Building out your matching process is one of the next important steps you must take in launching your Groups program. Once you have finished planning your registration phase, you can move on to setting up the matching process. To do so, first begin on your program home page:

Click Edit Matching Setup:

This will take you through each of the steps of deciding how to match your participants into groups. There are three key decisions you will need to make:

• Choosing your Matching Process
• Assessing Matching Readiness
• Creating Groups

To begin, click the blue Next button:

Your Matching Process: Admin-Led Matching

Administrators stage and create groups on behalf of both mentees and mentors. Once participants have been matched into a Group, they will receive an email announcing the other members in the Group along with some first steps to get started in the program.

Assessing Matching Readiness:

This section is dedicated to determining whether you're ready to start matching your participants based on your current settings and registrants. 

First, you will see a chart displaying some basic registration results, such as how many participants have registered as a Mentee and/or Mentor. You will also see some information letting you know the total amount of capacity your mentors have. In this example, I have 3 mentors, each with the capacity to facilitate a group of 3, totalling a capacity of 9 mentees:

If you scroll down on this page you will see some information that our algorithm uses to evaluate any risks when starting matching. Near the bottom, you will see a few recommended ways forward that you might want to consider before beginning to match participants.

Once you feel ready to turn on Matching, click the Next button to adjust any Matching Rules that you may want to tweak.

Adjusting Matching Rules:

This is the last step in setting up matching. Here you have another opportunity to apply any final changes to your matching criteria that our algorithm uses to match participants into groups. Keep in mind, that this can always be changed later if needed. 

Group Size: this rule is the only rule unique to Group programs. Here you can set the maximum amount of Mentees you would like in each group. Currently, the minimum amount of mentees in a group is 2, and the maximum is 100. 

To edit any of these rules, click on them. To add a new rule, click on the + Add Rule button under the respective type of rule you'd like to create.

Matching Restriction Rules are what we typically consider "hard" rules that must be met in order for a matching recommendation to be made by our algorithm. In other words, users must meet these requirement rules to be matched into a group. If they don’t meet these requirements with other users, they will not be allowed to be matched together. For example, you might want all members to be from the same timezone

Matching Recommendation Rules on the other hand are typically considered "soft" rules. These rules are not mandatory for users to be matched into a group, but they instead work to improve the strength of recommended groups to users. Be sure to prioritize what is most important for your program. For example, you might want a group to have similar interests, but it is not mandatory that they do. With these rules you can give each one a different level of priority; the higher the priority, the more influence the rule has when matching users in a group. 

Once you have adjusted each of your Matching Rules accordingly, be sure to click the blue Next button in the bottom right corner to move on to Adding Filter Titles.

Adding Filter Titles is identical to a Group program as it is a 1-on-1 program. Here you can help users pick the most relevant group by adding titles to the various filters that mentees can use to filter the list of groups by when looking for one to join. For example, one of my questions in my program is "What topics would you like to mentor others on", I could give this question a filter title of "Mentorship Topics" that a mentee could use to filter by when searching for a group. To do so, click on the question, then type in a title for it:

Once you're done adding a filter title, be sure to click the blue Save button. After providing titles for each of your filters, click on the Finish button in the bottom right corner. 

Now your matching process is set up! Your next step to launching your Groups program is to make & publish Groups.

Have more questions? Submit a request here and let us know how we can help!