Mentoring that does not quietly burn out your best volunteers
Alumni volunteer to mentor, say how many people they can take, and stop being offered once they are full. Students see who is available. You keep a programme instead of a pile of forwarded emails.
Mentors are verified alumni from your own directory, not strangers who found a signup form.
Four things a mentoring programme needs from software
Everything else in mentoring is human. These four are the parts that genuinely benefit from being in a system.
A limit on how much anyone is asked to give
Each mentor sets how many mentees they will take. When they are full they stop appearing as available, so the enthusiastic alumnus who answered first does not end up with eleven students and a quiet resentment of your association. This single number is the difference between a programme that runs for years and one that runs for one term.
Mentors who are actually your alumni
Mentors come out of the verified member pool, so somebody on your side has already checked that this person is who they claim to be. When you are putting a nineteen year old in touch with an adult, that check is not a formality.
How verification worksFindable by what students care about
Students are looking for a profession, an employer or a city, and those are already fields on every alumni profile. A student who wants to know what architecture is really like can find the three architects among your alumni without you playing switchboard.
A record of who was matched with whom
Pairings live in the admin panel rather than in one member of staff's memory. When that person leaves, the programme survives them, which is more than can be said for most volunteer schemes.
What to have ready, and what to expect
You need first
- Around 20 verified alumni willing to mentor
- A named coordinator with real hours
- A clear ask: three conversations, not a year
- A safeguarding position you can defend
- Somewhere for students to start from
The software handles
- Mentor capacity and availability
- Profiles with profession, employer and city
- Requests and pairings in one place
- Mentors editing their own details
- Unlimited mentors and mentees
Stays human
- Deciding who is a good match
- Chasing a pair that went quiet
- Safeguarding checks and policy
- The first introduction email
- Knowing when to close a pairing
A mentoring cohort, from launch to the awkward middle
The failure mode of alumni mentoring is not bad matching. It is silence in week five. Here is how the programme usually goes, and where the software helps.
Recruiting mentors is a directory job
You already know who to ask, because your directory holds profession and employer. Write to the alumni who work in the fields your students keep asking about, rather than sending a general call for volunteers that produces forty offers and no lawyers. Ask for something small and specific: three conversations over a term.
Capacity is the decision the software makes for you
When a mentor sets their limit at two, AlumDeck enforces it without you having to be the person who says no. That matters, because saying no to a keen volunteer is the task alumni officers avoid most, and avoiding it is exactly how three people end up carrying an entire programme.
Matching, then the introduction
- A student requests a mentor, or you assign one from the available pool.
- You read both sides and confirm the pairing, which is a judgement call the software should not be making.
- You write one introduction email that gives them a first task, such as a twenty minute call in the next fortnight.
- You check in at week five, because that is when a pair either has a rhythm or has gone silent.
Closing a cohort properly
End the cohort formally, thank the mentors publicly in your newsletter, and invite them back next term with their capacity reset. Mentors who are thanked in public volunteer again. Mentors who are quietly rolled into a second year without being asked tend not to.
Mentoring questions
Do students need to be alumni to take part?
No. Current students are members of your site too, so they can be registered and approved without being leavers. Your approval queue is where you decide who is who.
Some institutions run the whole thing among alumni instead, pairing recent leavers with people fifteen years ahead of them. That works the same way.
Is there a limit on mentors or matches?
None. Members, mentors, mentees, admins and pairings are all unlimited, because AlumDeck is charged once per installation rather than per user.
Twenty mentors and two thousand mentors cost the same. See the pricing page.
How do we handle safeguarding?
That is your policy, not a software setting, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling. What AlumDeck gives you is a verified member pool, a record of every pairing, and admin visibility over the whole programme.
Most schools pair those with a written code of conduct that mentors accept before they start.
Mentoring is included, not an upgrade
The mentoring module ships with the directory, verification, events, giving and news in the same $49 one-time licence, on your own server.
Running a programme already and wondering if this fits? Email hello@alumdeck.com.