10 a. Create & Publish Groups

Create & Publish Groups:

The next step in launching a successful Group Program is creating the groups themselves. Depending on your matching process, the way you complete this will look slightly different for each method. We will outline both methods here:

1. Mentee-Led Matching:

Let's first start with Mentee Led matching. First, from your Matching page, click on the View All Participants button under the Matching Funnel:

From here, you can click on the Unmatched Mentors tab:

It is important to first Stage Groups with mentors before mentees can choose their group. To stage your mentors into a group, you have two options:

Note: Mentors are typically known as facilitators for their groups. Check out our article here on what a Facilitator/Co-Facilitator is!

     1. Automatically sorting facilitators

Automatically sorting mentors into groups allows you to take advantage of our algorithm and the data you collected from mentors during their registration. To do so, click on the blue Create Staged Groups button:

There are two methods that you can use to automatically sort your mentors. 

• Pairing mentors together as co-facilitators based on a specific question from the questionnaire

Using this method you can select a question that you think might be important to match your mentors together on. For example, in my program, I might want to match mentors together to co-facilitate a group based on the topic they would like to mentor others on. I would then select this question from the dropdown and click the Create Groups button:

• Automatically assigning each mentor to their own individual group

Using this method will place each mentor into their own, newly staged group as an individual facilitator. To do this, click on this option and click the Create Groups button. Keep in mind that if you would like to add more mentors to this group later on you still can. 

     2. Manually assigning facilitators

To begin, we must create a new group, you can do so by clicking the + Create Group button in Staged Groups. This would allow you to add mentees or mentors to this newly created group later on from the Unmatched Mentees/Unmatched Mentors tab:

After giving this group a name, be sure to click the Create Group button. This will move the group to the Staged Groups tab that you can find along the left-hand side:

To manually assign mentors to facilitate the group(s) we've created instead of using our automatic sorting, head back to the Unmatched Mentors tab:

To assign a mentor to a group you must click on the Add to Group button under the Action column beside their name in the table:

Note: if you have mentors who are registered as both a mentor and a mentee as I do here, you must choose the Add to Group as Mentor option after clicking the Add to Group button:

From this page, select a group from the list of Available Groups on the left-hand side, followed by clicking the Add to Group as a Mentor button: 

Now that I have all of my mentors added to their own groups, you can see them here within the Staged Groups tab along with some other information about the group such as how many mentors/mentees are currently in it.

Curious to see how matching looks from the mentee's end? Check out our article on How to Pair as a Mentee in Group Programs.

Once a mentee has submitted their group preference you will be able to see this updated under your Staged Groups tab. 

Now you're ready to move on to Publishing your groups. Scroll down to our Publishing section in this article to learn how!

Note: you can publish these groups at any time. If you do not want to wait for all your mentees to submit their preferences you can keep Matching turned on and still publish groups for those who are ready to begin the program.

2. Admin Led Matching:

With Admin Led Matching, you must stage and create all of the groups on behalf of the users, as opposed to mentees selecting their own groups. To begin, click on the Matching section followed by Staged Groups under the Matching Funnel.

Here you will want to begin by Creating Groups to add your mentors/facilitators and mentees into. Click + Create Group:

Enter a name for the group and click the Create Group button. Do this for as many groups as you might want to create, in my case, I will be creating 3 groups here.

After creating each group, you will be taken to the Edit Groups prompt. Here you can add any mentee(s) and mentor(s) to the group that you would like. To do so, click either the Add Mentee or Add Mentor button near the top right:

Choose from the list which users you would like to add to the group by clicking on their names. After clicking on each user's name, click the Confirm Action button.

Note: adding these users to a Staged Group will not send any emails out yet.

Once you have added all of your mentees and mentors to each group, you can now Publish the groups to begin the program. 

Publishing Groups:

To publish a group and provide access to its members, you need to click the Publish All button which would publish all of your staged groups in the table. Alternatively, if you would like to publish groups one at a time, you may click the Publish button within the Action column next to each group name. If you would like to delete the group and re-stage it, you can do so by clicking the Discard button in this column as well.

Doing so will bring up this prompt confirming that you would like to publish the Group(s):

Once you publish these groups, each group participant will receive an email that looks something like this: 

Your Groups are now officially Active! To manage or edit your Groups once they have been published, head over to the Active Groups tab here and click the Edit Group button next to the group you'd like to make any changes to:

Program Maintenance:

The last step in the process of launching a successful Group Program is to continuously monitor how groups are doing. To do so, you can check in on the Active Groups  section:

You may also end active groups at any time by clicking on the 3 dots beside the group at the end of the table, and clicking End Group. If you ever need to view the data in this table in another program, try leveraging our Export feature where you can download a full list of your active pairings. 

Lastly, I would also highly recommend you check out our Monitor Health section once you have launched the groups. Here you will be able to see a number of important things, such as the number of sessions completed, the number of sessions upcoming and email delivery analytics:

Congratulations! You have officially finished building and launching your Group program.

Now it's time to let your program run! If you have any questions throughout this process or during your program please do not hesitate to reach out to your CSM or submit a request to us here!