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Managing Cohorts

How to organize members into cohorts for structured programs

Open-ended mentoring programs often lose momentum. Without a clear timeline, participants deprioritize meetings and goals drift. Cohorts solve this by creating shared deadlines, peer accountability, and a sense of collective progress. Programs that use cohorts consistently see higher completion rates and stronger engagement than those that leave mentoring open-ended. The Cohorts page lets you group members into structured program cycles with defined start and end dates.

Cohorts list showing completed and active cohorts with date ranges and match counts
Cohorts list showing completed and active cohorts with date ranges and match counts

What is a Cohort?

A cohort is a batch of mentoring relationships that run on the same timeline. They're useful for:

  • Structured programs with fixed durations (e.g., a 12-week mentoring cycle)
  • Onboarding groups where new hires are paired with mentors together
  • Leadership programs with specific curricula and deadlines

Creating a Cohort

Create Cohort dialog with name, description, start and end dates, and status
Create Cohort dialog with name, description, start and end dates, and status
  1. Navigate to the Cohorts page.
  2. Click Create Cohort.
  3. Start from a program template: pick a template to pre-fill the cohort's name and description, or Skip to start from scratch.
  4. Set the name, description, start date, end date, and status.
  5. Click Create.

Program Templates

Program templates are ready-made program blueprints. When you create a cohort, the first step offers any available templates as a starting point. Selecting one pre-fills the cohort name and description so you don't begin with a blank form. You can always skip the template step and configure everything yourself.

Tip

Assign matches to a cohort to keep pairings organized by program cycle. This also makes it easy to compare outcomes across cohorts and refine your approach each time you run the program.

Organizing Matches into a Cohort

Cohort detail showing total matches, participation rate, meeting frequency, goal completion, and match status breakdown
Cohort detail showing total matches, participation rate, meeting frequency, goal completion, and match status breakdown

A cohort groups matches that run on the same timeline. From the cohort detail page, you can:

  • Assign matches to the cohort, or remove them
  • View cohort-specific analytics (participation rate, meeting frequency, and match status breakdown)

Cohort Lifecycle

Cohorts move through stages: Draft → Active → Completed → Archived. The status is free-form: you can move a cohort back a stage if you need to. Completed and archived cohorts keep their data accessible for reporting.

Getting the Most Out of Cohorts

  • Keep cohorts between 6 and 16 weeks. Shorter than 6 weeks doesn't allow enough time for trust to develop. Longer than 16 weeks and urgency fades.
  • Run a kickoff event. Cohorts that start with a group introduction (even a brief video call) build stronger connections than those that begin with a silent email.
  • Use cohort analytics to iterate. Compare completion rates and engagement across cohorts. Each cycle is a chance to improve your matching and cadence.
  • Stagger your cohorts. Rather than running one large cohort per year, consider quarterly cycles. Smaller, more frequent cohorts are easier to manage and let you apply lessons faster.

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