Your program and your participants’ needs are special - and you have the ability to tailor your program’s matching survey to meet those needs. While Mentor Collective’s standard matching survey design and participant-focused philosophy is based on research about which criteria are essential to making good matches, Mentor Collective also offers a comprehensive suite of matching survey customizations to best fit your program.
How and When To Request Changes
Please consult with your Mentor Collective representative on what matching surveys customization may be beneficial for your specific program and what (if any) impact it may have on the matching process.
Matching survey customization requests must be made at least 10 business days before recruitment begins. Once recruitment begins, no further changes can be made.
Available Customizations
Mentor Collective offers a comprehensive suite of matching survey customizations to best fit your program. Please review the list of available customizations below.
Recommended Use
If a question is entirely irrelevant to your program’s participants or design.
Example
Your program requires all mentorships to meet every other week.
You may wish to remove the question: “How often would you like to be in touch with your mentor?” due to irrelevance or potential confusion.
Technical Notes
If you remove a standard question from the matching survey, this data will appear empty in both the Partner Dashboard and Participant Dashboard. You will not be able to conduct any analysis with this data, and participants will not be able to access this information about their counterpart.
Remove Response Option(s) from a Standard Question
Recommended Use
If a response option is entirely irrelevant to your program’s participants or design.
Example
Your program may specifically support only student athletes.
You may wish to remove “Student athlete” from the “Tell us about yourself” question due to redundancy.
Recommended Use
If there are program or institution-specific response options missing from our standard options.
Example
You may wish to provide your institution’s specific majors to the question “What was or is your primary college major or academic focus?”.
This will be much more relevant and specific than our standard options.
Note: This is the most common matching survey customization!
Technical Notes
The Gender and Race questions are limited to these options.
*This customization is available for most questions, except for:
- What is one goal you would like your mentor to help with in this mentorship?
- What’s your most important goal for this mentorship?
- How often would you like to be in touch with your mentor?
- Out of the preferences you just shared, which is most important to you?
- Would you be open to connecting with your mentee over any of these social media platforms?
Recommended Use
If there is a specific attribute or question missing that you believe will lead to stronger matches for your participants.
Example
You want all mentees in the Honors College to be matched with a mentor in the Honors College.
You may wish to add a custom question: “Are you a member of the Honors College?”.
Technical Notes
Custom questions can either be:
- Single Select
- Multi Select
- Free Response*
*Please note that free response questions can’t easily be taken into account when matching. Instead, please consider reconfiguring questions into single or multi select format, whenever possible:
- ❌ "What extracurriculars do you participate in?" …
- ✅ "Select any of the following extracurriculars you participate in…
Recommended Use
If your institution does not use "major" to describe a participant's primary academic focus.
If you would like to adjust the language used in the standard gender or race/ethnicity question(s).
Example
Your program provides mentorship for graduate students and the term “major” does not accurately reflect participants' experience at your institution.
Rather than ask: “What was or is your primary college major or academic focus?” - you may wish to adjust the question to: “What academic program are or were you enrolled in?”.
Customizations Not Currently Supported
Due to technical constraints, there are some changes to matching surveys that are not supported. Please review the list of customizations not offered below.
If you believe that requiring (or not requiring) any standard question is negatively impacting participant experience, please share this feedback with your Mentor Collective representative.
Changing the question text changes the meaning of the question, making it impossible to compare data across programs and institutions. Instead, please consider adding a custom question.
*Exception: You may customize the standard Major, Gender, and Race question text. See above.
Mentor Collective's platform does not support conditional logic in matching surveys due to the technical complexities that it brings to matching. Instead, please consider reconfiguring questions of this type.
Example
❌ Did you graduate from a four-year university?"
-
Yes
-
Did you graduate from any of these institutions?
- X
- Y
- Z
-
Did you graduate from any of these institutions?
- No
✅ Did you graduate from any of these institutions?
- X
- Y
- Z
- I graduated from a different four-year university
- I did not graduate from a four-year university
Mentor Collective’s matching algorithm compares responses to each question, to find commonalities. If a question's answer options are different for mentors and mentees, the algorithm won't be able to identify when responses overlap.
What about custom questions?
You can have different question prompts for mentors and mentees, but the response options must be the same.FAQ
❓What are “standard” questions?
- Mentor Collective’s standard matching surveys vary by program design, each with its own set of standard matching questions. Learn more here!
❓What are response options?
- Response options are the answer choices that participants can select from for each question single or multiple select question.
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