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Successful mentor program administrators know the value of “co-creating” mentorship programs with participants. Co-creating is when you involve participants in your program planning by collecting and using their feedback. The best way to get feedback in a mentoring program is through Together’s survey functionality.
Together includes survey functionality in the platform. In this article, we’ll highlight the best practices for surveying mentors and mentees, outlining when to send out surveys and what questions to ask.
The different kinds of surveys to send to mentors and mentees
Surveys are a great way to have check-ins with participants, but also to source helpful feedback quickly.
This means you can use surveys to see how participants are getting along at different stages of the mentorship program, including:
- Pre-planning
- Post-matching
- Learning more about unpaired users
- Post-session
- DEI feedback
- Mid-point check-in, and
- Post-program outcomes.
Now, while you want this feedback to focus more on the process of mentorship itself, you can occasionally use them to understand more about your employees, their needs, their limitations, and, perhaps, where your organization falls short.
Think about DEI initiatives or reasons why some participants may go unpaired.
Keeping all this in mind, let’s look at the different kinds of surveys to send to participants:
Pre-program planning survey
The first, and most crucial, survey is the one included as part of the registration. This survey is designed to help program administrators get to know more about participants and what they want in a mentoring program.
Information gathered here can help admins or the mentorship platform algorithm create good mentor-mentee matches. Think of it this way — the more detailed these questions are, the more perfect the match.
When to send out this survey
During the registration process and when participants are signing up.
What questions to ask
- Basic information (name, age, location)
- How would you like to participate in this program – Join as mentor & mentee, mentor only, mentee only?
For mentors and mentees:
- What is your current role?
- How many years have you spent in your professional career to date?
- What roles would you prefer your mentor/mentee be in or have experience in?
- Have you completed any university or college degrees?
- Do you want your affiliations with any diversity groups to play a role in your mentorship?
- What are your greatest strengths?
- What are your biggest weaknesses?
- What are your favorite activities?
- What would you like to get out of the mentoring program?
For mentees: - What skills or goals would you like to get from the program?
- What other roles do you have experience in, either here or in the past?
- What are your top 3 goals you’d like to work on in this mentorship program?
- In what areas would you like to get more support?
- In what areas do you feel comfortable?
For mentors:
- What is the number of mentees you can take on?
- What goals have you accomplished in the past that you feel capable to advise on?
- What achievements can you share with others as a mentor?
- Describe any experiences or topics you can help with as part of the mentoring program
After matching
Once you have your pairs, you’ll want to check in and see how participants feel about their match.
This is important for two main reasons:
- Participants will be with their matches throughout the mentorship period. So, they need to be happy with their match.
- You can learn more about how the matching process works for them and if improvements need to be made.
When to send out this survey
Once a mentee is matched with a mentor.
What questions to ask
- How did you find the matching process?
- Were you happy with the mentor-mentee match?
- How did you feel about browsing available mentors?
- What would you do to improve the pairing process?
- Were you excited or disappointed about the quality of mentors available?
- Were you excited or disappointed about the quantity of mentors available?
- Has the pairing process made you more or less hopeful about the mentoring experience?
- After going through the mentor matching process, how do you feel about the rest of the mentoring program on a scale of 1 (negative) to 5 (positive)?
Learning more about unpaired users
As you survey the successful matches, you also want to survey the unsuccessful ones to understand what went wrong. With our surveys, admins can send surveys specifically to unpaired users.
These could be users who have never entered a pairing or who ended their pairing before the program officially ended.
When to send out this survey
When a participant hasn’t been paired in 2-3 months and/or when a participant preemptively terminates a mentoring relationship. In addition to the above, you can also consider using a QR code generator to create QR codes that link to your survey. You can then print these QR codes and distribute them to unpaired users. This can be a quick and easy way for users to access the survey.
What questions to ask
Termination:
- What caused you to end your pairing?
- What can we (program admins) do to improve the pairing process?
Non-participation:
- Would you like to share why you haven’t requested a mentor yet?
- What could have contributed to you becoming a part of a pairing?
Post-session feedback
Now to the sessions themselves – you’ll want to collect ongoing feedback from all pairs so you can catch any issues that come up.
This will also help you gauge the program’s success and participants’ satisfaction. In this survey, your questions will focus on individual sessions.
When to send out this survey
After each or every alternate session, depending on the admin's needs.
What questions to ask
- How is your mentorship with [mentor or mentee]?
- On a scale of 1-10, rate your session.
- What was discussed?
- Did you take meeting notes, and what was the key piece of information you took away from the session?
DEI feedback
Admins can anonymize the responses for surveys, which encourages users to share more forthright details without the response being attached to their names.
So, here’s an opportunity to ask participants how they feel about the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts, especially if they are significant to your company’s mission.
When to send out this survey
Anytime during the mentorship process, preferably 4-6 months in.
What questions to ask
- What do you think about inclusivity in your organization?
- Do you think your top management team is diverse? If yes, in what ways?
- Do you think the company’s sponsorship and promotion policy support diversity?
- Do you think HR and management support the needs of disabled people in your company?
- How do you think the company can improve to become more diverse in the future?
- What do you think about diversity in the mentorship program?
- How comfortably do you share your concerns with your managers, supervisors, and mentors?
- What more can be done to promote equity in the company?
Mid-point check-in
Now, depending on the structure of your mentorship program, you’ll want to check in with mentors and mentees halfway through the program. This not only gives you an understanding of how the program is progressing, it also provides a check-in stop for participants themselves to evaluate their own progress.
When to send out this survey
Depends on the decided length of your mentorship program, adjusted for each mentoring relationship. For example, if your mentorship program is designed to last 52 sessions, then send this survey out after the 26th session.
What questions to ask
- How is your relationship with your mentor/mentee?
- What do you enjoy about the program?
- What about the program do you not enjoy?
- What has been the most difficult thing you have experienced during the program?
- What goal(s) have you accomplished so far?
- Are you happy with your progress in the program?
- What would you like to see for the second half of the program?
Post-program outcomes
Lastly, you have your post-program surveys. Through these, you will get feedback on what users missed, what they accomplished, and what they would like to see in the next program.
When to send out this survey
At the end of the program, preferably 1-2 weeks later so participants have time to think about the outcomes of the program.
What questions to ask
- How would you rate your overall experience with the mentor program?
- What did you like most about the program?
- What were some things you felt could be improved?
- Did the mentorship program run as you planned?
- What takeaway points did you learn from your mentee/mentor?
- What are your prized accomplishments achieved during the program?
- How would you describe your relationship with your mentor/mentee?
- What activities or discussions did you have with your mentor or mentee?
- Would you have preferred to meet more or less with your mentor/mentee?
How Together makes it easy to survey participants
With the many different kinds of surveys you can send out, you’ll need a tool that works for each scenario. Thankfully, Together’s surveying tools are highly customizable to meet your needs.
You can have multiple choice questions or long text boxes, as well as ask users to upload files and more.
So, you can quickly:
- Create and build new surveys,
- Send them to individual or multiple participants simultaneously,
- Schedule them with or without deadlines,
- Collect answers anonymously, and more.
You can check out our step-by-step guides to see how easy it is to put together and send out surveys within your mentoring platform itself.
Ready to start your mentoring program?
With Together, you can build out your mentorship program from scratch and integrate it easily with your existing workflow. And you can use our surveying tools to measure the success of your program and report it to management.
Contact your Account Executive to discuss how to get started on Together’s platform!
