Program Director of Virtual Mentoring

iMentor is a national nonprofit organization that believes every student has potential, and we work to ensure each student can reach it fully through our lens of Mentorship. For 26 years iMentor has served over 45,000 students in our direct service communities of New York, Chicago, and Baltimore. Now, with our customary intrepid and creative approach, and in response to years of requests, we seek to establish a virtual community of mentors outside our three flagship cities, and we seek a Program Director of Virtual Mentoring (PDVM) to help conceive of, build, and kick off our 26/27 Pilot Year.

The Program Director will serve as iMentor’s internal owner of this virtual mentoring pilot, coordinating the external partnership, corporate partner activation, mentor experience, program learning, and future growth strategy. We have important objectives with this pilot: (1) to connect more students with caring adults who can help them build the knowledge, confidence, and support networks needed to successfully navigate postsecondary education and career pathways, and (2) to activate enough corporate partners and mentors to meet participation goals, delivering a strong mentor experience, establishing effective processes with the external partner, and producing a data-informed recommendation for future scale.

Reporting to iMentor’s Senior Vice President of Impact Programming, this is a role for an entrepreneurial spirit who gets fired up at the junction of innovation, data analysis, strategic outreach and recruitment, and cross functional partnership.

• Lead activation of virtual mentoring partnerships following handoff from External Relations, translating partner commitments into successful implementation
• Partner with corporate contacts to drive employee participation and deliver a best-in-class mentor experience from onboarding and training through ongoing engagement and support
• Track participation, engagement, and experience, partnering with External Relations to support strong stewardship, renewal, and growth
• Apprise corporate partners of their involvement’s progress; foster continued and ideally deeper partner involvement over years
• Collaborate with iMentor’s Strategic Communications department to create written and online materials that will inspire corporate partnerships & increase mentor recruitment

• Assist in creating and executing Mentor Training for new mentors prior to their being matched with a student, and then ensuring they have ongoing support and answered questions throughout their pair engagement

• Act as primary point of contact with our Technology Partner, itself a leader in the mentorship space, UStrive, whose main responsibilities will include recruiting the students for the pilot, supplying the technology platform that mentors and mentees will use to communicate with each other, and implementing the program and associated pair support
• Build a deep understanding of the UStrive program model, and their approach to virtual mentoring
• Report back to all involved parties regularly in order to determine what program components need to be tweaked and celebrated

• Track and monitor critical program assessment using quantitative and qualitative data from students, mentors, corporate partners, and our external program partner to identify what is working, diagnose challenges, recommend changes during the pilot, and ultimately develop recommendations and roadmap for scale
• Partner with the Organizational Learning & Impact (OLI) team to define and monitor measures of pilot success, including mentor recruitment and engagement, quality of mentor-mentee relationships, participant experience, program implementation, and indicators of student impact
• Assess what the pilot is teaching iMentor about the conditions required for high-quality virtual mentoring and develop recommendations for the program's future design, scale, and impact
• Balance growth and implementation goals with program quality and participant outcomes, using data and feedback to understand not only whether a program is…