The CoachAccountable Blog

Master CoachAccountable and become the best dang coach you can be. Also, news.

File Sharing: Beyond Email Attachments

In coaching we often need to share files.  File resources for your clients can take all kinds of shapes: e-books, images, slides, videos, audio clips.  In the course of a coaching engagement, your style may call for sharing such files.

The most obvious and basic way to do this is to email ’em on over as an attachment.  From that simple baseline, let’s look at how CoachAccountable can do you a few better.

Share File With CoachAccountable

CoachAccountable file sharing works by either coach or client uploading a file, and the other party securely accessing it with a single click.  How does this improve upon email attachments?

First, mobility.  You might use web-based email (meaning your attachments are available wherever you are), but your clients might not.  CoachAccountable file sharing is inherently web-based, meaning you and your clients can always access shared files with an internet connection.

Second, accommodating large files.  Audio and video tend to be in the 10’s of MB or more.  Most email providers still have a cap on how large a file you can send, making emailing impossible for most substantive audio and video.  While we’re on the subject of file size, large files sitting in your inbox use up valuable disk quota in web-based email systems, which might affect you and/or your clients (i.e. a video might take up 20MB in your account as the sender, and 20MB in your client’s account as the receiver). With CoachAccountable, you can even embed video and audio files so they play right in the app.

Third, sharing the same file with multiple people.  Perhaps your coaching style entails one or more file resources that you share with everyone you coach.  With CoachAccountable you upload files once to your library, and with a few clicks share them with clients as called for.  If you have 30 people that you’re coaching and your program calls for them all to watch the same video, it is much nicer to upload it just one time to your library, and share it with all 30. You can also share multiple files with multiple people at once, or share with a group.

Forth, secured private access.  This is no different from the email route, but a nice benefit over other ways of sharing files like putting them on a website.  Without a lot of hassle, files shared in CoachAccountable are accessible only to authorized parties.

Fifth, awareness.  CoachAccountable tracks if and when your client accesses the files you share with them, giving you a little window into how well they’re keeping up with the materials.

File Last Accessed

Sixth, comment threads.  When you share a file, there might be a little back-and-forth about it, dialog like the one below.  Commenting on a shared file is as simple as replying to the email notification, and CoachAccountable files this all in context in the coaching stream which makes it easy to review later.

File Shared With Comments

Who knew a pony could be so effective for coaching?

File sharing online is nothing revolutionary, but CoachAccountable provides a few ways to make it a little nicer and a little easier.  Best of all, it fosters dialog between you and your client, allowing you to better know where they’re at and offer timely support.  Just a few more wins you can get when you use specialized coaching software.



4 Comments

  1. Les Postnikoff

    Is there a limit to the number of files or the amount of data that I can upload to my coach accountable account?

    January 11, 2021 @ 6:57 pm

  2. John

    Yes, the limit is 100MB times the number of clients supported by your subscription plan (so, for example, if you’re on the 10-client plan, you can upload 1GB worth of files).

    Happily, in practice it’s EXCEEDINGLY rare to bump up against this limit, as big files tend to be media files, like video and audio, and those are much better shared as embedded media as hosted by services that can smartly stream those media files. CA supports sharing embedded media files quite well. :)

    January 11, 2021 @ 7:02 pm

  3. Brandon

    What are the service providers that are most common and recommended for hosting media files?

    May 6, 2022 @ 3:16 pm

  4. John

    Good question! We don’t “recommend” on platform or another, per se, but there are indeed a several that you could say are more common, all of which CoachAccountable supports.

    For video, there’s YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Wistia, Loom, Screencast.com, and others.
    For audio, there’s Sound Cloud, Spotify, Castos, Buzzsprout, and others.

    Cheers!

    May 19, 2022 @ 9:13 am