10. Pairing Setup - Evergreen

Pairing Setup:

To begin setting up Pairing, click on the Start Pairing Setup button from your program home page:

There are four key steps to setting up your Pairing Process: 

1. Choosing your Process
2. Assessing Pairing Readiness
3. Reviewing your Pairing Algorithm
4. Customizing Pairing Emails

To begin, click the Next button to choose your pairing process.

Evergreen programs take advantage of the User-led pairing process. For User-led programs, you have two options:

• User-led with Approval: Users make requests from a list, sorted by best match, and indicate their preferred commitment length. The match must be approved by the person they request. Admins can still create new pairings at any time. For this program, I will use this process for demonstration.
• User-led: Users make a choice from a list, sorted by best match, and indicate their preferred commitment length. The pairing starts right away without approval. Admins can still create new pairings at any time.

Once you've decided how you would like to run your program, click the Next button.

Next, we have our Pairing Readiness Report. You can use this report to check whether or not you're ready to start your pairing process based on your 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 4 mentors, which contributes to a total capacity to mentor 6 different mentees - since some mentors indicated they can mentor more than one mentee. 

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 Pairing, click the Next button to adjust any Pairing Rules that you may want to tweak. Here you will see the same Pairing Algorithm that you set up during the Registration process. If you want to make any changes before turning on Pairing, here is where to do so:

Once you confirm that your Pairing Algorithm looks great, click Next to move on to adding Filter Titles for your users.

Adding Filter Titles allows you to help users find the most relevant match by adding a title to the various filters that users can use to sort through the list when looking for someone to pair with.

Two examples:

• One of my questions in my program is "What other professional disciplines are you interested in learning more about or prefer your mentor to be from?", I could give this question a filter title of "Disciplines of Interest" that your users could use to filter by
• Another question might be "What is your current role?" You could add a filter title such as "Role" so that users will know that they are filtering for the other person's role to narrow down their search.

To add a Filter Title, click on the question, then type in a title for it. Be sure to click the Save button after giving each question a Filter Title.

Once you've added Filter Titles for all of your questions, click the Next button in the bottom right corner to customize your pairing emails.

Customizing Pairing Emails works identically to how you learned how to customize registration emails earlier in this guide. In short, you will see each pairing-related email along with the cadences at which they will be sent. To review and edit any of these, click on them. Each email will have sections that can be edited when you hover over them with your mouse similar to our Registration emails. Be sure to click the blue Publish button in the bottom right corner if you do make any changes to an email:

Now that all of your pairing emails have been tailored to your liking, you can click the blue Next button in the bottom right of the screen to move on to Customizing Pairing Tasks.

Customizing and Reviewing your Pairing Tasks is the final step before you can launch pairing. Luckily, most of this will be a review from our section on Content - Tasks. The process here is identical to what you have learned already. You may edit and add any final tasks that you may need for your pairings here. For more information on this feature, check out our more in-depth guide on Tasks and Checklists. Once you have finalized your pairing tasks, click the Next button to move on to Launching Pairing!

You have officially completed your Pairing Setup, next up - Launching Pairing!

To continue building your Evergreen program, head over to Step 11 - Launch Pairing & Invite your Users to Pair

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