Mentorship programs are one of the best ways for universities to help students prepare for the outside world.
Students can approach the workplace not just with the right knowledge and skills, but fully equipped for what the world of work expects from them.
Mentorship schemes ensure that students learn from people who’ve been in a similar situation to them. They can then use their mentor’s experiences to better plan for their own future.
It also speeds up how quickly their knowledge and skills progress because they can watch out for the mistakes their mentor made and avoid the same pitfalls.
Setting up a mentorship program is only half the problem solved. There still needs to be a way for students to find the right mentor and easily book an appointment with them.
Having the right mentor is a crucial part of a student’s development, as the person could go on to play a huge role in their life. However, if it’s difficult for the student to meet with them they may give up and not meet with anyone at all.
Students then end up back where they would’ve been had a mentorship program not been offered to to them in the first place.
Emails are one option, but they often result in unnecessarily long chains. It takes an average of three emails to organize just one meeting. If a mentor has several mentees, this can easily add up to half an hour wasted just scheduling a handful of appointments.
"With Cronofy, we achieved the calendar integrations we thought would take months in just a few days. We’ve been able to expand into new product lines and delight our customers with seamless calendar flows. Cronofy has really helped accelerate our business."
Cronofy helps you to build real-time scheduling solutions into your mentorship scheduling program.
Once you’ve integrated the Cronofy Calendar API into your software, mentors can sync their calendars with it in just a couple of minutes.
Unlike if the calendar sync was built straight into the calendar service, Cronofy can be set up to only access users’ free/busy data, ensuring that private appointments stay private.
Mentor’s real-time availability can then be offered to students. As soon as a new appointment is added to their calendar, it’s removed from the list of options.
Mentors can also specify times when they’re available. This means that if they want to keep every Tuesday afternoon free, or only be available for meetings on a Tuesday afternoon, they can. When they’re available is completely customizable based on their personal preferences.
You could even allow students to search for mentors based on their availability. This ensures mentees can speak to someone as soon as possible without searching for hours only to find the person they want to meet is unavailable for the next six months.
To ensure that students don’t forget their appointment, they can also connect their calendar to your software. Appointments will then be added to their schedule automatically. Notifications can even be sent via their calendar to inform them when it’s time to leave.
If the meeting needs to be rescheduled, this can be done just as seamlessly. Everyone’s real-time availability is still factored in, avoiding double-bookings even if things change at the last minute.
Recurring and one-off meetings can be organized (or reorganized) in exactly the same way, making it a simple, seamless process for your users.
Booking a meeting is minimal effort with maximum gains.
Instead of building integrations with five different APIs – one for each of the main calendar services – you work with just one. It’s so quick to implement that by this time next week you could be offering real-time scheduling solutions to your users.
We do all the hard work for you – all you have to do is build the software and make your customers happy. All the upkeep and ongoing maintenance is done by us. Our API even works with older versions of calendar services, like Microsoft Exchange dating all the way back to 2007.
Integrating with so many different calendar services – and so many versions of each calendar service – means you can maximize the number of people who can use your mentorship software.
Developers can use our sandbox for free with up to twenty users.
And, because we know you’ll love Cronofy when you add it to your software, it’s free until you’re ready to go live.
That means you don’t have to pay to build your new feature – you only pay when your customers start to feel the benefits of real-time calendar sync.
Our pricing is based on how many users take advantage of calendar sync. That means if fewer students and mentors are taking advantage of mentorship programs over the summer, you only pay for the customers using your service.
Features such as real-time availability and automatic calendar connectivityare only available on certain plans.
To find out more about which of our pricing plans suits your needs, visit our pricing page or contact us using the form below for more information.
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