Customize Mentoring Trainings to Reflect Your Program

March 27, 2024, Durham, NC – When offering training to mentors, mentees, and parents/caregivers of mentees involved your mentoring program, you likely want to be sure that the trainings you offer not only provide essential information participants need for a successful mentoring relationship but also reflect your program’s specific mission, policies, practices, and branding. Mentoring Central, a division of iRT, offers options to customize any of our mentoring training courses, so you can elevate your program participants’ training experiences and achieve your program’s goals.

Mentoring Central’s team of mentoring subject matter experts, highly-skilled web applications developers, and talented multimedia and instructional designers have partnered with mentoring programs to customize training course design and content for optimal training experiences. For example, Girls Inc., a network of local girls’ leadership organizations across the U.S. and Canada, customized Mentoring Central’s Building the Foundation course so their affiliates are able to provide a welcoming training experience to their mentors and train their volunteers on Girls Inc.’s values and goals.

“Girls Inc. aims to build a new generation of leaders by supporting girls to be healthy, educated and independent through mentorship, a pro-girl environment, and proven programs,” says Dawn Wiley, Senior Learning Manager for Girls Inc. “Customizing our mentor training with Mentoring Central allows us to share and inspire our mentors with that mission before they even meet their mentee.”

Customizable Website Login Page

Mentoring programs using any of Mentoring Central’s training courses can create a custom website address (URL) that features their mentoring program’s name, so their trainees can easily remember how to access their online training and resources. For example, Girls Inc. customized their training URL to be girlsinc.mentoringcentral.net. A custom website address also helps visitors feel secure knowing that they are visiting a legitimate and recognizable website that is associated with your program.

In addition, your program can select a photo to display on your course login page that welcomes trainees to your website. A friendly and customized image highlights the professionalism of your organization and may help your trainees begin their training with a sense of belonging or trust in your program. Below, you can see an example of Girls Inc.’s customized login page which includes a welcoming image of Girls Inc. mentees that trainees see before logging into their training website.

Your mentoring program’s logo can be featured prominently at the top, left-hand corner of the login page, so participants know they are in the right place to access their online training and resources. Your organizations branded colors can also be incorporated into the design of your login page for a cohesive design.

You can purchase a custom website login by visiting https://admin.mentoringcentral.net/mgmt/orders/.

Customizable Training Handouts and Tip Sheets

Many training courses offered by Mentoring Central include tip sheets and handouts that trainees can download and/or print to keep after their training to remind them of important information they learned online. You can take your customization of Mentoring Central training to the next level by branding the tip sheets and handouts that are included in each course. The design of handouts and tip sheets can be customized with your organization’s branded colors and/or logo to help trainees identify the information and trust that it is information they need to know to be an effective participant in your program.

For example, Girls Inc. partnered with Mentoring Central to design customized tip sheets for trainees as well as a customized User Guide that Girls Inc. program staff can reference to learn to navigate the Mentoring Central Administrative Dashboard and utilize administrative features.

Course Customization

The ultimate level of mentoring training customization is tailoring the content of a Mentoring Central course for your unique mentoring program. If your mentoring program serves a specific population of youth, such as girls or children in foster care, you likely want the language, examples, and animations in your training to reflect that population. In addition, if your mentoring program has unique established procedures or policies that your volunteers must abide by during program participation, it is important to explain these procedures and policies in training. By customizing the content of your Mentoring Central training course, such as customizing course lessons, videos, or animations, your program can achieve these goals. Our mentoring and online learning subject matter experts will work closely with your program to make sure your custom course is of the highest quality, backed by research, and engaging to your participants.

For example, Girls Inc. partnered with Mentoring Central to create a custom introduction video to include in their mentors’ training that welcomes trainees to the course and highlights the importance of receiving mentor training. This video may create a sense of belonging for Girls Inc. mentors and help mentors understand the importance of engaging in their training experience to help fulfill Girls Inc.’s missions.

In addition, Mentoring Central revised the information, activities, and animations in the Building the Foundation course to include only examples of female mentors and mentees because Girls Inc. mentoring programs consist of only female mentees and mentors.

Mentoring Central also created a course lesson specially for Girls Inc. that provides an overview of their “Girls’ Bill of Rights.” More specifically, the customized lesson was crafted specifically to teach Girls Inc. mentors actionable strategies to help their mentees resist gender stereotypes, express themselves, take pride in success, appreciate their bodies, have confidence in themselves, and prepare for interesting work. In these ways, Mentoring Central was able to create a custom course that is unique to the population that Girls Inc. serves.

If you’re ready to start customizing your Mentoring Central courses for an enhanced training experience, contact us by email at mentoringcentral@irtinc.us to discuss your customization needs.