Gravity Forms
+ Mentor Matching

Mentoring programmes live or die on the match. With a handful of people you can pair them by hand, but with dozens of mentors and mentees nobody can compare every possible pair, remember who speaks which language or lives in which time zone, and keep track of how many mentees each mentor has already taken. The Gravity Forms Mentor Matching add-on does the comparing for you. Mentors fill in a profile form and mentees an application form; you choose which fields to compare, how much each one counts and which rules must match.

Every mentee gets a suggested mentor with a score out of 100 and a plain-language why for each criterion, such as 2 of 3 shared: Finance, Leadership or 3 h apart. Suggestions never break a must-match rule and never give a mentor more mentees than they offered to take, and mentees who cannot be placed are listed with the reason. You stay in charge: swap or change any pair (a warning appears if a must-match rule breaks) and confirm.

Both sides then get an introduction e-mail with signed accept and decline links. Contact details are shared only after both accept; a decline puts the mentee back in the pool and frees the mentor's place. Check-in survey links go out at the days you choose, a dashboard shows matched, waiting, unmatched and ended pairs, and a CSV export covers the whole programme. Everything runs on your own server, with no outside connection. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

The add-on reads the mentor and mentee entries through the Gravity Forms API and compares every mentee with every mentor on the criteria you set. Each criterion gives a part score between 0 and 1: the share of the mentee's topics or time slots the mentor covers, whether a language or industry is the same, how far the mentor's experience is from the wished range, or how many hours apart their time zones are. The parts are weighted and added up to a score from 0 to 100, and a broken must-match rule rules the pair out. Suggestions start with the best-scoring pairs and are then improved by moving and swapping mentees, always within each mentor's places. When you confirm, the mentee is taken out of the pool and a mentor place is taken with conditional database updates, so parallel confirms can never overfill a mentor. Introductions, decisions and check-ins use links signed with a secret key on your site, and e-mails go out through WordPress. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.