In this section, we'll be going over some helpful tips to consider to bring your program to the next level. By leveraging the awesome tools and settings that are available, you can try new approaches to increase engagement and productivity, potentially making your program more accessible for participants. 

Try different Match Types 

Traditional mentorship through mentor-mentee matches is a common match type to start with. You can also try Colleague Connect, which allows participants to match with peers for non-hierarchical knowledge-sharing, networking, and more. You can also consider Group matching to encourage collective learning and growth. You can have multiple match types in one program.

To add a Match Type, select Matching followed by +Add Match Type or Matching Templates +Create. 

Try different Matching Settings

Additionally, if you are running a traditional mentorship program, you can turn the matching process up a notch by allowing mentors to request mentees! This is a great feature which lets the mentors in your program browse the directory and send matching requests to mentees who they think would be a great fit as their mentees. 

You can enable this setting by clicking on Program Settings followed by selecting Matching Process. Check the Mentors can request mentees box to enable this matching type: 

If you are running an admin-led program and finding the matching process to be too time-consuming or manual OR if you are running a user-led matching with 2-sided approval program, consider updating your matching to user-led with 1-sided approval or roulette to remove manual steps for you as the admin or for your users.

Tuning the Algorithm 

The matching algorithm plays a massive role in how your participants connect with each other, and over the course of your program, you may consider fine-tuning the algorithm to create the best possible environment for creating more meaningful connections. Ask yourself: Does your question serve to enrich a user's profile but not contribute to matching strengths or rules, or is it critical for users to match on? Not every question should be part of the algorithm or have the same match strength unless necessary.

For example:

• Soft Skills, Hard Skills, and Goals might be important to be included in the algorithm but only if specified by the participants.
• Department might be crucial for the right users to be matched so the match strength might be tagged as Very Important.
• Diversity might be somewhat important for matching but not mandatory.

Source

In most cases, the users in your program add the data for their profiles by answering the questionnaire you've created. However, if you support a data-rich HRIS integration, you can have your question answered via information already available in HRIS. Additionally, if you already have another program with overlaps in the type of questions and returning participants, you can choose to link your question field to a fill from another program's field. To learn more, you can refer to these articles: Organization-Wide Fields: Importing Data and Converting Questions and Reusing Questions From Another Program.

Visibility

When you are building your program's registration questions, it is important to consider what kind of data you are collecting and who it is visible to. There may be sensitive information about a participant collected through the questionnaire that you may consider making visible to admins only. 

Question Format and Response Options

The type of responses you allow your participants to choose can have an impact on how they match in the program. It is important to consider the context of the question you are asking and to make the response options as specific as possible to avoid any confusion. Additionally, you can also allow your participants to add custom responses, as this can help users provide the most accurate answer if a particular option is not available. 

Another point to consider is how you word your question. Questions should be stated in a clear and concise manner to avoid any misunderstanding and allow participants to choose the best and most accurate responses. Adding an optional description can also help, as it will provide additional context to what is being asked. 

Matching Logic

One of the key aspects that will determine whether users will be matched based on their responses is the matching rule. Making changes to this part of the algorithm can help streamline the matching process and make the matches more accurate in some cases. By default, the matching rule will be set to look for overlap in responses between users. 

You can update matching logic by going to Program Settings > Profiles & Algorithm, scrolling down to the question you want to update matching logic for, and clicking edit.

Matching Strength

Making changes to the priority of your question can affect the match recommendation your participants receive, and can potentially block some users from the matching process. You can make changes to this setting throughout the lifecycle of your program based on the feedback you may receive from users. 

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