This site is designed to help both new and experienced mentors be more effective and efficient. 

If you are a new mentor, we hope you find this list valuable. If you are an experienced mentor, please skip the steps that do not apply.

1. Review the entire site: We suggest you start with Mentoring tips and the two clients sections (by stage and topic) with curated “go to” information for your clients. Click every button you find to better understand what information is available. Should you find a broken link, please click here.

2. Get support: Check out “Where to find help” to find mentors with specific areas of expertise to better support a client.. There are over 10,000 volunteers across the USA who are willing to help support you.

3. Best Practices: Please explore Mentoring Best Practices. It offers a detailed “how to” guide, developed and refined over the years by some of the best and most experienced mentors in our region. Even if you are an experienced mentor, there are a lot of great tips that can help you become an even better mentor.

4. Get Set Up: Read the “Get Setup” tab to help you get started. It compares three hypothetical mentors and shows the email templates and tools they use to better serve their clients and to save time. Copy any email templates you like to your own computer (they store nicely in Notes on a Mac and OneNote on a PC) and adapt them to your voice and copy and paste them into emails to your clients. Feel free to copy links to other materials in the Client/Stage or Clients/Topics sections and include them in your templates and emails to your clients.

5. Client Support: Go deep into the Client side, which is divided into two key sections: 

1. Client Needs by Topic: This  contains all information we have for clients on a given topic. If you need information on a specific topic, and we have it, you will find it here. Remember we do not attempt to collect everything for every contingency, just the most frequently used information. You can include links to any information in this section in emails to your clients.

2. Client Needs by Stage: This focuses on critical information clients need at each stage of their business. This section is great for new clients. Use the email templates in the Stage that best fits your client. Each template has embedded links to documents on the Client side, so you should not need to attach files to your emails to clients.

6. Submit New Information: If you have information that you think will fill in holes in what we have in the site, please enter it using the Contact Us button. 

Good luck and let us know what you think here!