Happenings Reports.

Or: “CoachAccountable’s system of emailing a summary of what’s new with your clients on a regular basis”.  It is perhaps an odd twist of a phrase, but this tool is one that I suspect will be quite powerful and useful for coaches.

So much customization!

Setup is as simple as indicating who to send to, which clients to report on, and when to send.  There are three types of recipients to serve three very distinct purposes.

Happenings Reports for You, as Coach

By configuring a report to go to yourself as coach, you can get a quick digest of what’s happening with any or all of your clients at regular intervals, without needing to log in and look into individual clients.  This summary enables you to be even more on top of how things are going, and allows you to be more proactive with your support.

If you coach your clients on a regularly scheduled basis, you can configure a series of Happenings Reports, each covering a single client and each to be delivered to your email inbox right before the respective appointments–perfect for getting up to speed just in time if logging in that moment isn’t convenient.

Happenings Reports for Your Clients

By configuring reports for your clients, you can give them a summary of all coaching happenings at regular intervals.  This can serve either as a nice tangible record of progress and accomplishments, or as a tidy reminder to keep up with outstanding actions, complete outstanding assignments, and be mindful to cause and track results for current Metrics.

Happenings Reports for Third Parties

The record of your coaching relationships in CoachAccountable is generally shared only between you and your clients, but in many scenarios it is desirable (or even necessary) to give third parties a window into client progress as it unfolds.  With Happenings Reports, these designated recipients can be automatically kept abreast of progress and coaching results on a regular basis.

This is perfect for when the person hiring you is not your coaching client but someone else, someone to whom you are responsible for producing results with your coaching clients.

Note: if those third parties want more direct access to what clients are doing, you may want to consider using Companies. That way the third party person will have their own login and access to whatever you provide about that client, instead of a passively received Happenings Report.

Include only what is fitting, send when useful

The controls for setting up a Happenings Report offer flexibility to handle numerous and varied scenarios.  Here are some examples:

• Send only Metrics for certain clients to HR on the first of every month.
• Give each of your clients an end-of-week summary of Actions for them to keep up with.
• Send yourself the complete details on a particular client every Tuesday at 10:45, just prior to their weekly session.

Here’s what one looks like in your email inbox:

Client and coach alike can make comments on any item in a Happenings Report via email simply by clicking on the little comment icon() next to it.  Comments sent via email this way are captured in the system as Stream Item Comments, and forwarded on to the other party as usual.

You can configure as many Happenings Reports as you like, each on their own schedule, covering their own set of clients and item types, and sending to their own recipient or recipients.

I’m excited to make these available to coaches and their clients, as a way to make CoachAccountable an even more useful tool for collaboration and accountability in ways that reach beyond when people are logged in.  To set them up in your account go over on the right side of your screen to Settings >> Happenings Reports.

Special thanks to Michael Leahy who was kind enough to give me his real-time first impressions over the phone while using an earlier, less polished version.  My wife and I wondered how long it would be before someone requested the ability to choose which things to include in a given report, and my conversation with Michael gave the answer to that question: 6 minutes.

For his feedback this official release is more polished and user friendly. :)