What is a mentoring program?

A mentoring program is a type of RandomCoffee program built to run mentoring from end to end, without spreadsheets or manual coordination. You enroll mentors and mentees, RandomCoffee pairs them, and each pair follows a defined journey on its own shared page.

Key features

• Enrollment: select your mentors and your mentees from audiences built on your HR data, or share an open enrollment link so that people register by themselves.
• Smart matching: RandomCoffee proposes pairs based on rules you define: skills, seniority, department or any other category. You can review, adjust and approve the pairs before anyone is notified, or let RandomCoffee send them on the scheduled dates. In the match email, you can show what brought each pair together, for example the skills they have in common.
• Structured journey: each pair follows a roadmap of milestones that you define, for example Kickoff, Assessment, Deep dive, Projects, Reflection and Wrap-up. Each milestone has its own goal, and pairs book each meeting directly from their shared page.
• Shared page for each pair: every mentor and mentee pair gets one page with their profiles, their progress, their meetings, shared notes and the resources of the program.
• Results: follow the meetings booked and completed, the ratings, the skills in demand and your top-rated mentors in the program’s results.

Availability

Once the add-on is active, RandomCoffee asks “What type of program do you want to create?” each time you create a program from scratch: choose “Mentorship”. Your mentoring programs then show a purple “Mentorship” tag in your list of programs.

How a mentoring program works

1. You prepare your data: a category for the roles (mentor, mentee), categories for the skills, and the audiences that contain your mentors and your mentees. See Categories and Audiences.
2. You create the program: enrollment, matching rules, messages, milestones. See Create a mentoring program.
3. You run sessions: each session creates new mentor and mentee pairs. See Mentoring sessions and matches.
4. Pairs meet: they open their mentoring page, book a meeting for each milestone and mark it as done. See Your mentoring page.
5. You follow the results in the “Results” tab of the program.

Plan your program

Define the roles

Create a “Multiple Choice” category, for example “Participant type”, with the values “Mentor” and “Mentee”. With a multiple choice category, a member can be both: a mentor on one skill and a mentee on another.

Then create two audiences from this category: one for your mentors, one for your mentees. You select them in the program to assign the role of each person. See Create categories and Create an audience.

List the skills

For skill-based mentoring, create two “Multiple Choice” categories with the same options: one for the skills mentors can share, one for the skills mentees want to learn. For example:

• Communication
• Team management
• Conflict resolution
• Work-life balance
• Time management
• Problem-solving
• Project management
• Business acumen
• Client engagement

Add other categories if you want to refine your matching rules, such as department, location or time zone. See Create a mentoring program for the matching rule to use.

Choose a rhythm

Decide how long each pair stays together before mentees get a new mentor, for example 6 months. Then schedule one session for each period: a session “One time only” now, and the next one 6 months later.

Regular meetings are key to a successful mentoring relationship: we recommend a meeting every two weeks. Create as many milestones as the meetings you expect during the period.

If you ask members to opt in before each session, leave a few days between the opt-in and the match: programs that allow at least 4 to 6 days get better participation.

Announce the program

Announce your mentoring program through your usual internal communication tools, and invite people to join as a mentor or as a mentee. Say how long the pairs last, for example “every 6 months, each mentee is paired with a new mentor”.

How people join depends on your setup:

• Your members are already in RandomCoffee: make the role and skills categories visible to members (see Hide a category from members), then invite them to fill them in from their Member Portal. If your mentor and mentee audiences are dynamic, a member who chooses a role joins the program automatically.
• The Member Portal is turned off, or only some people can join: collect the role and skills outside RandomCoffee, then update your members with a CSV file. See Update members.
• People are not in RandomCoffee yet: use open enrollment, with a registration form that asks for the role and the skills. See Create a mentoring program.

Write a clear match message

Your match message is the first thing a new pair reads. In the email editor, you can:

• show the role of each member with the “Role (Mentor / Mentee)” merge tag, and their skills with your category merge tags (see Merge tags);
• add a button to the pair’s mentoring page, with the “Milestones page link” merge tag;
• explain the next steps in a short “How does it work?” section.

For example, for pairs that last 6 months:

How does it work?

Now that you are matched, meet at your own pace over the next 6 months. We recommend a meeting every two weeks: regularity is key to success! In 6 months, each mentee will be paired with a new mentor, to broaden your learning and your network.

The skills of a pair do not always match perfectly, given the number of participants and the skills each of them chose. You can add a message like this one:

The skills you chose do not fully match? The matching does its best to pair you on the skills you selected, but this can happen. In this case, mentees, make the most of your mentor’s experience on the skills they listed!