Mentoring program administration
MentorPairing takes your application questions, ranks every possible pair against the criteria you set, and hands you a draft cohort you can adjust by hand. After launch it keeps the meeting log, the check ins and the numbers your board asks for in March.
Why the spreadsheet gives out
Every coordinator we talk to has the same four scars. They are not about software preferences. They are about hours you will never bill back and participants who quietly stop answering.
Applications arrive in a form, get pasted into a workbook, and then get sorted by hand across region, seniority, industry and the two constraints nobody wrote down. One coordinator in Ohio timed it at 31 hours for 160 participants.
31 hours per cohortYou send the introduction email, both sides reply warmly, and then nothing. Without a meeting log you find out in month seven, when the mentee has already decided the program was not for her.
1 in 4 pairs stallsThe board wants participation, retention and outcomes by chapter. You reconstruct it from an inbox, a sign in sheet and a survey with a 38 percent response rate, and you still hedge every number.
2 days of board prepSponsors and deans renew what they can see. A program that cannot show meetings held, hours given and mentees promoted is the first line trimmed when the budget tightens.
$18,000 sponsorship at riskHow it works
You keep every judgment call. The software does the sorting, the arithmetic and the follow up that nobody has time for in week one.
Build the mentor form and the mentee form from the same question bank, so the answers line up when it is time to match. Ask about industry, function, years in role, city, meeting cadence and the three topics she most wants to work on. Applications close on the date you set and nothing lands in your inbox.
Give each question a weight: hard rule, strong preference, tie breaker, or ignore. A chapter program might make city a hard rule and industry a preference. A university might do the reverse. You can save the weighting and reuse it next cohort.
One run scores every eligible combination and proposes a full cohort in under a minute, with the reason for each pair spelled out in plain language. Lock the pairs you like, swap the ones you do not, and re run the rest around your locks.
Introduction emails go out with both bios and a scheduling link. Each pair logs meetings in two taps, nudges fire when a pair has gone quiet for a month, and your dashboard keeps a running count of meetings, hours and check in scores.
What is in the product
Nothing here is borrowed from a generic CRM. Each screen exists because a program manager asked for it during a cohort that was already running.
Two linked forms, conditional questions, file uploads for resumes and a close date that enforces itself. Applicants can save and come back, which lifts completion on the mentor side where the forms are longest.
Set hard rules, preferences and tie breakers per question, then let the engine score every eligible pair and return a full cohort. Each suggestion carries its reasons, so you can defend a match to a participant who asks.
Either side of the pair can record a meeting from an email link without signing in. If a pair goes thirty days with nothing logged, both people get one polite reminder and you see the pair flagged on your dashboard.
Participation, meetings held, hours contributed, retention by cohort and check in scores, all filterable by chapter, campus or class year. Export to CSV or send a read only board link that refreshes on its own.
When a mentor takes a new job or a mentee steps away, mark the pair closed with a reason and the engine offers replacements from the wait pool. The history stays attached to both records so your numbers never quietly change.
Chapter leads see only their own participants, faculty advisers get read access, and sponsor contacts get aggregate figures with no names attached. Every export is logged with who ran it and when.
Who runs it
The shape of a cohort changes a lot between a chapter federation and a student success office. The weights change with it, which is why the criteria are yours to set rather than ours to assume.
Members apply in the fall, chapters run their own cohorts, and the national office needs one view across all of them. City is usually a hard rule, function is a preference, and the report goes to a board that approves next year's budget in February.
Typical size: 60 to 400 pairs across four to twelve chapters.
Alumnae mentors and current students, matched by major, career interest and class year, with a term that follows the academic calendar. Access has to be scoped so a department adviser sees her own students and nobody else's.
Typical size: 80 to 900 pairs, two intakes a year.
Cross department pairing inside one employer, where the constraint is almost always the reporting line: never match a woman with her own manager, or with anyone two levels up in her own chain. That rule is a switch, not a workaround.
Typical size: 30 to 250 pairs, one annual cycle.
Volunteer mentors and community participants, often with a background check requirement and a grant report at the end of the year. The meeting log doubles as the evidence the funder asks for, which is the whole reason it exists.
Typical size: 24 to 180 pairs, rolling intake.
Your current application questions, your list of participants as a CSV, and a decision about which two criteria are non negotiable this year.
The two linked forms, the weighting profile, the introduction email template with your own wording, and the reminder schedule.
Every record, exportable at any moment. Cancel and the CSV still comes out complete, with the meeting history attached to each pair.
What changes
These are medians across 168 US programs on the platform for at least one full cycle, measured against the cycle they ran before switching.
The sorting work moves to the engine. What is left is the judgment: reading the twelve pairs the criteria could not settle and deciding them yourself.
A scheduling link inside the introduction email and one reminder at day fourteen move most of this. Programs see the lift in the first cohort, not the second.
Early flags catch stalled pairs while a rematch is still welcome. Coordinators intervene in week six instead of finding out at the closing event.
The report is assembled from meeting logs as they happen. You open the dashboard, set the date range, and send a link that the finance committee can open on a phone.
From the coordinators
We match 340 women across nine chapters and I used to lose two weekends to it. This year I set city as a hard rule and function as a preference, ran it, and spent my Saturday reviewing 19 borderline pairs instead of building 340 from scratch. The reasons printed next to each pair are what sold my board.
Our alumnae mentors are generous but they are busy, and a mentee who hears nothing for six weeks does not email twice. The thirty day flag changed that. I rematched eleven pairs in October and every one of them finished the year. My provost saw participation, not apologies.
I run this program alongside a full membership portfolio, so anything that needs a weekly babysitter is out. Intake closes on its own, the nudges go out on their own, and the sponsor report is a link I paste into an email. Our renewal conversation in January took eleven minutes.
Pricing
Every plan includes the matching engine, the meeting log, the reporting dashboard and unlimited coordinator seats. You are never charged for a participant who did not complete an application.
$79 per month
Up to 60 active pairs. Right for a single chapter or one department cohort.
$179 per month
Up to 300 active pairs across as many chapters or campuses as you run.
$359 per month
Unlimited pairs, several programs under one roof, and the paperwork your counsel needs.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your account settings. No setup fee, no annual commitment, and your data exports in full on the way out.
Questions coordinators ask
Your plan is set by the number of active pairs in your program, not by staff logins or applications received. Small Program covers up to 60 active pairs at $79 per month, Program covers up to 300 at $179 per month, and Institution removes the ceiling at $359 per month. If a cohort grows past your tier mid cycle we move you up at the start of the next month and never backdate a charge. Coordinator seats are unlimited on every plan, so adding a chapter lead costs nothing.
Most programs are open for applications within one working week. Day one is your question bank: we start from the form you already use and rebuild it so the mentor and mentee answers line up. Day two or three is the weighting, which is the conversation where you tell us what actually matters in your program. After that you publish the form, and the pairing run itself takes under a minute whenever you are ready to close intake.
All participant records are stored in US data centers, encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never sold, rented or used to train anything. Access is scoped by role: a chapter lead sees her own participants, a faculty adviser gets read access, and a sponsor contact sees aggregate counts with no names. Every export is recorded with the account that ran it and the time it ran. University partners on the Institution plan receive a signed data agreement covering student records before any data is loaded.
Participants can be imported from a CSV exported by any association management system or student information system, and matched records update rather than duplicate. Introduction emails carry a scheduling link for Calendly, Google Calendar or Microsoft Bookings, whichever your mentors already use. Reporting exports to CSV and to a read only web link, and the Institution plan adds single sign on through your identity provider. There is also a read API if your advancement team wants the participation figures inside their own dashboard.
You can cancel from your account settings at any time and the plan stops at the end of the month you already paid for. Nothing is prorated against you and there is no exit fee. Before the account closes you can export every application, pair, meeting log and report as CSV, and we keep the data available for ninety days in case a new coordinator picks the program back up. Many association programs pause over the summer and restart in August without losing a single record.
No, and it does not try to. The engine does the part you would do with a highlighter: filtering out impossible pairs and ranking the rest against the criteria you set. It hands you a draft with the reasoning shown, and the coordinators who get the best results override between five and ten percent of it. You know that a first generation student needs a mentor with patience rather than a matching job title, and nothing in the scoring stops you from making that call.
The Pairing Desk
Our magazine for program coordinators: how to match a full cohort, what makes pairs go quiet, what FERPA asks of you, and what a program really costs per pair.
Talk to us
Bring the form you use today and the shape of your cohort. In thirty minutes we can tell you whether your criteria translate into weights, what your pairing run would look like, and what the first week of setup involves. If the answer is that a spreadsheet still serves you better this year, we will say so.
We reply within one business day, and we do not add you to a newsletter. Coordinators who would rather skip the form can send their cohort dates and pair count straight to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.
