07 Mar 22 The Use Of Forums In Mentoring

Enabling Mentees to Share Ideas, Embrace Challenges and Teach Each Other using Forums in Mentoring Software

Learning from one another, collaborating and working together through challenges is an important skill and element for university students and charity mentees to learn. Feeling supported and knowing that you can discuss topics with others who face similar challenges, can boost mental well-being and allow an individual to feel supported. Creating a space for doing this that is safeguarded, secure, and measured can be a challenge for many mentoring schemes. sfG MentorNet software however, provides a platform to foster such activity and discussion within a secure environment.

Creation of Mentoring Forums

Within the sfG MentorNet system, a ‘Forum’ can be started by Administrators, or the onus can be on the mentors and mentees to start discussions.

Those who choose to utilise the forums feature within our mentoring platform can rely on topics to be continually moving and not limited by time or too many responses.

What’s more, there are different levels to each forum, so there can be the main topic – accommodation for example, and then linked to this main topic can be a number of sub-topics or ‘threads’ that relate to accommodation further. From these threads, there can be a further third-level forum, in the form of topics.

Importantly, security can be set up for forums – this can allow topics to only be available to certain mentors or mentees, providing privacy and safety.

Users can add an image to their topic, a title, and a description.  ‘Feature’ threads can be set by administrators – these would usually be determined by either importance or popularity. Forums are all about communication and work as an additional way to start conversations and increase mentor programme engagement.  As with many other elements within sfG MentorNet software, the availability of the Forums area can be switched on or off, depending on your preference.

Customisation and Selecting Mentoring Topics

When considering ideas for an engaging Forum, one example could be Administrators setting up a forum topic for International Students. This would clearly be a discussion area where students from other countries can go to find out more about things such as the local area, the university, and culture.

Within this ‘International Students’ forum topic there could then be threads for things such as ‘Fees and funding’, ‘English language support’ and information relating to working while studying in the UK.

If an international student wanted to find out more about Fees and funding, there could be other sub-threads for this, such as where to find out more about funding, how long funding can take, and details regarding the funding processes.

This is just one example of how a forum can be set up, but the structure can be similar for other important matters and events.

What kinds of topics would your mentees benefit from hearing more about? It’s worth thinking about and then putting those into practice within your mentoring system.

If you want to learn more about sfG MentorNet’s Forum provision, you can contact the team directly.