Our technology
Online mentoring has a positive impact on young people.
Our platform and app work in the same way as messaging apps young people use every day. This means they can access an inspiring mentor without leaving the house. They could live in central London or the Outer Hebrides; they’d have the same access to opportunities, without needing to spend any money.
Our technology is designed to help them get the most out of mentoring by keeping them engaged throughout their programme.
Our platform is flexible to ensure it meets the needs of the young people we work with. We offer a suite of features and match them to what works best for the projects we run.
Secure messaging
Messaging on our app and platform is moderated by our trained in-house team. To safeguard young people, links, attachments and some words automatically stop the message being received until it’s checked by a human.
Our partners have complete access to the conversations happening on our platform, and can customise the stop words and tailor the moderation settings to ensure it works for the young people on the programme.
Redacted moderation
This is an evolution of our message moderation feature and allows messages to be received in real time, but with part (or all) of the message redacted, while the full message is checked by our moderators. The redaction moderation settings can be adjusted to make sure they’re effective.
Reminders and notifications
It’s easy to read a message while you’re doing something else and forget about it completely. Our app sends notifications encouraging mentees and mentors to reply to messages, and sends mentors handy guides and topic suggestions to keep the conversations flowing.
Recognising achievement
This is how we encourage young people to make the most of mentoring and engage with their mentor in the best way. The app recognises users for achieving milestones, for example sending more messages or reading articles. Our platform also works as a virtual guide to keep them communicating. It’s like language learning apps keeping you learning every day or your smart watch keeping you active.
Pick your own mentor
We know engagement is better when young people can choose who they want to mentor them. Our bespoke algorithm gives them a selection of profiles to choose from based on education, career history, background and interests to ensure they have the perfect match.
Partners tell us this process saves them time and is more effective than matching mentees and mentors themselves, but we offer the option to manually match people too.
Quizzes
We offer online interactive learning quizzes on topics like ‘writing a CV’ to act as a conversation starter for mentees and mentors and help young people build skills.
Communities
Mentees have the opportunity to ask questions in a forum so that the whole cohort can see the responses. It gives young people the chance to talk to peers, to see their questions, listen to their experiences and interact with them in a safe and monitored space.
Ask the expert
This is another way for young people to get support and advice from someone other than their 1:1 mentor. Mentees submit their questions, and we collect them for the expert to answer, showing mentees responses to questions they might not have thought to ask. Mentors and project leads can also submit questions.
