Mentoring For 1k At-Risk Young Women in Mexico

It has been 12 months since our first crowdfunding campaign to fund a digital platform that provides mentoring and career support to young Mexican students who will be the first women in their respective families to attend and complete university studies. Through the GlobalGiving program, we raised $9,001 to fund a digital platform to scale our mentoring program. And on this occasion and with much happiness we can share with you that we have reached our goal. 

Along the way we encountered more than one limitation and we have learned a lot along the way. In our last reports, we shared with you that we had the possibility to create and launch a bot called Lucy. Although these technological solutions were successfully developed with bug free functionality, we found weaknesses that limited its effectiveness to help scale our program; among them we discovered the need for additional features, such as allowing mentors to be paired with more than one mentee, adding new mentors to ongoing programs and automatic rescheduling of messages.

However our troubleshooting process has been enlightening. After thoroughly reviewing our pilot program, and taking into account the technological limitations and personal behaviors of our mentees, as well as our evolving functionality requirements, we determined that the most viable solution to solve these challenges was to generate a landing page that integrates our bot (Lucy) with a private repository of mentor and mentee contacts that facilitates communication with our mentees. 

In the months of July and August we hired a company that offers digital marketing, branding and web development services, called "TroopMark". This alliance was fascinating and realistic to meet our scalability goal. During the past months the Olascoaga® program’s team was in constant ideation and had several feedback sessions to communicate TroopMark the needs of the program. We shared the areas of opportunity that we found and the lessons learned during this scalability process. The result has been impressive. Apart from the fact that we were able to make an almost instant match with TroopMark, they were able to understand and materialize our needs and ideas, resulting in the creation of our own "Will Platform". We had already use it to host two of our editions this year. Within our platform both mentors and mentees can enter their personal data, build a personal profile, know the contact details and information of their mentor, they also have a calendar that allows them to schedule their sessions, fill out their attendance, and have the resources and tools needed to be able to carry out their mentoring session.

Thank you so much for your donation. Thank you for believing in us as we learn and grow throughout this process and for mobilizing and taking the initiative to help young women have a better future and succeed in their professional paths. 

With love

Olascoaga® Team