10. Pairing Setup - Cohort

Pairing Setup:

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

There are five 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
5. Reviewing your Pairing Tasks (optional if you followed step 7 in this guide)

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

In Cohort Programs, you have three methods of pairing your users:

1. Admin-led: Administrators will create pairings on behalf of users. Top matches are suggested by the platform to help you. As an admin, you can stage, review, and release pairings with the assistance of the pairing algorithm. 

With admin-led programs, you have one main setting that you can choose to configure:

• Automatically End Pairings: with this setting, you may choose if and how pairings will automatically end. You have the option of pairings ending either on a specific date or after users have been paired for a specific amount of time. If you do not want pairings to automatically end, leave this set to Never. 

2. User-led with Approval: Users make a shortlist of preferred matches from a list, sorted by best match. The match must be approved by the person they request. Admins can still create new pairings at any time.

Here is what the User Approval process looks like from the user view:

3. User-led (without approval): Users make a choice from a list, sorted by best match. The pairing starts right away without approval. Admins can still create new pairings at any time.

Here is what the User-led process looks like from the user view:

In Cohort programs you also have a couple of additional advanced options depending on the pairing process you choose:

• New Mentor Requests (User-led processes only): you may choose whether or not a user requires admin approval to change their mentor.
• Automatically End Pairings: with this setting, you may choose if and how pairings will automatically end. You have the option of pairings ending either on a specific date or after users have been paired for a specific amount of time. If you do not want pairings to automatically end, leave this set to Never.

Once you have these options nailed down, click the blue Next button to head onto 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 5 mentors, which contributes to a total capacity to mentor 15 different mentees (i.e. each mentor has said they can take 3 mentees on average).

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 (only applicable User-led programs). If you're running an Admin-led program, skip to Customizing Pairing Emails. 

Filter Titles (User-led Only):

Adding Filter Titles allows you to help mentees pick the most relevant mentor by adding a title to the various filters that mentees can use to sort through the list of mentors when looking for one to pair with.

Two examples:

• If 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 a mentee could use to filter by when searching for a mentor.
• Another question might be "What is your current role?" You could add a filter title such as "Role" so that mentees will know that they are filtering for the mentor'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:

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.

Note: If you're running an Admin-led program, you will only see the Mentorship Assignment email in this section, which is sent out to inform users they have been paired.

To review and edit any of these emails, 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 Cohort program, head over to Step 11 - Launch Pairing & Invite Users to Pair.

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