How to run your mentorship program with Dado

Mentorship programs are win-win-win:

• the mentees accelerate their growth through their mentor's guidance
• mentors gain valuable leadership skills and a broader network in your organization
• the organization benefits from higher employee engagement and more professional development, at no extra cost

The only down-side is the effort involved in running a successful program. This article will explain how Dado can dramatically reduce the time it takes to launch and run a mentorship program.

Setting up your mentorship experience in Dado

1. Promote the program using our Moments templates
2. Accept applications with an enrollment form
3. Make matching participants quick and easy with Dado's flexible imports
4. Send relevant content to mentors and mentees with our Experience template
5. Brainstorm ideas and get advice from our Customer Success Team

Promote the program using our Moments templates

The first stage in any mentorship program is collecting together a pool of willing volunteers. It's often very easy to find would-be mentees, but mentors can be a lot harder to find.

Dado offers a range of templated employee comms to help build enthusiasm and encourage sign-ups, in our Moments feature. These include:

• A general announcement message, sharing the link where people can apply, alongside listing the advantages of being a mentor/mentee
• A targeted message to more senior employees, encouraging them to volunteer as mentors
• A message just for people managers, asking them to encourage their direct reports to apply
• A message with a different approach, encouraging less senior employees to apply to be "peer mentors"
• A final reminder message, to be sent just before the application deadline passes

Simply duplicate these templates, tweak the target audiences to match your employee data, and you're ready to go.

We recommend a 'drip campaign', where you send a series of messages across the application period, to keep the program top of mind.

Accept applications with an enrollment form

Ask your Customer Success Manager to copy the Mentorship Program experience template into your account. That template comes complete with an enrollment form that captures all the info you need to successfully match would-be mentors and would-be mentees:

• Personal details so you can identify sign-ups and reach out, eg email address
• The individual's desired role: mentor, mentee, or both!
• Some extra questions to help you find the right match: how often do they want to meet? what are their goals for the program? what skills do they want help working on, or could offer help working on?

Include the link to this enrollment form in the messages you send about the program, and start collecting sign ups!

Running an application 'window'

The Mentorship template is set to kick off the actual program on a specified calendar date. Anyone who fills out the enrollment form will be held in a kind of 'waiting room' in the experience until this date. That means that you can see them on the Experience page, but they won't yet receive any content.

We've designed the template this way so you can run an 'application window' of several weeks, and then all the program participants will start the program on the same date. That's better for building camaraderie and for collecting feedback.

When you'd like to close the application window, deactivate the enrollment form. Then you have up until the day the Experience is due to start to match mentors and mentees (see the next section for more on this)

If you'd prefer to build your own enrollment form, here are a few pointers

• Set the form to auto-enroll without approval, to avoid extra work
  • You can use target audiences later to ensure only matched mentor/mentee pairs receive tasks and messages.
• There's no need to ask employees for info you already have (eg their department, location or job title). You can use the data destination feature to sync this data to your application spreadsheet, as described below.

Make matching participants quick and easy with Dado's flexible imports

The Mentorship Program template experience is set up to send all the info you need to match sign-ups to a dedicated Google or Excel Online spreadsheet, using Dado's data destination feature.

You can find the link to this spreadsheet in the resources section of the experience. As people fill in the enrollment form, they'll appear in real-time in this spreadsheet.

Once you've closed your application window, you can review the would-be participants and find good mentor/mentee matches.

1. Add 2 extra columns to the data destination mentioned in the previous step: "program role" and "mentor email"

2. Put your mentor/mentee matches in these new columns

   

3. [If you're using our Mentorship Program template, you can skip this step] Create 2 custom Dado field to store the employee's Mentor; and their role in the program.
   • First field to create:
     • Field name: "Mentor"
     • Field type: "User Relationship"
     • Identified by: "email"
   • Second field to create
     • Field name: "Mentorship program role"
     • Field type: "Text"
     • Note: the template is set up to treat anyone with "mentee" anywhere in this field as a mentee. So if you have people who are both mentors and mentees, be sure to use a value like "Both mentor and mentee" or "mentee/mentor"
4. Add the data destination spreadsheet as an import source
   • You only need to import:
     • work email
     • the 2 new columns you just added
   • Set up field mappings for these columns, matching them to the appropriate custom fields. If you need a recap of how to do this, find instructions here.
5. Run an import
   • This will pull in the new data on employees' mentors and roles in your program
   • It will also automatically assign the correct mentors to the mentees who signed up via the enrollment form

Now you've matched your mentors and mentees, time to think about what content you'll send them!

Send relevant content to mentors and mentees with our Experience template

The Mentorship Program template includes 6 months of "light touch" messages and tasks for mentors and mentees, using Target Audiences to make sure everyone receives the right content.

The template also includes a message to anyone who applied to the program but wasn't matched to a mentor/mentee, letting them know they missed out this time round.

The content in the template is designed to ensure a successful program for mentors and mentees, including:

• introducing them to their mentor/mentee, and tasking the mentee with setting up their first meeting
• asking for a commitment to meet with their mentor/mentee regularly, and take the program seriously
  • this leverages the "commitment effect", a psychological bias that makes us more likely to do something if we're asked to commit up-front to doing it
• sharing monthly advice tailored to mentors or mentees
• check-in surveys half-way through the program and at the end
  • both surveys send the data collected to a dedicated data destination spreadsheet in either Google Drive or Excel Online, where you can easily export or conduct your own analysis

Brainstorm ideas and get advice from our Customer Success Team

Dado makes it easy and fast to set up the program on your own – but we really recommend talking with your Customer Success Manager before you get started. Our team have helped lots of customers set up their own programs, and they have valuable best practices to share.