.

Matching Needs and Features

Our first step was to match the roles of the mentorship program with the ones of Follow In Steps. The mentorship had coordinators, mentors, and mentees. In Follow In Steps, the coordinator is the author of the steps, the user that has full access and special view of their own steps, which is exactly what the coordinator needs to manage the program. The mentor is a subscriber, someone who has access to the steps, can assign them to other people and follow their performance. The mentee is a performer, someone who was invited by the subscriber, or the author, to perform the steps. The roles formed a great match.

The second step was to make sure the steps that mentors and mentees follow are not a To Do list neither a business process with logical branches. Steps are actually a recipe, a sequence of actions where each action incrementally contributes to a final outcome. That’s not what happens with To Do lists because each To Do item can be independent and done in a different sequence, making them unfit to achieve a final outcome. That’s not what happens with a business process either, because processes can be complex while steps must be straightforward. Steps don’t have conditions because each condition can lead to a different outcome. If conditions exist then they derive to different steps. Since the beginning it was clear that the nature of the mentorship program was based on steps and it made Follow In Steps a match again.

The third and last step was to check if minimal required collaboration features were in place to allow fluent communication among coordinators, mentors and mentees. Mentors and mentees use only conference apps such as Zoom, Hangout, and Skype. The conversation is fluent but volatile, so they needed some written communication to report their progress, keep some key knowledge points and give feedback. Fortunately, Follow In Steps supports conversations in each one of the steps. Coordinators, mentors, and mentees can read and write those comments, which are listed in a discussion format.

Preparing to Run the Program

With all pieces in place, the Mentorship Program was ready to adopt Follow In Steps and abandon those inefficient spreadsheets. The adoption was simple. First, a person designated as coordinator created a business account to represent the mentorship program. Then all people helping on the coordination created their accounts and the coordinator associated those accounts under the umbrella of the business account. This way they acted as a team on behalf of the mentorship. The coordinator created the steps with all the details to be followed by mentors and mentees, but anyone in the coordination team could do that as well. They had the chance to update the steps for better understanding throughout the program.

Once the steps were complete, it was time to invite the mentors to join the program. In Follow In Steps, mentors are known as subscribers, which means they can assign the steps to other people and follow their performance. There were many mentors to invite so the entire coordination team divided the work and sent invitations to them. An invitation is an email explaining why the person is invited, what they can do, and instructions about joining the app.

Mentors received the invitation by email, read the instructions and clicked on the link to confirm it. Mentors who didn’t have a user account were redirected to the sign-up form. Those who already had a user account and were not authenticated were redirected to the sign-in page. After sign-up or sign-in, mentors were finally redirected to the steps they were subscribed to.

Once engaged, mentors were in charge of inviting their mentees. In Follow In Steps, mentees are assignees, those who receive assignments from authors or subscribers to perform steps. Each mentor invited their mentees and the invitation worked the same way it worked for mentors: E-mail message, link, sign-up or sign-in, and finally steps. It concluded the setup to start the program. Everybody was ready to fulfill their roles.

Running the Program

When the program started, mentors and mentees intensively used Follow In Steps. They checked the steps they have completed and left comments about the experience. The coordination had a graphical dashboard with a global and detailed view of the progress in real-time. For the first time, they had an instant picture of the program as a whole, preventing and remediating issues as fast as possible.

With more automation and monitoring, new problems became evident. It was possible to know in which points dropouts were likely to happen; that an extra effort was necessary to keep mentors and mentees updating their steps by the end of the program, that those who completed the entire program were also disciplined when reporting progress and more engaged with the activities. Those and other discoveries helped us to improve the app, which in consequence, improved the efficiency of subsequent editions of the Mentorship.

We are running the second year of the Program, which brings the second round of improvements to cover most of the needs of this relevant use case. We hope to offer this service to more mentorship programs by the end of 2021.