Mentorship Masterclass: Driving Program Engagement

So thank you everybody for joining us here today.

I'm really excited to be hosting and showing you the expertise and the advice that we have on running your mentorship program into really driving engagement.

Whether you're a first-time program admin, whether you're a season program admin, the hope is that you can take something away from this that you can implement in your next cohort or even this week if you're running an always on program to help drive more participation and really get more impact out of your program.

So we love to make these presentations feel interactive.

So please feel free to ask questions.

We'll have some time towards the end if you have any specific questions about your program, if you have specific questions about tools, we'll get time to answer them.

The one thing that I ask is that you just put it in the Q&A panel is on the right side of your screen.

This way, Mateo and Nathan can both see your questions and get them answered.

You can go in there, you can answer, ask questions yourself, or if you want to just browse the ones that are asked, you can upvote them, and we'll be answering the ones that are highest up on that list.

And lastly, we're going to be sharing some templates.

We're going to be sharing some links in this presentation to save you the search while this presentation is happening.

Just let you focus on the content here, we will be sending out every single webinar, every single resource that we have linked out in this slide deck, as well as the recording afterward.

So we're in for a very full kind of presentation here today.

We're going to be going through first introducing our speakers.

And then we're going to be diving into an engagement overview, what it is, what are the levers, very high level.

And then we're going to quickly be moving on towards mentorship strategies.

What is it?

How can you design mentorship at a strategic level to be highly engaging?

Then we're going to get into the practical aspects of program design, looking at individual programs, the certain decisions and criteria that you can make to change and drive more engagement.

Or to me looking at program design, matching, registration, as well as your tech stack.

And following that up with collecting insights.

This is really the lifeblood of driving innovation and driving evolution for your program to make it more engaging time over time.

We're also going to be talking about some new products that we're launching to drive engagement with your program, where Nathan's going to come in.

He's going to talk about incentives and awards as well as events, how they play a role in driving engagement, as well as showing you how this works in Together's platform.

Like I mentioned before, we're going to have some time at the end for Q&A.

So again, if you have a question throughout the program, throughout the presentation, please feel free to put them into the Q&A.

If you have questions at the end, we'll be answering them then.

So we're joined today by two of Together's foremost experts when it comes to mentorship programs.

We're joined by Mateo Peralta.

Mateo's an account manager at Together, and he's been here for the past two and a half-ish years.

Supporting organizations with their mentorship strategy and advice, both helping them on the platforms, making sure the programs are set up, their strategy is in place, and off the platform making sure that they're aware of best practices and different activities that they can do to drive engagement, increase promotion, and so on.

We're also joined by Nathan Goldstein.

He is the head of product and the co-founder of Together.

Nathan leads the research and development for Together's Product Suite, so he spends a lot of time talking with people in L&D strategizing around what tools and technology they need to really drive impact with their learning and development, D.E and I, onboarding, and leadership development goals.

So I'll keep my part short and sweet, and we'll get Mateo up here to start with the engagement overview.

All right.

Thank you so much, Brent.

And to everyone joining, welcome.

I am very excited for today's conversation.

And yeah, happy to identify a few issues and a whole lot of solutions.

And To kind of kick things off, we really want to dive into the challenges, kind of where we're starting from.

So we have three main buckets that we wanted to walk you folks through.

The first can, of course, be not having enough registrants within your programs.

And this can definitely occur at the top.

Up the mentorship funnel.

Essentially, if you're limited for your numbers, it can be a bit challenging to create an effective learning experience at scale.

And that is, of course, tied to the low potential match rates.

So you might have a registrant coming in very excited and very hopeful to find a mentor, but ultimately they might only find just a few matches and they might not.

Find a match that they're looking for.

So today we'll also be discussing some of the tactics to really help you maximize your chances for making not only a good number of matches, but high quality matches.

And then last but not least, there's the challenge of sustaining engagement.

So it's one thing to kick a program off, but it's another thing to really keep that momentum going, that excitement, if you will as well.

And so this can definitely have a big impact.

Act on the goals that you've set.

And if you don't essentially keep those mentoring relationships sustained, then progress and growth from your initial efforts can definitely taper off.

Moving on to some lever.

So we want to at this point look at the changes we can make to overcome some of the challenges that we identified to really help improve those engagement levels.

And so the two main areas that we're highlighting today is the mentorship strategy piece.

So this is essentially a statement of how you're leveraging mentorship to impact your organization's development goals.

And here we specifically look at the entire number of programs that you're running to help ensure that you're set up to maximize engagement within your organizations.

And that also goes hand in hand with the program design.

When you're really looking at your program design, you want to essentially assess your individual.

Dual programs and the considerations on how they impact your engagement.

So a few aspects that we can kind of think of here are the program engagement.

The matching type and also the support that we'd be offering to our participants.

And today, we'll also be covering a few tactics and advice at both of these levels to help you develop your mentorship strategy, uh, and your individual programs that should help maximize engagement and produce the results that you want to produce.

All right, so in this section, I'm very excited.

Mentorship strategy is essentially the vision setting, if you will, where you're thinking..

What it is that you want to have happened within your program?

So to kind of pick things off, we'll be essentially covering a few different types of programs that you can launch.

I think it's, you know, some folks might be coming to the session thinking, I don't know what I don't know.

I don't know what kind of program.

I could launch, and we're happy to give you some ideas.

And in addition to that, we'll also be sharing some good benchmarks for success and also helping you in developing a robust strategy.

And I Understanding all of these elements, before we dive into them, is definitely crucial because a well-crafted mentorship strategy that aligns with your needs helps enhance engagement, and it definitely helps impact the kind of level of excitement around your programs.

So today we'll definitely be exploring how to effectively structure and implement these programs through a few exciting ideas.

So we have a few different structured approaches that you're able to leverage.

But what we kind of recommend to start things off with is an evergreen program.

So these are all access year-round experiences that allow your participants to join or leave as needed.

And within the sort of program, you can help facilitate that kind of traditional hierarchal mentorship.

As well as more casual peer connections like coffee chats or networking.

To give you folks kind of quick example, together, we happen to have a really exciting combination of mentorship and coffee chats and the pleasure of connecting with a few peers.

Outside of the structured mentorship and I've been able to learn a lot more about their departments, I know about blind spots that I didn't even realize I had.

So, Overall, having that kind of multifaceted approach can definitely help you scratched at a few of the challenges that your participants might be experiencing.

And to kind of speak to this further, these sorts of evergreen programs are at the end of the day, focused on being low maintenance, not only for your participants, but also for yourselves as admins, especially when you're using the tool to facilitate connections.

And what we then recommend in terms of a cohort approach is to layer on specific programs to tackle the specific priorities that you've identified and are wanting to address.

So here we have some really exciting examples that include onboarding, DEI initiatives, new manager training, and leadership developments.

We've seen it all.

And I have to say, it's always exciting to see a new organization take on this sort of initiative.

And these time-bound cohorts are largely, we want to say, a little bit more time-bound.

So they can last for about six months to a year.

They have the more kind of focused goals.

And usually we will have a subset of individuals within an organization identified as the participants.

And oftentimes, it's really exciting because once we have mentees complete one of these programs, they often return as mentors.

In the following program.

So you want to think about your goals within the existing program, but also what comes next?

And an engaging mentorship strategy at the end of the day will help in kind of including all of these needs.

And we generally recommend having the open programs for just general skill development and the more targeted programs for specific needs.

All right, moving on to benchmarks.

Some of you might see benchmarks as goals at your setting, specific numbers that you are looking at, and identifying as the most important.

To give you context on where we're sharing these benchmarks from, we've had the pleasure of supporting many, many organizations across the globe in every field that you can imagine.

And we've learned a lot from them.

Well, they've also learned a lot from their employees.

And consistently, what we've seen is that the benchmarks that we're presenting today, you end up having the highest impact on the participants within the programs.

And so, While each program's goals and audiences absolutely differ in every program, there are definitely some similarities between the organizations that we're kind of referring to today and how they've implemented mentorship specifically.

And so all of the organizations that we've benchmarked are running multiple programs A lot of them are centered around a core program, kind of nucleus, if you will, and orbiting around them.

We do have some more low intensity programs, some incremental programs that are targeted to specific departments.

For example, a marketing department, we have a specific program or one specific program for employees looking to get a little bit more of a connection in the context of DEI.

So, When you're looking to drive more engagement, what we see is that the organizations who have done it well are not necessarily thinking about improving existing programs, but ultimately thinking about meeting the development needs of more of your employees.

So it's all about the scale.

Excellent.

So to kind of expand upon the concept that we've covered so far, when it comes to the kind of multiple programs, the multiple initiatives, when you're essentially implementing your broader strategy to address your organizations, core development needs, it's I think really important to also identify where your mentorship is most needed.

So what are kind of the areas of feedback?

What voices are the loudest?

Who?

Might you not be hearing from.

And so to hone in on this a little bit more, we have seen that historically our organizations will start off with that specific need, such as training new managers and These programs are designed to target specific segments and are supported through a lot of training and content development, which we're also happy to offer through the platform.

And once that initial program succeeds, New programs are launched and processes are established for mentor recruiting and reporting.

So we've observed quite a lot of organic growth in many organizations where successes in one area absolutely spread and kind of have a bit of a positive domino effect for successes in other areas.

And this expansion is a key driver for increasing mentorship.

Awesome.

So now we're going to get a little bit more kind of focused on what these programs end up looking like, specifically with the design aspect of things.

So, When it comes to this, we really always want to think of what we're planning in the frame of engagement.

So we'll be sharing today some tactics related to the settings and decisions that you make around how your participants interact with your program.

And overall, these tactics that we'll be sharing will cover the entire funnel.

So registration, matching, booking sessions, and also the tech that you're using to facilitate your program.

And to kick things off, we'll be heading into the registration piece.

Awesome.

So essentially, this is, of course, the first part that your participants interact with.

It's kind of the intake.

Process, if you will.

And in the past, what we've seen is that the most well-designed programs that follow the best practices get low engagement occasionally due to promotion issues.

At the end of the day, people might just not be aware of the program existing or how to engage with it.

And Actually, I thought that we're covering this because just last month, in case you folks missed it, we actually had another webinar on..

In our master class series on promotion.

And so we definitely have those resources that we can support you with and that we'll be happy to send out later where you can also look at some of these tactics to make sure that at the end of the day, you're communicating as much as possible to everyone who needs the materials.

Great.

So essentially, moving on from the engagement piece, something that we definitely recommend is maximizing mentor capacity.

I think as an admin, you folks might find a situation where you find more mentees in need of help than the mentors that you have available.

And this can actually be pretty common based on what we've seen with different organizations, particularly within the traditional one-on-one programs.

And to get around this hurdle, what we recommend is just increase the mentor capacity.

The total number of mentees that your mentors can connect with.

You may very well have those mentors who can only take one mentee at a time, which Makes sense, but then you might indeed have those mentors who are potentially super mentors in development.

They've been waiting to help engage the folks around them, and they can take on two or three mentors at a time.

And so what we recommend from this is to also reduce the criteria on what it takes to be a mentor.

We've definitely seen over quite a few years, quite a lot of programs that oftentimes the most unlikely of individuals turn out to be the best mentors.

So always considering relaxing your rules is a great, a great method based on what we've seen.

And one of the most immediate tips that I can also share with you folks is that you can, again, have your mentors connect with more than one mentee at a time.

And this will, I want to say, have the most immediate impact even if you have a program that's ongoing right now, you can let them know that there is that capacity.

You can, at the end of the day, let the mentors determine how they're engaging with your participants.

So reducing that friction, is really the goal with those recommendations.

And so what we would love to dive into next is a success story based on all of these with one of our most valued customers as well, which you folks may have heard of.

But it's Hopspot.

So they're an absolutely incredible and inspiring example of how an organization has absolutely crushed registration and really surpassed goals.

So when they were essentially launching their global DEI program, what they did was that they leveraged targeted and automated comms to mentors and mentees and overall increase their pool for participants to be able to join as mentors, having that criteria based on years of experience in addition to positive performance reviews instead of kind of one specific piece.

And the impact of this approach really blew their engagement away.

And they exceeded by their targets by overdub So definitely an inspiring success story that we always love to refer back on as well.

All right, moving on to matching.

So folks might call this kind of part the bread and butter, if you will, once the registration is occurring.

Here, one of the biggest challenges that we see is essentially reducing the time between when a participant registers and when their first match is made.

I want to say that you really want to keep that momentum going.

So as soon as someone registers, let them know when that matching will happen, make sure that kind of time for them to get those connections happening isn't taking too long at the end of the day.

And to speed up pairing, one of the most impactful things that you can do is automate your processes.

So using a mentorship platform like together can definitely help you in getting this more manual, this more administrative task done.

And at the end of the day, you would still absolutely have control over any specific matches that you might want to set in place as well.

I think that, you know, through our relationships with different employees, different departments, we absolutely have some ideas of, you know, one mentee definitely potentially connecting well with a mentor based on similar interests and what you've seen from your own perspective.

And In terms of kind of reducing that time, we definitely recommend leveraging algorithm processes which is what together is really magical for in terms of being intentional with the connections that are occurring.

It's really great to essentially focus your matching goals within your algorithm on really open criteria and removing rules within your algorithm, such as seniority gaps, in order to really keep that match open.

But then that's one piece of it.

What we also recommend and what we see is personalizing your matching process.

So what we've seen based on a lot of the examples that we're covering today and based on a lot of recent customers as well is that Creating personalized matches absolutely significantly increases that sense of engagement and that satisfaction overall.

So what we mean by this is specifically letting your mentees choose their own matches by browsing options, doing match scores, and reading mentor profiles.

And a unique profile that you'd be able to leverage in together is just allowing your participants to actually set the weight of criteria that is important.

Important to them, which adds another layer of personalization.

So to give you a quick example on our together program that we use, something that's really important to me is learning a new language.

I'm not too picky on which language it is, but I am very intrigued about this background that a lot of my colleagues have.

Through my settings, I've been able to indicate that learning a new language is very, very important and that's yielded to some very exciting conversations on my end.

And then that takes us into the sessions.

So the actual meetings, once the matches have occurred.

So when you're designing your mentorship program, you definitely want to embrace that flexibility.

So allowing your participants to schedule and make time for mentorship and just letting them kind of choose that frequency and that cadence is a great step to getting the relationship started.

So not everyone needs to meet with a mentor every week, but may indeed have someone who..

Is in a kind of position of high stress.

Let's say they're working on a big project, and they need a mentor support at any point, at every point, then they'd be able to decide that with their mentor on their own.

And so another kind of key area in terms of flexibility that is helpful is cases where new matches need to be made.

While your first priority should definitely be to coach and support your pair towards successes, I think that having your pairs also ensure that they can kind of select who they're able to match with would definitely help with that process.

And that definitely leads us to the next piece of enabling impactful conversations.

So what we want to cover in this part is specifically the content of what you're covering within these connections.

So you do have your session agendas that play an important role in facilitating and sustaining mentorship and When you are running a cohort program that's highly structured and focused, the session agendas can help create that sense of focus and structured to conversations.

And they're also pretty important for building confidence in your mentees.

So helping them kind of overcome the hurdle of I'm not too sure what to talk about is the goal that you want to really hone in on with these agendas.

And so your mentees can often have the same objection when it comes to matching with a mentor.

And by filling the gap in with session agendas, you're essentially able to ensure that your parents a last long, but B also increase the number of matches that are being made.

And actually on this topic and one that will be sharing information on as well is The fact that Together recently launched a new feature that does allow your participants to custom their session agendas.

So the great thing about it is that you can have a unique set of agendas developed for your own match.

But let's say there's something specific that you want to work on with a mentor.

You can actually customize that as well.

So you can prompt a platform to redevelop an agenda based on a key area.

I'd say it's public speaking, and that overall helps your relationships evolve dynamically alongside the mentor experience.

Awesome.

So what we are excited to cover next is the technology side of things.

So, kind of diving into this piece, you really want to make your engagement as simple as possible.

So we definitely see increased engagement by taking a bit of a more intuitive process and low effort process for registration and matching.

And so when it comes to this piece of the platform with making engagement simple, Centralizing your mentorship programs helps clarify where and how your participants can engage.

So you essentially don't want to have important processes like matching and mentor availability.

Hidden within a spreadsheet, you want for your mentees to be able to know when their mentors are available, let them know what resources they have to access.

In terms of navigating these relationships and definitely developing that relationship management with tools that you can offer.

But while together definitely helps automate this.

You'll want to have check-ins and prompts for where drop-off might be likely.

Let's say you're approaching the holidays, you might want to make sure that after the holidays, you do have a nudge to get your participants to continue connecting with their matches.

So this takes us into the automation piece.

Which we have definitely covered in a few ways.

So we want to say that this is important to help create your engaging mentorship experiences because at the end of the day, mentorship It's really just one piece of the relationships that your participants are having with one another.

And so when it comes to the gaining of insights, we definitely recommend being proactive.

So monitoring things such as the not only number of sessions being created, but also the feedback from these sessions is always a great move.

So essentially, you don't have to wait until the end of a program to know if it is successful.

You can check in after each session that's had after each month and see how your participants are feeling.

And if needed, make changes even while the program is going to make sure that your program and experience is as positive as possible.

And in our first mentorship, in our first mentorship master class, We did cover reports that can definitely help you in how to kind of check in these processes, and we'll be actually sharing a link to these resources in a follow-up email after a session.

Another success story, Activision is definitely an exciting one.

So prior to becoming a together customer, division had to actually run their program manually.

So manually might include leveraging spreadsheets, kind of having to remember who might be a good match with someone else and starting an email thread with them.

And so having the friction that comes with a manual program, essentially not only did it increase a lot of time for the program admins, but it also didn't create an ideal experience for the participants because they again didn't have that structure.

And so when Activision Fast forward, got set up one together and relaunched their program on a global scale.

They're engaging.

Rate actually went from 3% to 46%, which is a huge jump and absolutely a result to the process and magic of building confidence and trust with your participants.

Great, and we have a quick video here that we can play to let you folks see an example right from this great customer on what that looked like on their end.

All right, we will be happy to send that out afterward as well.

So I'll get on that front.

But we do have another couple of customer examples coming up in this presentation and in this discussion.

So we'll be happy to cover that as well.

So to jump into the collection of insights, What we definitely want to cover are a few kinds of different tactics here.

So you want to, going into the collection of these insights, have a good growth mindset when it comes to running your program?

So collecting feedback is a core activity that helps you amid this process.

And it all starts off with the session feedback.

So during the program, you want to not only collect that session feedback, but also keep track of it.

To give you an idea, there might be a few cases where a mentor Mentee needs support or coaching on how to fulfill their role on their end.

You might have someone who registered as a mentor, who maybe isn't feeling as confident as a thought, And if they're sharing this feedback, then you can step in and support them at any time.

When it comes to the together piece, it is collected automatically, and each participant within the platform does get notifications to help ensure that they build out this feedback that you're able to keep track of.

And then we also kind of want to make sure that your folks are collecting program feedback.

So what we mean by this is, specifically feedback that helps you understand how to refine your program.

So this might kind of be focused on the specific materials that you're offering.

Maybe your intake questionnaire, let's say you didn't ask some questions that could have been of benefits.

That is with that piece covers.

And then..

When it comes to the drawing of insights and iteration, we definitely always recommend combining your feedback with reports.

And we also recommend creating a cadence of constantly reviewing this phase this feedback while the program is running.

And we've actually created a really great resource with specific survey questions that you can leverage to collect all of this feedback that will also be happy to share afterward.

All right.

One of our other success stories here is with a firm.

So this is an outstanding example.

Of an organization that leverages some of the feedback examples that we covered to really help evolve their program to better help need their participants needs.

On another together panel recently, Elizabeth, one of our wonderful affirm admins, spoke to the experience of how her and her team have collected their feedback around program design, specifically from each and every one of the participants within the programs.

And so after collecting these surveys from a post, these, excuse me, these areas of feedback from a post experience, uh, survey, it was definitely clear that the participants within the program wanted not only more casual, but also more communal mentorship opportunities.

So they realized that one-on-one maybe wasn't what was working as effectively as it could have.

And based on this feedback, they ended up implementing a group format of mentorship in addition to their traditional one-on-one matching.

And this had occurred, it has occurred, and is occurring to really exciting success.

So sometimes..

It's all a matter of perspective, kind of taking a look at the way in which relationships are happening, seeing how you can rejig things is also an exciting approach.

And one great example of what we saw from our great team at a firm.

All right.

Thanks, Mateo.

And for those of you who just joined, I'm Nathan, I'm co-founder and head of Product It Together, and I'm very excited today to share two new features for driving engagement.

First, badges and certificates, and then secondly, events.

I'm going to start by providing a quick overview of both of these before finally giving you a demo via screen share.

So let's start with badges and certificates.

Mentors and mentees invest significant time in their programs, and recognizing their efforts can be challenging.

Many organizations include mentor contributions in their performance reviews or personal development plans, but participants often lack quantitative goals or program guidelines.

To further enhance engagement, we're happy to announce today that admins can now effortlessly recognize participants in two ways, ensuring that everyone stays on track.

The first is with badges, where users are recognized for their participation across every program that you launch on together.

It can be your Evergreen programs, perhaps you have multiple cohort programs, or even for your colleague connect programs.

And then earned badges are going to be visible on your profile throughout the platform.

Secondly, with certificates, users are awarded these for completing a specific program based on the criteria that an admin sets while launching that program.

Tangible recognition like awards makes participants more likely to register and complete the program.

And it also allows admins to socialize the program's success and congratulate participants.

So we've already seen, for example, with some of our programs, so many people sharing their certificates and badges to LinkedIn and then more people finding out about programs in the company.

And so today we are launching with four available badges across all of our customers.

Those are super mentor, mentor, mentee, and connector.

The Super Mentor badge requires 40 completed sessions as a mentor.

And you can see the earn requirement for the others below their name.

As an admin, you'll be able to see the number of users who've earned each badge as well as the date that they earned them.

And more to come on that in the demo, both from the admin side and the end user side.

All right, let's talk about our second product today.

Events.

Events are a way to integrate all hands touch points into your mentorship program that build awareness, supplement learning, and support participants.

With events, you can focus on just hosting a great event rather than managing your audience and dealing with administration.

We built events because we saw that customers mentorship programs often have events like kickoffs, midpoint check-ins, and mentor training sessions.

And previously, admins had to come up with an agenda, manually export email lists from together to add to their external calendar and then try to maintain that invite list as new users joining the company.

This manual process just kind of made it challenging to ensure the right people get their invites and users could be missed.

Without these checkpoints with program sponsors and having these events, engagement and mentorship programs can drop off.

And so events and together solve this by, for example, having a midpoint check-in or even a graduation ceremony that everyone can look forward to.

So now users can see both their mentorship matches, and their events all in one place.

And on top of that, admins can set up events to invite users automatically as soon as they join a program, and we will show that in the demo as well.

All right.

So that was a quick high-level overview of the two features that we're building and launching.

And I would love to take you through a live demo and show how you can incorporate these today from both the admin side and the end user side.

So here is my screen, and I am looking at the admin view of all of my programs at my organization.

I'm going to start by heading over to users.

And ignoring the user table for a second, I'm going to go to badges.

And so badges will list the four different kinds of badges that can be earned today.

You'll see supermentor, mentor, mentee, and connector.

Now let's say I click into the mentor badge.

What that's going to do is give me a little bit more information about the badge, but also a table of all of my users that are eligible for this badge.

So anyone that has..

Ever registered as a mentor in any of my programs.

I can also see which users have earned a badge and the number of completed sessions they have as well as the date that they earned that badge.

Let's look at another badge, the connector badge, And here you'll see that there may be some people who are in progress on earning that badge.

A number of users have four out of 10 matches, and so you can keep track of that and see how users are progressing throughout all of your programs.

Okay, I'm going to go look at all my programs here.

And to talk about certificates for a second, I'm going to pick a program, say, mentorship, 2022, 2023.

As a reminder, certificates are different from badges in that they're specific to a given program.

And so if I go into content certificates, I'm going to see certificates that are related to this mentorship program.

Badges are earned across all of your programs, and for certificates, only the sessions in this program would count.

All right, let's look at this mentorship program completion certificate.

I'm going to click Edit, and this is available for any certificate that you launch across any of your programs.

Here you can see that the certificate preview is on the left-hand side, and you can actually edit this.

So maybe I'm going to call it certificate of completion instead.

I like that more.

And this certificate is for Addison.

Today, I'm going to be the user Addison.

You can even customize the branding a little bit, say I want more of an orange accent underneath the image.

And what's really important is you can change the requirement of that certificate.

So today, I have it set so that you need to complete at least six sessions in this program in order to earn this program.

You'll also notice in the text here that only sessions with feedback from at least one party in the pairing are counted towards progress.

That is to continue incentivizing your users to ensure that they're submitting feedback.

What's nice about certificates is they also come with an email preview, So here you can see that we're going to automatically notify users when they earn that certificate or badge.

And here you'll see there's going to be a preview of that certificate.

As well as the chance to view it in the app and also add it to LinkedIn.

And I'm really excited to share a little bit more about our LinkedIn capabilities over the next few minutes.

All right, so let's flip over to the end user side to see what it looks like for them when it comes to badges and certificates.

So here is my end user homepage.

I'm Addison today.

And below my to-does across a few of my programs, I'll actually see badge progress.

So here I can see that I am in progress for earning a connector badge because I've had one match so far out of the 10 required.

And also, I have 11 out of 40 sessions complete as a mentor, so I'm on my way to earning a super mentor badge.

I'm going to click on the connector badge, and this is going to take me to my profile page.

And the profile page is going to allow me to see all of my activity across all of my matches and all my programs.

So here you can see for under Addison and my activity, there's a little bit more about the matches and total hours and sessions I've completed across my programs and I can filter for that.

Below here is my achievements, and it looks like I've already earned a mentor badge for completing 10 sessions.

You can see here, you can copy the link.

You can download this as an image if you want to maybe include it in an email footer to show off your badge internally.

But what's really interesting is the ability to share to LinkedIn.

So we're super excited that the integration with LinkedIn essentially automatically starts a new post for you.

And there'll be a little bit of a blurb that you're welcome to customize.

And there'll also be a link to your unique badge.

This unique badge can be viewed by anyone.

You don't have to be part of together.

You don't even have to be part of this company.

Um, the same company, this is a publicly available link.

And just to show what that looks like, I can go ahead and open that, and you'll see a permanent link to the badge that I earned as for being a mentor as Addison.

Similarly, I've earned a certificate for this past program, the mentorship 2022, 2023 program.

And you can also see as well the same abilities to download that as an image, copy the link, or add to LinkedIn.

What's really exciting about certificates and LinkedIn is that you may know that LinkedIn resumes have a section for certificates and earned licenses.

And so what our ad to LinkedIn integration does is it actually starts the form for you of adding that certificate.

So you can Customize the name, but you'll also see that the credential URL is there.

That's the permanent link to my certificate.

It looks something like this, very similar to the badge permanent link.

And you can even contact our account management team to help you set the issuing organization automatically to be your organization if you don't want it to be together.

Great.

So that is a little bit more about what badges and certificates look like on the end user side.

And now I'd like to talk a little bit about events.

For events, I'm going to flip back to the admin side.

So here I am on the admin side.

And I'm administering all my programs, and I will notice a new navigation item called events.

So I'm going to go click on that.

And right away, events is going to list all of the events that are in my platform across my whole organization.

I can start just by looking at my upcoming events first.

So you can see here that I have a wrap-up and awards ceremony coming up for my spring cohort.

I have a midpoint check-in coming up for my diversity and ERG cohort.

And it looks like I've got a fairly large spring 2024 mentorship kickoff with almost 500 participants.

And so I'm going to go ahead and walk you through how events works with this one.

Here is my event overview page, which is going to essentially preview what this card looks like for my end users when they are going to sign up for this event and see it.

Every event has a banner, a title, description, and then it'll also have an organizer, which will typically be the program admin for that mentorship program or an L&D admin of some kind.

As well as a speaker.

You can invite multiple speakers.

We recommend for some events to maybe have a senior leader, really create some hype, and join as a speaker.

If I click the preview event page, I'll see more of the full screen page, including an event agenda.

And there are templates for different event agendas that I'll talk about in a second.

All right.

Next, let's go to the event settings.

Here, there's going to be some of the things that you'd expect.

You can set a title for the event.

What's really interesting is you can also associate an event with one of your mentoring programs on the platform.

And I'll talk about what that does in a second, but essentially gives you some handy benefits around inviting people in that program.

You can see the event organizer, and you can add additional speakers.

So searching through my directory, maybe I'll add Alexandra.

Finally, you can integrate your own video conferencing, such as Zoom.

We also do support Zoom webinar if you have a webinar license as well.

Typical, just regular Zoom meetings will usually have around 300 participants as a cap.

But we have had already customers launch with a thousand participants using more of a webinar license.

Okay, on audience, this is where a lot of the admin work that you may have considered in the past for running an event is going to be automated.

So here you can see invited participants.

I've got 500 people that are invited.

But what's really interesting is this section around adding attendees with an audience rule.

With this, I can set rules around who is automatically invited for this event.

And so here you can see that I'm automatically adding users in this program who are currently registered as mentees or mentors.

So that makes it super easy that anyone can join that's in the program and I don't have to manage any lists.

But it gets more powerful.

Let's say that my registration is still open, and this is an event that's upcoming.

If anyone else registers as a mentee or mentor and qualifies for this event under this rule, they will also automatically get this invite.

And so you can think about setting up your event before your program even launches.

And as people register for your program, they're automatically invited to any events that they qualify for.

Where this could be really powerful is I could switch this rule from people who are registered to perhaps people who have ever been matched as a mentor.

And here, I could create a support session for mentors, maybe as a midpoint check-in.

How are things going?

What are you as mentors seeing works well to support your mentees, et cetera?

Then you don't have to worry about who's been matched, keeping track of anything and who to invite.

You can just use anyone who's ever been matched as a mentor as a rule, and we will automatically invite those people to that event.

If the automatic rules aren't for you, then you can always add attendees manually, either from your own user table or by pasting email addresses.

And the last thing that I'll mention audiences is event access and visibility.

If you do audience access only, that means that you have to invite people for them to be able to see this event.

But you can also use events open to the entire organization as well.

And what that does is it means that anyone, even if they're not a registrant of your program, can join this event may be helpful for an info session, or we've even seen our customers run events that really have nothing to do with mentoring programs at all, like Lunch and Learns or Fireside chats with a C-suite member, etc.

All right.

So, of course, events are 100% calendar integrated.

So these RSVPs, which I can view either here or by clicking on RSVP status, are fully synced with your Google or Outlook calendar.

And so anyone who's attending can be filtered for, and you can really see this as a nice list and, you know, export and do a lot more than you can with just your calendar client.

As well as awaiting response, you can maybe select all these folks and send them an email or something like that to remind them.

It's just a lot easier to do than using your Outlook or Gmail.

Okay, events also come with emails that you'd expect and find very useful.

Of course, one, when someone is invited to an event, you'll be able to have a little email that goes out branded with your program banner and colors.

Giving you some more information and a link to view the event.

And then, of course, a reminder that goes out one hour before the session starts, which you can also customize.

So what can you really do with events?

Well, there's a lot you can do.

So going back to the events page, I'm going to go to templates.

And what you'll see is some suggestions of events.

We are learning from our customers more and more overtime of what kind of events they like launching.

But in particular, some of the ones that we've seen are how to use Together training.

That's an event that you can, you know, add as maybe a 30-minute overview of the software if it's your first time launching with Together and you could potentially ask your customer success team to help you with some of that.

You can launch an award ceremony towards the end of your program to highlight those badges and certificates that were earned.

And, you know, people knowing that is going to be part of the program will incentivize them to return.

Stay engaged and keep having their sessions, and then you can do the same with midpoint check-ins and program kickoffs.

And we'll give you an agenda anytime you use any of these templates.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is that some of our customers are using events outside of a mentoring program as more of a general learning resource for people in an all-hands way.

And so we are seeing career panels about maybe how to be more internally mobile, lunch and learns, roundtable discussions, and kind of the list goes on.

So maybe there's a real hot topic at the company, maybe, you know, AI is really a dominant discussion.

You can feel free to host your event through together and get all of the benefits that were previously described.

With our last few minutes, I'm just going to flip over to the end user side and just show you briefly what it looks like as an end user.

You'll see that there's a new tab in the navigation called events.

And here I will be able to see all of the events that I am eligible for, whether they're open events like this one, an overview of all mentorship programs at the organization.

Maybe you've got multiple mentorship programs, and you want people to attend this event to figure out which one is right for them.

So I can add that to calendar or if I have one that I've been explicitly invited to, I would just see that here without needing to add to calendar.

All right.

So that was it for the screen share.

And I'll just flip back to wrap things up here on the presentation.

So if you're looking back on everything today that we shared and thinking, wow, that's quite a lot of work to do manually, then I can assure you that using a mentorship program like together can help you get this done.

We manage your mentorship programs from end to end, giving you an incredible mentoring experience for your employees.

And it'll save you hours from matching participants, following up with people, and managing spreadsheets.

So you can instead spend that time on meaningful activities like promoting your program or supporting the participants.

Three things on together.

The first is that we've been the easiest to use mentorship software in the category for the last four years.

And that's based on the G2 rankings of software reviews.

And as we mentioned, you know, it's important to keep motivation to participate high.

And so together makes this very simple and clear for employees.

Together is secondly, the most customizable platform in the market.

All the emails, surveys, reminders, they're automated by together, and they're also fully customizable.

And you're able to completely white label for your own branding and colors for your organization.

Of course, we also offer tons of templates to help you get started right away and if you're worried about too much work.

And lastly, folks like Mateo and the rest of our support team are really just more of a partner to you as an admin than anything else.

You will get dedicated onboarding and training to ensure your programs are ready to launch.

And we offer strategy and design sessions personalized to you, like the one that we discussed a little bit today, to ensure that your engagement efforts are meeting best practices.

And with that, that's all we wanted to cap up with today.

So we'll open it up to Q&A.

And I think there are a few questions been submitted already.

Amazing.

So thank you everybody for that.

I know we've got a few minutes left.

Thank you for answering or asking your questions in the Q&A.

And yeah, we're going to kind of go through these one by one.

They seem like most of them are related to the product.

So Nathan, I imagine you'll be taking the lead.

On this one.

The first one we have is on, as from Jessica, and the question is, can any of the HR systems integrate with together platform?

Yeah, definitely.

We do integrate with pretty much every HR system that can be done natively, or it can be done..

With other methods like SFTP, which your IT admins will love?

So we have native integrations for UKG Pro, Bamboo, Workday, Success Factor's, DayFORCE, and others, ADP and others.

Definitely integrates.

The benefit of doing an HR integration is it means that your New hires will be reflected in the platform every single day.

Your terminations will be reflected, and everyone's information will be synced and up to date.

Amazing.

And then our next question comes from Terry, and this is about badges and certificates.

Can they be customized to have the organization's branding?

Yeah, so certificates will have both your organization's logo on them, and color accent and any wording that you want to change.

And as well, when you're sharing that certificate to your LinkedIn profile, you can change the issuing authority of that as a customer to be your organization.

So that certificate was issued by your company.

And for now, badges are all kind of standard across together platform.

So those four badges that I shared are those colors are basically across the platform.

Amazing.

And we have a question from Jessica about future availability.

So are the badges and event features only included on the paid tier plans?

Yeah, so events is only currently for our enterprise plan.

However, badges are on all our paid plans.

And so yes, you will need a paid plan to take advantage of most of these features.

And then our next one is from Kylie Mason.

Can we generate certificates for programs that have already concluded?

So can you do this retroactively?

That's a great question.

You should be able to manage certificates retroactively.

So we can have the..

Customer support team help you with that if you've already got a program, and you can go back and issue those.

So it shouldn't be an issue.

Okay.

Perfect.

And we'll take one last question.

I'll see something that we haven't already answered.

We got this one from Rita.

So can check-ins be conducted during this session, especially on one-on-one sessions?

Can check-ins be conducted during sessions, especially on one-on-one?

So is that..

Assuming it's referring to events, you're welcome to add like a check-in session for all of your participants in a one-on-one program and in an all-hands forum essentially see how things are going.

So yeah, that's definitely doable with events.

Amazing.

So I also see that we're at time here.

So I want to be respectful of your days.

So thank you everyone for joining us.

Like I mentioned before, the recording, the resources that we shared today will be sent out.

To everyone after the event has ended.

I just want to give a few tips on how to get started.

If you want to take action on some of this item, if you're a customer, and you've joined us here today, you can always connect with your customer success team or your account manager.

I know engagement can be a tricky topic.

You want tailored advice, your organization and your needs are a little unique.

We're happy to offer that.

So if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to them.

If you're in our audience and this is the first time that you've interacted with us, or you're not using our platform, either free version or not, please feel free to book a personalized demo.

Our teams of account executives and sales representatives are not just there to sell you a product.

They're actually experts in the field themselves too.

They regularly conduct strategy and design sessions.

And they're also a great sounding board for any ideas that you have about your mentorship program.

And they're happy to offer you solutions for things like taking too much time or improving the user experience of your platform.

If you'd like to book a demo, You can just click on this button right here, book a call, that will lead you to a demo booking page.

You can then get a quick 15-minute introduction.

You can ask some questions.

You can get to orient yourself around the situation as well too.

So again, thank you, everybody, for joining.

It was a really great session and looking forward to hearing any comments or questions you have afterward.

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