Mentoring Program Surveys: Collect, Customize, and Report With Confidence

Surveys That Work Because They Are Part of the Experience

Think about the last time you rated an Uber driver, confirmed an Instacart delivery, or gave feedback on an online order. You did not receive a separate email three days later asking you to fill out a survey. The prompt appeared at exactly the right moment — when the interaction was fresh, when you were already in the app, when responding took ten seconds and felt like a natural next step rather than an administrative task bolted on afterward.

That is precisely how MentorPRO delivers surveys. When a mentee finishes a session, completes a Check-In, or reaches a scheduled program milestone, the survey appears on their screen — right there, right then — as an integrated part of the workflow they are already in. No separate link. No follow-up email. No coordinator chasing down missing responses. Responses are captured instantly, and results aggregate automatically.

This is not a minor usability improvement. It is the mechanism that makes program measurement actually work.

Why Most Programs Struggle to Measure Anything Meaningful

Program directors understand that measurement matters. What gets discussed less often is how many structural barriers prevent it from happening well. Survey links sent by email get ignored. Surveys administered at the end of a program cycle, after the experience has faded, produce responses too thin to analyze. Home-grown questionnaires produce numbers that cannot be compared to benchmarks or cited in grant reports. Validated instruments get administered in separate platforms, creating data streams that have to be manually reconciled with everything else the program tracks.

The result is a field-wide gap between what programs believe about their own effectiveness and what they can actually demonstrate. Most programs know they are making a difference. Very few can show it with the kind of longitudinal, participant-level data that makes funders confident and programs better over time.

MentorPRO was built to close that gap — not by adding a survey tool to a messaging platform, but by embedding measurement in the participant experience from the start. The same logic that drives our Check-In and goal-setting features applies here: the tool only works if participants actually use it, and participants use it when it is seamlessly part of what they are already doing.

Three Ways to Measure What Matters

MentorPRO’s survey capability has three distinct entry points, designed to meet programs wherever they are on the evaluation spectrum. All three deliver surveys the same way — embedded in the participant workflow, on the participant’s own device, tabulated automatically in real time.

The Survey Bank: Free, Validated, and Ready to Deploy

MentorPRO’s proprietary Survey Bank is a free library of psychometrically validated instruments built, curated, and continuously updated by the research team at the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

That distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Dr. Jean Rhodes, Professor of Psychology at UMass Boston and co-founder of MentorPRO, has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles on mentoring, youth development, and program evaluation over a career spanning more than three decades. That body of work does not just inform which instruments appear in the Survey Bank — it defines the conceptual architecture of what programs should be measuring: which outcomes are most sensitive to mentoring interventions, which mediators link program activities to those outcomes, and which predictors at baseline tell programs where their greatest risks and opportunities lie.

Most platforms that offer survey features have no scientific basis for which questions they include or which constructs they prioritize. At MentorPRO, the question of what to measure was answered by a researcher who has spent her career studying exactly that question.

The Survey Bank includes instruments covering the outcome domains mentoring programs are most commonly asked to document and that the scientific literature identifies as most responsive to mentoring interventions:

Academic self-efficacy — validated single-item and multi-item measures used across multiple MentorPRO implementation studies
Sense of belonging — adapted from the Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (Goodenow, 1993)
Overall well-being — adapted from Cheung and Lucas (2014), with demonstrated validity against multi-item scales
Relationship quality — the Strength of Relationship scales (mentor and mentee versions), developed and validated by Dr. Rhodes in a national sample of 5,222 Big Brothers Big Sisters dyads (Rhodes, Schwartz, Willis, and Wu, 2017)
Networking self-efficacy and help-seeking — the Academic and Career Help-Seeking Intentions Scale, validated in a racially diverse college sample and used in the NSF-funded Connected Futures program (Schwartz et al., 2023)
Career readiness, social capital, goal progress, and more

In published MentorPRO research at a large private northeastern university, students completed in-app surveys at baseline and three-month intervals — prompted within the app before they could proceed to the next activity. That design produced completion rates sufficient to power rigorous statistical analyses. Greater survey engagement was significantly associated with higher end-of-year GPA and stronger academic self-efficacy, belonging, and overall well-being, even after controlling for first-generation status, underrepresented minority identity, gender, and high school GPA (Werntz, Deng, Jasman, Yowell, and Rhodes, in press).

Students were prompted to complete brief surveys through MentorPRO at baseline and three-month intervals before they could proceed further within the app — producing completion rates sufficient to detect significant effects on GPA, belonging, self-efficacy, and well-being. — Werntz, Deng, Jasman, Yowell, and Rhodes (in press), International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education.

Upload Your Own Surveys

Many programs — particularly those with funder-required instruments, IRB-approved protocols, or long-standing evaluation commitments — already have validated surveys they are required or prefer to use. MentorPRO does not replace those instruments. It gives them a better home.

With MentorPRO’s upload capability, programs can import any existing survey instrument directly into the platform so participants complete it on their screens, inside the same workflow as every other program activity. Responses are captured automatically and tabulated in real time, connected to each participant’s full longitudinal record within MentorPRO. That means:

Your validated instruments live alongside your Check-In, goal-setting, and messaging data in one system — not three
Completion is tracked at the individual and program level automatically
No CSV exports, no data merging, no reconciling platforms at the end of a grant cycle
Survey data connects to each participant’s longitudinal record for pre-post comparisons and trajectory analysis

For programs that report to national mentoring networks, state agencies, or foundations with specific instrument requirements, this removes the single most time-consuming part of evaluation administration.

Build Custom Surveys

For programs that need to measure something the Survey Bank does not cover — a population-specific construct, a local program theory, a funder-defined outcome — MentorPRO’s custom survey builder lets coordinators create new instruments from scratch and deploy them through the same embedded workflow. Custom surveys can be:

Deployed at any point in the program cycle — intake, midpoint, exit, or follow-up
Targeted to specific participant groups — mentors only, mentees only, or both
Combined with Survey Bank instruments in the same session
Tabulated in the same dashboard as all other program data

The custom builder supports closed-ended items (Likert scales, multiple choice, ratings) and open-ended free-text questions. All three survey types deliver inside the workflow. All three tabulate automatically.

What the Science Says About What to Measure — and Why That Expertise Lives Here

Knowing how to deliver a survey is a design problem. Knowing what to measure, and why, is a scientific one — and the two are not the same.

Dr. Rhodes has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles on mentoring, youth development, and program evaluation. Her book Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the 2023 APA Eleanor Maccoby Book Award, synthesizes that work for practitioner and scientific audiences and represents the current state of knowledge in the field. That depth of expertise determines what appears in MentorPRO’s Survey Bank.

The instruments are not selected because they are widely used or easy to find. They are selected because decades of published research identify them as sensitive to the specific changes that mentoring relationships produce — in academic confidence, relational quality, social capital, career orientation, and well-being. Programs that use the Survey Bank are not just collecting data. They are collecting the right data, in the right sequence, to tell a credible story about what their program actually does.

Other platforms that offer survey features have no equivalent scientific basis for instrument selection. A form builder is not a measurement framework. MentorPRO is both — and the framework comes from a researcher who has spent her career building it.

The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring, edited by Dr. Rhodes and reaching nearly 15,000 subscribers worldwide, keeps the Survey Bank current as new research emerges. What programs measure with MentorPRO reflects the current state of the science, not a snapshot from a product meeting five years ago.

The Center Analyzes Your Data and Builds Your Program Reports

Collecting good data is only half the work. Understanding what it means — and turning it into a program report that satisfies funders, informs practice, and demonstrates impact — requires the kind of analytical expertise that most programs do not have in-house.

The Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at UMass Boston does not just provide the instruments. The Center works directly with MentorPRO program partners to analyze their data and create program reports. That means programs have access to the same research team that developed the measurement tools — to help them interpret what the numbers mean, identify which pairs need attention, understand what is working and what is not, and produce credible, funder-ready documentation of their outcomes.

No other mentoring platform gives you validated instruments, workflow-embedded delivery, and the research team that built the tools to analyze your results and write your reports.

What that looks like in practice:

Outcome analysis — pre-post comparisons on validated Survey Bank instruments, interpreted against benchmarks from published research
Subgroup analyses — identifying which participants are benefiting most and which need additional support, stratified by risk factors, demographics, and program characteristics
Engagement reports — connecting Check-In patterns, survey completion, message frequency, and goal progress into a coherent picture of program fidelity and participant engagement
Qualitative synthesis — organizing open-ended survey responses into thematic summaries for narrative reporting
Funder-ready deliverables — written program reports that meet the documentation standards of foundations, federal agencies, and national mentoring networks

What Your Program Reporting Looks Like With MentorPRO Surveys

Most program coordinators spend a disproportionate amount of time on reporting relative to its value — hunting down survey responses, reconciling data from multiple platforms, manually calculating means, and writing narrative around numbers they are not fully confident in. MentorPRO changes that calculation entirely.

When surveys are embedded in the workflow, completion is tracked automatically, results aggregate in real time, and coordinators can pull program-wide summaries at any point in the program cycle. When survey data is added to the Check-In and engagement picture, the result is a longitudinal, participant-level dataset that connects what mentees are experiencing to how they are engaging and how they are progressing toward their goals.

What program reports look like with MentorPRO surveys:

Baseline and follow-up data on validated outcomes, ready to present as pre-post comparisons with benchmarks from published research
Open-ended participant responses, organized by survey item for qualitative narrative reporting
Program-wide and subgroup aggregate summaries, available in real time without manual calculation
Individual participant longitudinal records connecting survey responses to Check-In data, goal progress, and engagement patterns
Export-ready data in formats that integrate with standard reporting templates
Optional Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring analysis and written report, built by the research team that developed the instruments

Survey Delivery: MentorPRO vs. Standalone Tools

	MentorPRO	Standalone Survey Tools
Delivery method	Embedded in participant workflow	Separate link, separate platform
Response rates	High — prompt appears in context	Lower — depends on email open rates
Validated instruments	Free Survey Bank included	Not typically provided
Custom surveys	Yes	Yes
Data integration	Connected to all program data	Requires manual reconciliation
Pre-post tracking	Automatic, participant-level	Manual
Data analysis support	Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring	None
Report generation	Automatic, with Center support	Manual

Getting Started

MentorPRO’s survey features are available as part of the full platform, alongside research-based matching, Check-In, goal-setting, flash mentoring, and program management tools. The Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring works with every partner to select instruments, customize survey timing, and build reporting frameworks suited to the specific program population and funder requirements.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Mentoring Program Surveys

What is a mentoring program survey?

A mentoring program survey is a structured instrument used to measure participant outcomes, relationship quality, or program-specific constructs. When delivered inside the participant workflow rather than through a separate link, response rates are significantly higher and data quality improves.

What validated surveys does MentorPRO offer?

MentorPRO’s Survey Bank includes psychometrically validated instruments covering academic self-efficacy, sense of belonging, overall well-being, relationship quality, networking self-efficacy, career readiness, goal progress, and more. All instruments are free to partner programs and updated as new research emerges.

Can we use our own survey instruments?

Yes. MentorPRO’s upload feature lets programs import any existing instrument so participants complete it on their screens, inside the platform workflow. Responses are captured automatically and connected to each participant’s full longitudinal record.

How does MentorPRO improve survey response rates?

Surveys appear as part of the participant’s natural workflow — when a mentee completes a Check-In, finishes a session, or reaches a program milestone. They receive the prompt in context, on their own device, without being redirected to a separate platform or waiting for a follow-up email.

Who analyzes our survey data?

The Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at UMass Boston works with partner programs to analyze survey data and produce funder reports, program improvement summaries, and outcome analyses.

How are survey results tabulated?

Automatically and in real time. Quantitative responses aggregate as participants complete surveys. Coordinators can view program-wide and individual-level data at any point. Qualitative responses are collected and exportable. The Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring can provide deeper statistical analysis and written interpretation on request.

Do validated surveys help with grant reporting?

Significantly. Every instrument in MentorPRO’s Survey Bank has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. That means your outcome data carries the weight that anecdotal reports and home-grown forms never will. When the Center’s research team analyzes your data and writes your report, the result is documentation built on the same scientific standards that produced the instruments in the first place.

Can small programs use these tools?

Yes. MentorPRO’s survey feature is designed for programs of any size — from a single cohort of 20 pairs to multi-site programs serving hundreds of participants. The platform handles administration, reminders, and tabulation automatically, requiring no statistical expertise from program staff.

References

Cheung, F., and Lucas, R. E. (2014). Assessing the validity of single-item life satisfaction measures: Results from three large samples. Quality of Life Research, 23(10), 2809–2818.

Goodenow, C. (1993). The Psychological Sense of School Membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30(1), 79–90.

Rhodes, J. E. (2020). Older and wiser: New ideas for youth mentoring in the 21st century. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674292277

Rhodes, J. E., Schwartz, S. E. O., Willis, M. M., and Wu, M. B. (2017). Validating a mentoring relationship quality scale: Does match strength predict match length? Youth and Society, 49(4), 415–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118X14531604

Schwartz, S., Parnes, M., Browne, R., Austin, L., Carreiro, M., Rhodes, J., Kupersmidt, J., and Kanchewa, S. (2023). Teaching to fish: Impacts of a social capital intervention for college students. American Educational Research Journal, 60(5), 986–1022. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312231162821

Werntz, A., Deng, Y., Jasman, M., Yowell, C., and Rhodes, J. E. (in press). Effects of a technology-enhanced university peer mentoring program on first-year academic and well-being outcomes. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education. Link to be added upon publication.

Werntz, A., Hagler, M., Heleniak, C., and Rhodes, J. E. (2023). Acceptability and feasibility of a technology-enhanced peer mentoring program for first-year college students. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1177/15210251231163466