Innovative online mentorship platform PeopleGrove helps universities, communities, and companies build great mentorship programs.

When you are a student it can be daunting to make the jump into a full-time job, or to know for certain which career path best suits you and how to successfully get there. PeopleGrove can be used to put students in contact with inspirational career coaches and mentors who can give them insight and advice.

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Other use cases can include building a network of alumni, launching a job board or setting up corporate training programs.

The platform’s interface allows students to filter mentors based on several criteria like their area of expertise. Mentors can also indicate if they have time to take on more students or are only available for a one-off conversation.

The Challenge

Mentorship programs are amazing but they rely on knowing the availability of people with busy lives and schedules.

PeopleGrove has built a sleek interface that allows users to find the mentors they want to contact, indicate which type of advice they are looking for – from CV reviews to more personal conversations – and what is their preferred way of communicating.

One challenge they needed to solve was offering their users a simple booking process to avoid getting in a situation where every mentoring session would involve several back and forth emails just to find a time that works for both participants.

The Solution

The team at PeopleGrove identified the need to connect the calendars of their users with their platform to push events to calendars when mentorship sessions are booked.

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They thought about building an integration with Google Calendar but that would have only covered about 70% of their users. Many companies or universities use other services like Outlook. They needed a Calendar API that would help them connect to all calendar services which is what led them to choose Cronofy to build their calendar sync features.

PeopleGrove has created a seamless availability solution by leveraging the Cronofy API to build an even better booking flow. Instead of simply proposing a time and date to their mentors, students can access the real-time availability of these mentors, see which days are opened in their calendars and then select a time slot. The invitation will immediately be sent to the mentor’s calendar. This automated and immediate process replaces the usual exchanges of emails — 3 on average — and the mentors don’t have to juggle with answering several invitations.

It also helps avoid double-bookings! If the meeting needs to be rescheduled the platform also offers an easy messaging tool.

You can see exactly how the booking flow looks in the video below:

This a great example of how calendar integration can help make an already fantastic product more appealing. And it only took a week for the developers at PeopleGrove to build this real-time booking process.

Build real-time Calendar sync into your booking flows and improve the user experience

If you want to easily connect to the calendars of your users to build great scheduling features then give the Cronofy Calendar API a go.

If you are a developer, sign up for free and start building straight away.

If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about the Cronofy API and its features, please get in touch via the form below.