Research shows that having a mentor provides a world of benefits for children. The Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania, has made it their goal to support mentoring programs such that every youth has access to the benefits that a mentoring relationship provides.
However, each year nearly 900 kids in the greater Pittsburgh area alone apply for mentors but cannot be served due to limited supply.
Magnify is a mobile application focused on encouraging adults to form a habit of mentoring in simple, everyday actions. We see adults that interact regularly with youth - such as coaches, teachers, and tutors - as potential Everyday Mentors. By equipping these potential Everyday Mentors with the knowledge and confidence to positively impact the youth around them, Magnify aims to create a seamless support structure of caring adults for all youth in a community.
Our team spent four months conducting a plethora of research, including secondary literature reviews, interviewing mentors and mentees, and observing mentoring programs. Once we began ideating and building, we prototyped and tested multiple iterations of our ideas with members of our target user audience. Our team was commitment to a human-centered design, and made sure our research insights directly impacted our solution.
Mentor training is only useful if is consumable and applied in the real world. Magnify educates users about fundamental mentoring skills, prompting reflection and offering relatable anecdotes along the way. In addition, Magnify also presents users with challenges to apply the mentoring skills in daily life.
The impact of mentoring can be difficult to track, but is vital to motivating adults to continue mentoring. Magnify gathers and visualizes mentoring interactions around the nation to provide a holistic view of Everyday Mentoring. Over time, Magnify will provide a rich data set of qualitative and quantitative measures of mentoring for the Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern PA to leverage.
Much of mentoring is done in isolation from other mentors, but our team observed the value of having mentors connect with one another: the expertise and stories from experienced mentors can help beginners learn and grow. Magnify leverages this by creating communities of mentors, where stories of mentoring interactions can be shared.
Our research showed that ‘mentor’ is a loaded term, and its presence can hold people back from taking on a supportive, mentorly role. No where in Magnify does the word mentor appear. Instead, Magnify is marketed as a training tool to help adults strengthen interactions with youth.
