Title: Using Technology for Mentor´s Assessment and Mentor´s Support
Facilitator and room number: Joke Aerts, Saskia Bogaarts; 1.307
Documented by: Leonie Reekers
Number of participants: 21
Who are you and to which institution do you belong?
My name is Joke Aerts and I am a staff member of Spanish Social Mentoring Network. I am responsible of coordinating the Mentoring Project for Refugees in Catalonia.
Starting question/hypothesis:
Can technology be useful to monitor mentoring matches and measure big data at the same time? – The digital tool “Messagenes” provides valuable possibilities for monitoring matches and measuring project impact.
Sequence of content:
The two facilitators used a mix of powerpoint presentations, giving an inside into an online newsroom and group discussions. They started with a short presentation about the social mentoring frame (the app model that they are using to monitor relationships and extract big data). The M+ Frame is so far used by 15 programmes and by using it, they help to improve it and at the same time produce comparable big data. They showed an online newsroom, a social platform used by coordinators and mentors, where mentors can create posts about their recent activities and also fill out questionnaires online. The coordinators can monitor and for example use data cards with graphs showing how often they meet, what topics they are speaking about and what kind of activities they do. The session ended with questions from the audience concerning the use of the tool.
Main arguments presented by the facilitator:
They want to promote strategic alliances between the technology field and social field to work collaboratively to achieve social changes. The tool eases the monitoring work of coordinators, because they can stay updated in real time on their matches’ activities, progress and possible issues. The common framework makes the data comparable, but depending on the programme the tool can be adapted.
Main points of discussion:
- A participant asked, who is able to see the information in the newsroom. Saskia answered that, when it’s public, everyone can see it, but you can also make it private and only accessible for mentors, coordinators and mentees. She pointed out, to have it public is a good way to include teachers and parents.
- One question at the end was, how they deal with data privacy. Saskia replied that the data belongs to the producer and can be only used for research. It is stored on the Amazon Cloud Service on European servers.
- One question from the audience was, what are the costs to have such a newsroom. The answer was that it’s 35€ per month for a newsroom with up to 250 mentors, but it costs more if you want to have a special framework in the background.
- A participant asked the audience, who is already using a tool like this. Only one woman working at Kiron answered that they are doing online mentoring with online meetings and also filling in online questionnaires.
- Another person wanted to know, how they get the mentors to use the tool. Saskia explained, that they do trainings in small groups and there are separate follow-ups with explanations on the app.
Results of the Session:
Most questions were about the use of the app. The audience was very interested in the features of the app, but also asked about data security and the overall benefits. Some seemed to be planning to use a similar tool.
One thing that surprised the participants:
Some of the participants were amazed by the precise information the coordinators can extract from the online data, such as the graph showing which topics mentor and mentee are talking about the most.
Further remarks and references:
Joke Arts is the contact person for process and development related questions. Saskia Bogaarts is the expert for the app.
An example for a newsroom of a mentoring project