RX 24 - Mentor-Mentee Pairing Using Connections and Workflows - Heather Judd

Transcribed Content

We're going to talk about mentor mentee pairing using connections and workflows. And I'd like you to welcome Heather Judd, who's going share with us about that today. Go, Heather. Glad to be here, guys. I'm looking forward to sharing this tool with you that we've developed over the last year or so and how it's been a big game changer for our ministries. A little bit about Northpointe. Northpointe Ministries is a parent organization of eight Atlanta area churches, including Northpointe Community Church. Each week, more than 50,000 people attend our services, either in person or online, and our eight churches are a little bit different than many of the multi campus sites, is that our eight campuses are relatively close to each other. And in the last couple of years, we've pivoted our mentality to a rock first mentality, meaning that we're trying to use rock as our tool of choice before we use any custom solutions. So our churches, we have several different ministries that pair mentors and mentees together. For example, we have several care ministries. We have one that's called Restore, that's grief counseling. We have another one that's Renew, that's discipleship. Those are the two main ministries that I'm going be sharing with today. But those, they have these really manual and administratively heavy processes involving Google Sheets and all of these different just manual processes. And so we've taken connections and workflows to make it better and eliminate all of their clicks and jumping in and out of different systems. So our goal was to simplify and automate as many of the administrative tasks as possible to keep their data accurate and to allow them to more easily pair the mentors and mentees to ultimately allow them to have more time to mentor and love and shepherd people. So this is kind of how it starts. We have a mentor and then we have the mentee. So a mentor, those are volunteer leaders who apply for a mentor role using our application system. You'll get a quick glimpse of that, but we use connections and applications for that. The mentors are vetted and onboarded using our connections tool, and the mentors are trained to become this leader. And then we approve them, and then we place these mentors in a group. When we approve these leaders, that actually creates a new connection card, and I'll show you that in a minute. Now on the flip side, a mentee applies for one of these programs, filling out an application. Same thing, they're kind of vetted to make sure that they don't need maybe professional counseling. They're vetted, and then once their participation is confirmed, we will place them in a status called ready to pair. So this is an example. Renew is that discipleship mentoring program that we have, and you can see that we have several different statuses, but one of the statuses is Approved. Once a leader reaches that status of Approved, a new card is going to be generated on our mentor availability board, which I'll show you in a moment. As well, the participant or the mentee also goes through a similar process. They've submitted an application. It's determined that they are eligible for our program. And then when we're ready to pair them, we put them in this status of waiting to be paired. So when we were creating our mentor availability board, I'm gonna not make you read all of this, but these are several of the things that we had to determine before we set up our board. So first off is we created a new connection type for mentor availability, and we actually keep it in a different place than we keep our applications. This is not an application system for our mentor availability, so we wanted to keep it separate. So we created a connection opportunity for each of our mentor programs. You can see here, there's five here. The two, renew and restore, the two that I was mentioning. So we created boards for or connected opportunities for each one of those mentor types. We identified four statuses that apply to all of our mentors. One, they're available. So that means they're ready to take on a mentee. Currently paired, that means that we have actually paired them with a mentee. Not available, not paired, that means, hey, I need a break. Maybe I'm going on vacation, or it's the holidays, or, whew, that last person was challenging. Or for whatever reason, they're not ready to retire from the program, but they need a break from being paired for the time being. And then the last is a retired mentor. So those are the kind of the statuses that we determine that people move in and out of those four statuses for all of our programs. So this is a Connections board. It's going to be very familiar to many of you, but for some of our boards, we actually added connection request attributes. So for example, for our grief mentoring program, we would add the type of loss. And so you can see here that this individual had a parent, sibling, and extended family as a loss. And then also, this is where the mentee that is paired with them will ultimately show up as well. So we also had to determine what workflows we wanted to use for this tool. So we use add document to person. That's if anyone has any notes they want to upload and keep with the person on their rock profile. Pair with mentee, mentor available, not available, retire mentor, or send an individual email. So those are the workflows that we determined we wanted to have in place for these connection cards. So when we are ready to pair with a mentee, we select that workflow, pair with mentee, And then what happens is it looks to that board that has the mentees that were in the waiting to be paired column, and it shows you the people who are ready to be paired. Those initials afterwards are our campuses, so they obviously can see the gender, and they can see the campus, and they can decide who to pair with. So they'll select the mentee at that point. What also happens at this time is the mentee is placed into a group, into a rock group, and it shows that they're active in that group. What also happens is that mentor is marked as paired in their group. The mentee on their connection board moves statuses to currently paired, and the mentor is moved to currently paired on that mentor availability board. So a lot of different things that are happening that people were having to manually do beforehand on lots of different places. Now, when that relationship is over, the mentor and mentee have worked through their curriculum. By using the mentor available, that actually takes and ends the relationship. So what ends up happening is the mentor is then unpaired and goes back to that currently available status. The mentee and their group goes to inactive, and the mentor is unpaired. And the mentee on their board goes to a completed status, and that completed status is then on their connection card forever and ever that you can get to on their person profile. A lot of things going on here. Okay. So again, workflows are doing all the work. Kind of a similar idea for mentor not available. So when you select that workflow, it also serves to end that mentor mentee relationship. So all of the things I just mentioned happen, but that mentor instead goes to that not available, not paired status. Same thing with retire mentor. When that is selected, the mentor moves to retired and they are actually inactivated in that group. Again, all of these things are happening to the mentee and their group at the same time. Now, mentee drops. Sometimes our mentor mentees, it's just not a good fit or they determine maybe sometimes during the curriculum that maybe counseling is needed or they're going to resume at a different time, or maybe the mentee goes to the mentor. For whatever reason, sometimes these relationships don't work out. And so we determined we needed did not complete workflow. And so what ends up happening is it unpairs the mentor and the mentee, moves the mentor back to available, and then it changes the mentee to inactive. And then it moves them to the did not finish status. And so that status sticks with them on their card. So again, on their ROC profile, it shows them their participation in that group and that they did not finish. They can still access that card. They can see who the mentee was, I mean, mentor, and they can see any notes and activity that happened there. I love that that card stays there forever so you can kind of always see what's going on with people. That was quick. A lot of moving pieces. So at this point, what questions do you have?