The year of 2023 has been full of new and exciting things! We welcomed 6 new team members, and grew the team to 14 people. Our founding team also expanded by a baby of my co-founder Klara who left on maternity leave this year. I am super proud of the team for helping with the transition and stepping up into leadership roles, especially Petra, our Head of Program Operations, and Ellen, our Marketing Manager and Martina, our Tech Queen. The shoutout goes to the rest of the team as well, who were able to make all these things happen in 2023. Here are some of our achievements this year!
This year we matched over 450 mentees with their mentors, which takes us to 1,500 matches in total! That means 450 hours of onboarding calls, and more hours of finding the right mentor for the mentees’ challenges. What we care the most about is for the mentees to really receive the help they need, and we’re happy that 83% of our mentees reached the goals they set - from improving their leadership skills, figuring out the next career move, to feeling more confident, and receiving a promotion, or landing a new job. About 10% of our mentees received a scholarship for women in financial need, on maternity leave, or students.
When you hear from the mentees things like “Mentoring energized me”, “I'm proud of myself.” “Pushed me forward.”, “More comfortable at work & in life.”, “I switched to a job that I love.”, “Transformative experience”, “Grown as a leader”, you know that what we do really matters. Read more about what the mentees say about the program.
We welcomed 250 new mentors this year who joined us from countries such as Canada, the USA, Germany, UK, and more. On average, our mentors who finished mentoring received a rating of 4.84/5 from their mentees. We also launched the Mentor Awards and awarded 80 mentors in various categories, from impact to long-term dedication. How does it feel to be a mentor? Our mentors say “One of the most rewarding experiences”, “A very powerful and self-fulfilling feeling”, “It also makes me become better”, “Best about being a mentor is not that you are giving. You are getting much more from your mentee in return.” Read more about their experience.
The main highlight of this year was the launch of our own Mentoring platform, something we have dreamed about for years! Our platform helps streamline the mentoring experience of the mentees and the mentors as well. The platform allows them to track their sessions, write and share notes, share feedback and it keeps all mentoring resources in one place. Our plan is to keep developing the platform more in 2024. On a personal note, it’s been fun to brush up my design skills and work with our super start tech team on it!
Our Mentoring program for companies crossed the pond and we were able to welcome more international clients from Canada and the US, but also from Germany, the UK and Czechia. We’re happy to see that our clients such as Mews or Merkle, keep sending more and more mentees because they see how the mentoring program is helping!
Based on popular demand, we organized our 3rd annual conference with support of our partners Organon, Ceska Sporitelna, Ciklum, Ogilvy and Sirva. Just like the previous year, our event took place at the same stunning venue, WPP Campus, with a remarkable turnout of over 200 attendees. We discussed topics such as how to navigate in the male-dominated world, the future of work and AI, balancing motherhood & leadership, and more. Would you like to join us next year? Book the date 05.10.2024 in your calendar!
We moved our community to Slack, and focused on engaging activities that anyone could participate in. Every month we run a community Slack challenge, from book readings, to physical activities tracked on Strava. For the community, we organized many events with a focus on leadership, career growth, D&I, entrepreneurship, and how to get into tech (Thanks Barclays for support). We also launched a new Ambassador program and welcomed 30+ ambassadors.
The Berlin community grew by 250% this year. We organized many community meetups, as well as a conference for 80+ attendees together with a community International Women in Berlin. During the half-day event at Motion Lab, we discussed topics such as career growth, leadership, achieving financial freedom, personal brand and more.
Next year, we plan to keep focusing on our community and mentoring activities, fun & educational events (have you signed up for our Financial Wellness event yet?), tech development of our mentoring platform, and more to be announced 😉
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