Ending Your Mentorship Program Well: A Program Admin's Guide

Most of the attention in mentoring program design goes into the start: matching, onboarding, kickoff sessions. The mentorship program end typically gets far less thought, and in most organisations it looks the same: a survey link goes out, participation trails off, and the cohort dissolves without anyone marking that it happened.

That's a missed opportunity. Working with program administrators across organisations running mentoring on Brancher, we've seen how a program ends shape whether participants:

• Walk away with a clear, consolidated sense of what they got from the experience, rather than a vague "it was fine"
• Feel recognised for the time they invested, particularly mentors, who are usually volunteering their time
• Advocate for the program internally when the next round of nominations comes around

A mentee or mentor who finishes without any real closure is far less likely to sign up again, or to recommend the program to a colleague, even if their individual mentoring relationship went well. Note that this is a different question from how a single mentoring relationship ends, which comes down to the two people involved.

This guide is about closing out the whole cohort at the program level, at the point where the entire program (not just one pairing) concludes. For guidance on ending a single mentoring relationship gracefully, see How Long Should a Mentorship Program Last? for the rematch and duration side of things, and How to End a Mentoring Relationship When It's Time for the individual etiquette side.

Brancher's matching algorithm pairs mentors and mentees on personality and values rather than skills or availability alone, and match satisfaction across the platform sits at 98%. That starting point matters for how a program should end too: a cohort that's been well-matched from day one deserves a wrap-up that closes the relationship with the same care the matching process opened it with.

TL;DR

Wrapping up a mentorship program well is as important as starting one well. Rather than letting a mentorship program end with a survey link and silence, a structured virtual workshop in the final one to two weeks gives the whole cohort a proper close: reflection, recognition, and clarity on what happens next.

This guide is written for program administrators closing out an entire cohort, not for an individual mentor or mentee whose own pairing is ending mid-program — if that's what brought you here, see How to End a Mentoring Relationship When It's Time instead. This guide covers when to run the closing workshop, who should attend, a full 60-minute agenda, and best practices for collecting feedback as the cycle closes.

Table of Contents

• When to Schedule Your Mentoring Program's Closing Workshop
• Who Should Attend When Wrapping Up a Mentoring Program
• The 60-Minute Agenda for Wrapping Up a Mentorship Program
• Common Pitfalls When Wrapping Up a Mentorship Program
• How Brancher Supports Every Stage of Wrapping Up a Mentoring Program
• Turning a Good Ending Into Next Cycle's Advantage
• Frequently Asked Questions

When to Schedule Your Mentoring Program's Closing Workshop

Run the closing workshop in the final one to two weeks of the program, while relationships are still active and the experience is fresh. Scheduling it after the program has technically ended tends to produce lower attendance and flatter reflection, since participants have already mentally moved on.

Running it before the end-of-program survey also improves the quality of survey responses. A structured reflection session gives people language and clarity they wouldn't otherwise have when answering survey questions cold. This sequencing is one of the most consistent patterns we've observed in programs that run a closing session versus those that go straight to a survey.

If you're unsure exactly when to schedule the workshop, Brancher's dashboard gives administrators live visibility into meeting frequency and pulse scores across every pair, which makes it easier to judge whether a cohort is genuinely winding down or still has active momentum worth protecting a little longer before you close things out.

Who Should Attend When Wrapping Up a Mentoring Program

Run separate breakout sessions for mentors and mentees rather than mixing them in the same small groups. Mentors and mentees are reflecting on the experience from different vantage points, and mixed groups tend to produce more surface-level sharing, since participants may be more guarded about what they say with their own mentor or mentee in the room.

A joint main-room session (welcome, synthesis, and close) with separate mentor and mentee breakout rooms in the middle gives you the best of both: a shared sense of occasion, plus space for each group to reflect honestly with peers in a similar position.

The 60-Minute Agenda for Wrapping Up a Mentorship Program

This agenda reflects the structure we recommend to program administrators running end-of-cycle sessions on Brancher, refined against what tends to hold attention and produce genuine reflection over a single hour.

Opening the session (0:00–0:10)

Brancher's admin dashboard makes the welcome segment easy to prepare for. Administrators can pull headline participation numbers directly from the dashboard, and Brancher's engagement leaderboard gives you a ready-made way to recognise the most active mentors and mentees in the cohort, without having to manually tally meeting logs beforehand.

Breakout prompts

Mentees:

How did you find the mentoring relationship experience? What's one thing that shifted in how you see yourself or your career? What were your biggest achievements? What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them? What impact did your mentor have on your development? What support do you still need going forward? What will you do differently in the next 90 days?

Mentors:

What did you learn from mentoring someone else? What made the biggest difference in how you showed up as a mentor? How has it impacted you personally or professionally? What advice would you give a first-time mentor? What were your own and your mentee's biggest achievements? What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?

The forward-look segment (0:45–0:55)

This is a natural moment for a short demo of how participants wrap up their relationship inside Brancher: completing a final training module, downloading key resources and notes from their pairing before access changes, and marking their relationship as formally concluded.

Ava AI, Brancher's always-on support layer, can also continue to support participants informally after the program closes, answering questions about the alumni pathway or next-cycle sign-up without the admin team needing to field every message individually.

Common Pitfalls When Wrapping Up a Mentorship Program

• Turning it into a product or admin session instead of keeping the focus on participants' experience
• Skipping structure — an unstructured "any final thoughts?" call produces weaker turnout and reflection than a scripted, prompt-led session
• Not capturing anything from the session, losing its program-improvement value the moment the call ends
• Mixing mentors and mentees in breakout rooms, which tends to flatten honesty on both sides

These are the same patterns that show up repeatedly across the enterprise and mid-sized programs we work with, which is part of why we built the agenda in this guide around what consistently works rather than a generic event-planning template.

How Brancher Supports Every Stage of Wrapping Up a Mentoring Program

Closing a program well is easier when the platform running it is built to support the end of the cycle, not just the start. Across the workshop and the days that follow, Brancher's software supports program administrators with:

• A live engagement dashboard showing meeting frequency, pulse scores, and goal progress across every pair, so administrators can judge exactly when a cohort is ready to close rather than guessing from anecdotal check-ins
• An engagement leaderboard administrators can pull into the welcome segment of the closing workshop to recognise the most active mentors and mentees
• Final training modules and resource downloads built into the platform, so mentors and mentees have a clear, guided way to formally wrap up their individual relationship at the same time as the program-wide close
• Customisable end-of-program surveys, sent directly through the platform once the workshop has already given participants a chance to reflect live
• Ava AI, which continues supporting participants with informal questions after the program ends, reducing the load on program administrators during the highest-traffic period of the cycle
• Dashboard reporting that connects workshop themes and survey responses to the same participation data collected throughout the program, so nothing from the closing session gets lost between the call and the next cycle's planning

Turning a Good Ending Into Next Cycle's Advantage

A mentorship program that wraps up well doesn't just close out one cohort cleanly, it builds the case for the next one. Participants who feel recognised and heard on the way out are the ones who put their hand up to mentor again, or tell a colleague the program is worth joining.

Running this well every cycle is easier with a script to work from rather than building the session from scratch each time.

Get our free Facilitator's Guide: Hosting an End of Mentoring Program Virtual Workshop for the full breakout scripts, discussion prompts, virtual troubleshooting guidance, and a post-workshop follow-up template. Download it here.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you professionally conclude a mentorship program using digital tools?

Conclude a mentorship program professionally by combining a structured virtual closing workshop with digital tools that formalise the wrap-up: a platform-based final training module or resource download for participants, a recorded session for anyone who can't attend live, and a digital end-of-program survey sent immediately after.

Mentoring software that supports final wrap-up steps directly in the platform (completing a closing module, downloading notes, marking the relationship as concluded) makes this easier to run consistently than doing it manually over email.

How do you effectively offboard participants from a corporate mentorship program?

Effectively offboard participants by running a structured closing workshop in the final one to two weeks, recognising mentors specifically for their volunteer time, giving both mentors and mentees clear next steps (final survey, final conversation with their partner, expressing interest in the next cycle), and updating their status in your mentoring platform so they stop receiving active-program communications once the cycle ends.

What are the best practices for collecting feedback at the close of a mentorship cycle?

The best practice is to collect feedback in two layers: a live, structured reflection session (a closing workshop with guided prompts) followed by a written end-of-program survey.

Running the workshop first improves survey quality, since participants have already had space to reflect before answering questions in writing. Keep survey questions short and specific rather than a single broad satisfaction rating, since a single score hides the qualitative detail that explains why a program worked or didn't.

What's a step-by-step guide for ending a virtual mentorship program smoothly?

To end a virtual mentorship program smoothly: (1) schedule a closing workshop in the final one to two weeks of the program, (2) open with a recap of the program timeline and headline participation stats, (3) give participants quiet individual reflection time before any group sharing, (4) run separate mentor and mentee breakout rooms with guided prompts, (5) bring the group back together for a short synthesis of themes, (6) cover what happens next and demo any platform wrap-up steps, and (7) close with clear next steps and a final thank-you, particularly to mentors.

What online tools can you use to create and distribute mentorship program exit surveys?

Mentorship program exit surveys can be built with general-purpose form and survey tools, or with the survey and reporting features built into a dedicated mentoring platform. A standalone survey tool automates distribution and collection but typically requires manually compiling results into cohort-level trends, while a mentoring platform with built-in survey and dashboard features can connect exit survey responses directly to participation and engagement data already captured during the program, reducing manual compilation work.

Author Bio

Holly Brailsford is the co-founder and CEO of Brancher and a registered organisational psychologist specialising in workplace mentoring design. She works directly with program administrators across enterprise, government and university mentoring programs on the full lifecycle of a program, from the first match through to how a cohort should close, drawing on patterns she's seen play out across hundreds of program cycles.