Don’t take it on faith that your mentor program is working in achieving its objectives. However, that is exactly what many organizations do. They consider a program successful if people keep participating in it year after year. Even if they wanted to determine the effectiveness of their program, many companies don’t know how to evaluate if a mentoring program is delivering results.
Our program evaluation services include both formative and summative evaluation of a client mentoring initiative. Formative evaluation examines whether the participants are implementing the program as it was designed, which can provide valuable feedback on the design and structure of a program. Clients can use their formative evaluation to make adjustments to a program and update their program charter (see Program Design Services). The summative evaluation will capture what results a program is achieving based on feedback from both mentors and protégés. Since we have done the surveys with dozens of clients, we have benchmark data including NPS (net promoter scores) so clients can understand how their program is operating compared to other organizations. Our formative and summative evaluation blend together both quantitative and qualitative metrics that are presented in a comprehensive report with recommendations on how a program can be improved.