Using Together's mentoring platform to scale mentorship while minimizing administrative workload
The Challenge
The Forum is a Canadian-based non-profit whose mission is to “help women entrepreneurs access the resources & community they need to thrive in business.” They achieve their mission by growing their community of female entrepreneurs and connecting them with mentors.
Since its founding in 2001, The Forum has connected over 2000 entrepreneurs with career-changing mentors to help them build their businesses. Prior to adopting Together's mentorship software the process of pairing mentors with budding entrepreneurs was laborious and done manually through spreadsheets. When a mentee joined the program, The Forum had to have an initial consultation with them, determine their needs, and consider who the right mentor was for them in their community.
Additionally, after The Forum made the pairing, they didn’t have the resources to follow up with each pair and make sure they were meeting and growing together. They could only hope that the relationship was beneficial.
They understood that manually running their mentorship program hindered their ability to grow their program and support their goal of “leaving no woman behind.” They needed a tool to help them automate the pairing process and make it easy to monitor their program. Without it they couldn’t scale.
The Solution
The Forum chose Together’s Mentoring Platform to scale their ability to pair mentors and mentees. Using our customizable pairing algorithm, The Forum seamlessly matches mentees with mentors based on their goals, skills, and current challenges - all with minimal administrative oversight. Participants love it too. They share that the matching process is efficient and quickly identifies the best possible mentor for them. With the need for individual consultations taken care of with our algorithm, their pairing process was streamlined without jeopardizing the quality of the matches.
Additionally, The Forum now has insight into how each mentoring relationship is progressing using Together’s Health Monitor Dashboard. They can see who’s meeting, how often, the meeting’s rating, and review the feedback mentors and mentees provide after each session - all within one place and at a glance. When discussing Together’s Health Monitor, The Forum shared that it supported them “by ensuring no one fell through the cracks.”
The Results
Within less than a year of leveraging Together’s Platform, The Forum has 4x’ed the size of its mentoring program. They also have plans to triple its size again over 2022.
The Forum’s team now has more time to focus on continuing their mission of providing career-changing mentorship to female entrepreneurs, not manually connecting mentors and mentees.
Moving forward, The Forum has plans to partner with corporate sponsors and introduce more entrepreneurs into the program, connecting them with more leaders and educators.
We’re proud to continue supporting The Forum as they bring meaningful mentoring opportunities to female entrepreneurs across North America.
Overview
The Forum has supported over 10,000 women entrepreneurs since 2002 and are committed to making sure women-identifying entrepreneurs feel equipped to achieve anything they set their mind to. Their educational programs, mentoring programs, and deeply collaborative, connected community are all focused on helping female entrepreneurs set and achieve big goals in their businesses.
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