The CoachAccountable Blog

One of the beautiful things about Version 3 of CoachAccountable is that you now get White Labeling for free.

What’s white labeling? It’s your way to make your CoachAccountable coaching management system look more like your own site, for you and your clients: your color scheme, your logo, your name.

If you haven’t yet set up your account to be white labeled as your own, you’ll find the place to do so in Settings >> System >> Branding.

One of the places to customize is with your company’s logo. Most logos as designed are best suited to be mounted on a white background, which makes sense: it’s the sort of thing of having it on the top of branded stationary or in the signature of an email.

CoachAccountable V3 goes for a more minimalist and flat look: the top bar is a vibrant, solid color, with white icons and other features placed on it for a nice contrast and clean aesthetic:

Kinda sharp, right? Ooh, but to make it more your own! Let’s see how it’s done…

It’s likely that you’ve got a logo, but unlikely that it’s done in this style: a white shape that nicely mattes onto a solid background color.  Recently I noticed that CA customer Rebecca Licalsi (of Licalsi Coaching) had such a logo set to show in the header like that.  Here’s what it looks like:

Made to be matted on white!

Looks sharp, right?  It helps that we have it matted on white.  When we set this logo to be the White Logo (and pick a nice purple to go with it) within CA we get this:

The white rectangle dropped into this boldly colored area looks a little… abrupt.

As you can see this isn’t ideal: plopping a big white rectangle into the middle of this space kinda breaks with the surrounding aesthetic.  A better, more congruent logo would be one that follows the lead of the other elements in this space: a crisp, white shape that mattes nicely on our vibrant background color.

So let’s make one of those!  No need to hire your designer to make you a whole new logo, from the one you already have you can transform it into a white version with just a few steps.

Using Rebecca’s logo as an example, let’s show you how this is done in Photoshop (and if you don’t have Photoshop, you can either use another photo editing software or just email us for assistance):

Making a White Logo in Photoshop

Our first step is to clear out the white background (which causes that abrupt white rectangle) and make it instead transparent (so that it will sit nicely on top of any matting color you choose).  To do this, first choose white as your main active chosen color, and then go to Select >> Color Range…

Select all the white in the image with the Color Range selection tool.

Because you’ve got white as your chosen color, the default Select option “Sampled colors” will select all the white in your image.  Fuzziness 85 seems to reliably get the right amount around the edges, but you can adjust that up or down to more or less aggressively pick the white and near white pixels:

The white parts in the selection preview image are what we’re selecting (and ultimately removing).

Once you’ve selected all the white pixels, clear them away by using the eraser, leaving you with a nice transparent background:

A big fat eraser makes this easier.

Now that the background is cleared out, let’s make our coaching company logo shape be as tightly cropped as possible (because there’s no need to keep those pixels on all the edges which were providing padding).  Do this by selecting all (Ctrl-A), copying (Ctrl-C), making a new image (Ctrl-N), and pasting what you selected into that new image (Ctrl-V).  This will have the effect of shedding off all rows and columns that were completely empty, giving you the tightest possible crop without losing anything of the image.

Now the real magic: to turn our colored shape into a flat, white only shape.  Do this by right clicking on the one layer of the image and selecting “Blending options…”:

Blending options are so cool.

Here we just pick “Color overlay” and be certain that white (#FFFFFF) is the color we are over laying:

Click okay and we’re done!

And there we have it:

Not much to look at now, but…

A crisp white shape, layered on a fully transparent background.  It’s hard to read against that white and grey checkerboard, but our vibrant background color choice will give much more favorable contrast.  Save it as a PNG file and it’ll be ready to set as your White Logo.

If you don’t use Photoshop, you can use several free web-based photo editors with a similar process.

And that’s all there is to it.  We started here:

and we end here:

The end result is a branded system that looks sharper and much more consistent with the more modern, flat design of the new CoachAccountable coaching management system.  Not bad for 2 minutes of work.

If this process looks at all intimidating, no worries!  Because here’s the deal: I’m all for you to feel completely at home within your CA account, and I want CA to make your coaching look as clean and professional as possible, to both you and your clients.

As such we’ll be happy to do it for you.  Just send your logo in whatever format you’ve got it (preferably high quality, high res, but we’ll roll with what ever!) to support@coachaccountable.com and we’ll cook up (and put into place) a white logo for you.

A big thanks to Rebecca for letting us share this process using her logo!

Want to join Rebecca in a place where we look out for opportunities to help you make your coaching business look and run even better? Try CoachAccountable today.

Now that v3, the new version of CoachAccountable’s coaching software is out, I thought it would be fun to recap the path from 2.0’s launch over 5 years ago that led us to where we are now.

The funny thing is I haven’t really used version numbers since 2.0 came on the scene, instead making incremental changes and improvements, large and small, at a regular clip that amounted to a monthly, weekly, or indeed sometimes daily basis!

This is no doubt one of the great luxuries of web-based software.

But what if I DID use version numbers to mark the big jumps?  What would I consider to be the major .point (and even kinda major .point.point) releases?  This is realm of creative editorial discretion, and so I invite you to come along for a journey into largely contrived (yet totally plausible) trajectory of CA’s journey from 2.0 to 3.0!

2012

2.0, August 30 – Initial launch.  After 3 years on the shelf, CoachAccountable’s return to being a publicly available online coaching platform.  This time is was actually good!

2.0.1, September 7th – Inbound Email Processing.  Just a week after launch I put in a whole new way to mark Actions complete and report on Metrics.

2.0.2, September 30th – Client Data Export.  Get all of your coaching client data and files out with a single click.

2.1, November 29th – CoachAccountable Courses.  Courses, for all their complexity, took me only a month to build.  Amazing to think back at how quickly I could work before I had a substantial volume of customers. :)

2013

2.1.1, February 7th – Course Enhancements.  Following items, cloning items, spin off versions, and a few other goodies added.

2.1.2 March 23 – Gallery Images.  Uploaded images were made embeddable in compositions like Worksheets, Journal Entries, and so on.

2.1.3, April 29th – In-system Emailing.   Coach and client could email one another via the system, with benefit of it all being documented as part of the coaching record.

2.2, October 9th – CoachAccountable Groups.  Full on support for group coaching.

2014

2.2.1, February 25th – Client Invoicing Overhaul.  A better coaching client invoicing system now supporting line items, taxes, and automatic delivery of scheduled invoices.

2.2.2, March 19th – Happenings Reports.  Automatically sent routine summaries of client progress.

2.3, July 2nd – Team Edition.  Full on support for collaboration and coordination of coaching teams.

2.3.1, August 8th – Action Projects.  Grouping of related Action items together and overall progress visualization.

2.3.2, October 10 – Client Export Files.  Easily generated HTML files of documented coaching work with a given client, ripe for sharing or archiving.

2.3.3, November 7th – Two way sync with calendars.  Let the system know your precise availability for accurate appointment scheduling.

2.3.4, November 29th – Stripe and Authorize.net.  More options for accepting client payments online.

2015

2.3.5, January 15th – Whiteboards.  Collaborative and evolving documents.

2.3.6, March 10th – System Email Addresses.  Communications done over regular email that are automatically documented to the coaching client record.

2.3.7, April 6th – API.  First release of the CoachAccountable API.

2.3.8, May 15th – Form-Based Worksheets.  Worksheets no longer limited to WYSIWYG editor mode: now with check boxes, radio buttons, text areas and the like.

2.3.9, June 25th – Piping Worksheet answers into Metrics.  The act of filling out a Worksheet populates in turn Metric data points, enabling the creation of sophisticated course workflows.

2.4, September 30th – CA Mobile.  CoachAccountable gets fully mobile friendly, no need for a coaching app.

2016

2.4.1, June 28th – Unit Based Courses.  Support for self-paced Courses wherein the completion of one item triggers the dispatch of the next.

2017

3.0, November 27th – CoachAccountable 3.0.  The completely remixed UI packed with plenty of other goodies and free White Label branding.

Gosh, it looks like I was really phoning it in in 2016 and 2017!  But of course that’s when I was doing all the heads down work for 3.0.  And there are a ton of little releases and features all along the way that didn’t make the cut as I tried to keep this a not too tedious and granular list.

Nevertheless I’m struck by how far CA has come over the years, and find myself both amazed and grateful for the folks who paid the exact same price for a much less capable system 3, 4, and 5 years ago (CA is in fact LESS expensive today with Courses, Groups and White Labeling now all being included at no extra charge, that combo used to cost $80 + $40 + $50).

Now that the dust has settled from 3.0, and I’ve had a nice bit of time off to relax and regroup, I’m excited to get crackin’ on what’s next!

If you want to be a part of that “what’s next”, try us out free.

I released CoachAccountable Version 3 now nearly three weeks ago, pretty much out of the blue as far as anyone was concerned.  If you’ve been a user of CoachAccountable for months or years, you had no idea it was coming if you weren’t among the very select few that I told in advance.

Yet V3 was in the making since early 2016, well over a year and a half.  The more conventional thing to do for a software company is to talk up such a project, to drive hype, interest, and attention so that everyone can be all like “OMG it’s so good!” when it finally drops.

Why did I keep such a large project, one that would ostensibly demonstrate a positive sign that the platform was continuing to move forward, so thoroughly under wraps?

I offer insight into that question as sort of glimpse into the inner workings of the software enterprise that is CoachAccountable, or, you might say, a glimpse into how I roll.

Let me take you back to my first and only straight job that I had out of college.  I worked for a small eCommerce company that would eventually be gobbled up by Network Solutions.  It was shopping cart software, a software-as-a-service business before “SaaS” was an in-vogue acronym, that allowed our customers to run their own online store.

I started that summer in tech support.  Our company’s software was then on version 3, and for months the sales people, owners, tech support; pretty much everyone customer facing had been pointing to the forthcoming version 4 as the solution to all woes.  “You need to organize your store into sub- sub- categories?  Version 4 will do that!”  “That bug that’s making your life miserable?  Totally fixed in version 4!”

Don’t worry, version 4 is coming.

As you might imagine, trading heavily on the promise of a not-yet-completed piece of software created a certain external pressure to get version 4 done and launched already, FFS.

So it was launched.  After months of unmet anticipated launch dates broken promises it finally launched in the fall.  All customers were migrated over in scheduled waves over about a 3 week period, no option to opt out.

That’s when the pain started.  Problem was version 4 was a piece of shit.

I mean, rushing will do that, right?  But they felt compelled to launch among a rising tide of unmet expectations and upset, and understandably so.

For about 2 months it was all hands on deck, everyone working a few extra hours each night to put out fires and calm pissed off customers.  Support ticket queues, which had seldom got more than 10 open at a time, rocketed up into the hundreds, peaking I believe at something like 1200.

It seemed like everyone had something that was borked with their online store as a result of the migration, or some key feature they relied on in version 3 that was buggy in version 4 (or just plain not there, like the ability print an order invoice–yeesh, how’d that get missed?).

But at least folks had sub- sub- categories.

Anyway that was my experience of a new version launch as performed by a legit, buttoned up software company.  I’m a little older and wiser these 14 years hence, and now I run my own software company.

I look back at the experience then and think the whole affair was kinda bush league.  I mean, it wasn’t really, because the bumpiness seen in that particular launch is so darn common.  There’s this general tendency for us all to wince at the prospect of a new version [of software that we already rely on], because the launches thereof being kind of a shit show is practically to be expected.

Still, informed by what I consider the mistakes of the past, I resolved NOT ON MY WATCH.  When Rob gave me designs that pulled for essentially a complete overhaul of the UI, thus befitting of a new major version release, I figured the only acceptable way to do it would be to give CoachAccountable Version 3 the time it needed to be a great coaching tool from the first day of its release.

Specifically, this actually entailed quite a lot:

• I would not hurry its development to meet external expectations.
• I would not create any external expectations, i.e. I would not offer up the new as the not-yet-existing solution to current woes.
• I would test the shit out of it¹ to ensure I was proud to have it out there.
• I would make it good enough to be compelling for current customers to want to switch.
• No one would be forced to switch².
• Everyone could test drive and play around with the new coaching tool version without being stuck there.
• It would be ready to use FULLY on Day 1.
• Every feature that existed in the old would be present in the new.
• I would NOT be buried under issues and bugs post-launch.

So?  I took my sweet time to build Version 3.

At times it was hard to labor in isolation for such a long stretch, with little external feedback to motivate the huge undertaking.  A few noticed that the clip of new releases had stalled out relative to the norm, prompting them to innocently ask “Hey, uh, you working on something you’ve not shared with us?”  It was a fun question to answer.

It’s been a long road but I’m incredibly pleased with the end result.

Three weeks hence I’m proud to report that I’ve NOT been buried under issues and bugs to deal with amid now thousands of users poking around in V3 (as compared to just Paolo and I being in there for so long).

Have the masses found bugs that he and I did not?  Yep, but nothing I haven’t been able to keep on top of.  Our open ticket queue remains well below 10 as the bug reports trickle in, the majority of which I’ve been able to fix within minutes, and the trickiest of which took about two hours (here’s looking at you, automatically responsively resizing embeddable login widget iframe!).

So THAT’S why the secret.  I wasn’t willing to, with current or prospective customers, trade on software that didn’t yet exist, because I didn’t want the stress of external expectations weighing on (and compromising) the process of creating it.

As a result it is my absolute pleasure to give to the coaching community a shiny, vastly improved online coaching platform, offered at the same price (cheaper, actually, given that White Labeling is free in V3), and without the downsides of either compromise (missing or buggy features) or force (having to give up what you already know and love).

Merry Christmas, Coaching industry.

Love,
John :)

This has been in the works for a long time.

It was January of last year (2016) that I invited Lee and Rob, my business partners from back in the Version 1 days (circa 2008-2009), for a meeting to discuss giving CoachAccountable’s coaching management platform an aesthetic facelift.

You see Rob was the one behind the pretty pixels of the original CA coach portal, and it was those pretty pixels that I have extended, remixed, and repurposed throughout all of Version 2’s tenure.  Though the passage of 8 years rendered that look ostensibly stale and dated, there was no one else I’d rather work with to give CA a cleaner, more modern look, and no one I trusted more to design away the sins of my years of cobbling (and overindulgence in CSS gradients :).

“I’d like to basically give it a fresh coat of paint.  A new set of icons, some updated styling rules to pretty up those areas wherein my own programmer design instincts could be improved upon, and whatever tidying up to better unify the visually inconsistent bits.” I said during our two-hour pow wow.  “Could be fun to call this ‘Version 3’, I’ve been evolving Version 2 for over three years now so you could say we’re due.”

Team LeeRob did me way more than I bargained for.

Rather design than a paint job, they went deep into researching modern app designs to re-imagine what the coaching tool could look like if newly designed today.  The mock-ups they presented me took me quite by surprise.

I confess it was not love at first sight.  I mean it sort of was, because yes, they were gorgeous.  But my overarching sentiment was a mix between “But it looks so different from the current version that I and my customers have come to know and love!” and “Oh fuck, this is going to be a lot of work.”¹.

It was all a sort of mental inertia from a successful 3+ years run of the old aesthetic.  Happily, my attitude towards the overhaul softened considerably once I’d built a bunch of it and experienced CoachAccountable in this new, slick style.  After a little while, once V3 became my new baseline for how the coaching software “should” look, the old seemed crusty, and even kinda ugly.

At times it was hard to have that crusty version out there as THE forward facing presentation of CoachAccountable, with no one knowing I was working on this new work of art that I kept hidden away.

Which brings us to today, when after a LOT of work I am so happy to finally reveal CoachAccountable Version 3.

So what’s new?

Well, practically everything.  It’s a bit cliche to say with a software release like this, but truly, the entire system has been given an aesthetic overhaul.  I didn’t mess with the core system functionality one bit, I mean that’s really working, and so I would do so at my own peril, but everything got re-imagined and remixed towards the dual purposes of “make it beautiful” and “make it a joy to use”.

Consider the coaching dashboard, that vital jumping off point.  From Version 2:

And here’s what it looks like in Version 3:

Pretty different, right?  And yet super consistent with V2 in terms of functionality.  Longtime users of CoachAccountable should find themselves quickly feeling right at home within Version 3.  Version 3 is fully on feature parity with Version 2, yet there are a couple of key differences worth pointing out in this broad overview.

White Labeling is now Free

One of the most constant gripes about Version 2 is that the right to white label costs $50/month.  I had my reasons for this, but the main one, to serve as sort of price segmenting that helped me to bootstrap this whole endeavor, no longer holds as necessary.

Business is good, so I’m happy to, as a gift to my customers, give up that sizable chunk of revenue and open up the nicety that is having your coaching system branded as your very own to everyone else.  (Fun fact: this allowed me to skip a bunch of work of bringing forth the branded/not branded dichotomy into the Version 3 code–benevolent laziness for the win!)

Besides being free, White Labeling is improved in several ways.  For example, your system-generated email templates are more customizable than before:

Desktop and Mobile are now One

CA Mobile was the alternate, minified version of Version 2 that was cooked up to responsively accommodate smaller devices.  It got the job done, but it was a pared down experience focused on the day to day work of coaching interactions.

By contrast Version 3 is completely responsive.  CoachAccountable just works on any size screen, meaning every device is able to elegantly access the complete system.  The only exception is drag and drop operations on a touch-only device.  Since dragging on a touchscreen is essentially relegated to scrolling purposes, the drag-and-drop course builder, for example, isn’t fully functional on a smartphone.

Please, no one try to build a course from a smartphone. ;)

Otherwise it’s just all there.  You can get a live taste for how this works by firing up the CA  coaching software on your desktop, then just drag the corner of your browser around to resize the window any which way and watch the system rearrange itself on the fly.  It just works.

Behind the scenes, I’m excited because when I build a new feature, there will be no need to do it twice to cover both mobile and desktop–there’s just one code base to rule them all, meaning I can advance the platform more quickly.

Folder Organization

Popular demand for some time has been calling for a way to organize files into folders.  Done and done, and this holds for templates and courses as well.

Create folder hierarchies as deep as you like, drag and drop both items and folders to move ’em around.  It should feel pretty natural to everyone used to working with file systems on modern computers².

In-app help, for coaches AND clients

The UI of Version 3 is no longer cluttered with inline instructions like were common in V2.  Instead I’ve put that sort of thing into an in-app help system that is woven throughout the system.  On nearly every page and pop up window you’ll find a light bulb icon, which, when clicked, will jump you right to the relevant article.

For example, take the screenshot just above of the Worksheet Templates page.  When we click the light bulb icon in the top right there, this help article slides right into view, like so:

What’s cool is that from whatever article is loaded we can surf around to other related articles, or do a search of the whole knowledge base.  We can resize this help sidebar to take up as much or as little space as is ideal, making it possible to have the guide present while we’re doing our thing within the app.

Also cool?  This very help system is present for your clients, too.  Their side of the house contains its own separate collection of help articles, pared down and tailored to just those things that they would need to know and get answers to.  This should make it easier for them to onboard themselves and feel comfortable in this new coaching system you’ve invited them to.

Again, this overhaul that I’m calling Version 3 was much more encompassing than I’d bargained for when I first discussed a design update with Lee & Rob.  Big hat tip to those two for pushing me to make CoachAccountable the best possible version of itself (they’re amazing designers and creative consultants, they’re busy but hire them if you can).  It runs faster, works better, and is prettier throughout.

It is the perfect foundation for moving forward with what’s next for CoachAccountable, and after all the heads down work done is secret to get this out the door I am excited to finally once again extend the coaching management platform with new functionality.

Should be fun! Join along if you haven’t already.

This year’s cake is actually vegan and gluten free.  You can hardly taste the difference!

Holy moly, that’s like half a decade!

As I look back over the (now quite long) path of this endeavor I’m struck by how thoroughly CoachAccountable has moved past the “startup” phase, how far beyond that humble “Yeah, I’m going to make a web app to help coaches and see if it takes!” hopeful state.

CoachAccountable has taken.

This past year was our biggest yet by a lot in terms of the number of coaches we helped to deliver better and more results-based coaching, and the number of their clients who had a more supported experience with the help of our online coaching platform.

Paolo, my first hire and who came on board during this fifth year, turned out to be a lucky hire indeed.  As many of you have experienced Paolo is wicked smart and a patient teacher for coaches all along the technophobe spectrum.  He is talented well beyond answering support issues and giving demos, and I couldn’t have asked for a better person to be the first to join the CoachAccountable team.

Five years.  I’d like to give a nod to the late, great David Bowie whose song of the same name has been playing in my head for the better part of today and all of composing this missive.

Our work is far from done, so I say here’s to five more.  I’ve had so many life-giving and inspiring interactions with coaches while on this path, so it is decidedly my pleasure to keep on it in service of the practice I revere.

I got a note the other week with an interesting ask from Adil of Adil Iman Coaching:

Evening John,

Hope all is well. I love the software and I will be sure to sign up after the trial.  I am shooting a video next week about what happens in a coaching session and there after.

Are you okay for me to mention this software and if so what could I say in a nutshell to sell the idea.

Any suggestions or scripts would be fantastic.

Thank you for creating a great software.

Regards,
Adil

I found this interesting because it made me consider a problem I’ve never myself had: how to sell the idea of using CoachAccountable’s online coaching platform to a client.  As you might imagine I’m steeped deep within the world of using CA and I practically shudder to think of the dark days of trying to coach without it (they’re not dark days, of course, I just remember it being much harder and a lot less rigorous).

So I naturally think there’s nothing to it: if they’re sold on you as a coach you can just shuffle them right along into your process (a sort of “Welcome to the program, here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll be tracking our plans and our results in here, etc. etc.”).

But of course there’s power in being able to show off how you’ll be doing your work BEFORE your client signs on the dotted line.  I was reminded of this truth by a note I got this morning, a coach named Christina who opened to say “I would love to use CA as a way to differentiate myself. E.g. on my website – let my clients know that when they coach with me they get access to CA.”

So this is a useful area for us to help coaches in.  It’s a tricky proposition: every coach has a different style (and often vein of coaching: we have business coaches, health and wellness coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, addiction coaches, ADHD coaches, and more) so it’s tricky to prepare materials for a diverse collection of coaches who are going to be working with an even more diverse collection of clients, but there are a few resources we can offer that cover the more universal, broad strokes.

The “Show your value” video illustrates a number of ideas on how to showcase your coaching for prospective clients with the aid of CoachAccountable.

The Client Manual is another resource you as coach have handy to share with your clients, to better let them know what they’ll be getting with you.

But here Adil gave me another interesting angle: if you were to shoot a video to explain to a client what they’re getting themselves into, what would you say to introduce the use of CoachAccountable?

Here’s the example riff I gave Adil for such a script, which I think is surprisingly applicable and adaptable across the board:

…So by the end of our coaching session you and I are going to have come up with a few things: things for you to keep in mind during the coming week, a few action items for you to tackle before the next time we talk, maybe we’ll have you tracking something.

To make this all real (and not just some cool ideas of what do to) we’re going to set these things up using our coaching tool, to support you AFTER our session in getting these things done.  The reminders will help to ensure you follow through on what there is, and when we reconvene the next time you and I are both going to have a very clear picture of what you got accomplished during the interim, and where you could use some extra support.

We’re gonna gonna focus on real results, we’re gonna make sure you’re making real progress.  You’re gonna love it.

Just as I was happy to share this with Adil I’m happy to share this with you to plagiarize freely.  Tailor it to the specifics of your personal coaching practice as you see fit to best convey how CA will play a vital and enhancing component of the experience of being coached by you. And, for those of you who haven’t yet started the free 30-day trial, keep this extra aspect in mind as you evaluate the value of CA for your coaching practice.

We’re going to go deeper into how to get your clients excited to work with you specifically because of what you’ll be able to bring to them via CoachAccountable, but for now these ideas should give you a nice foundation on which to build.  Enjoy!

CoachAccountable is designed to be a complete experience for coach and client, with the intended goal of using coaching software make the coaching relationship better for both parties. This comes with the assumption that coaches AND clients use the coaching management system. Due to a number of reasons: lack of familiarity, aversion to technology in general, the hesitance that comes with trying anything new, clients might not use the system as much as you’d like, or how you’d like.

Fortunately, we’ve noticed a number of things one can do that increases the likelihood that clients not only use the system, but embrace it and love it.

Clients should know that you’re a fan, a big fan

To start, we’ve noticed that clients who take to our coaching management system do so because the coaches themselves are fans of the system. More importantly, these coaches communicate to the clients that using the system is an important part of their coaching experience. Some coaches even pitch CoachAccountable as an “added bonus” clients receive as part of their coaching program, and talk about the ease and convenience that online software will afford them.

There’s something to be said about showing enthusiasm when letting your clients know about the benefits of using coaching software and how it’ll make their lives easier.

Communicate HOW you want your clients to use the system

Related to this, coaches should have an idea of how they’d like their clients to use the system, and be able to communicate this to their clients. Clarity is key here. If you expect clients to be more active users, ones that set up their own Actions, Worksheets, Metrics, and are active in Journaling, make that clear. If you expect clients to be more passive, only interacting with CA via the various notifications and email reminders that get sent out, that’s fine as long as it’s clearly communicated.

A bit can be said about selling the process here. For example, the more passive type of usage can be billed as a simple, time-friendly way to interact with the software. Many clients are busy, and this is the perfect way to improve results but also keep actual coaching platform usage time to a minimum.

Communicating that the system is important, as well as how to use it, can be done in many ways. Aside from your personal interactions via actual client calls, there are many opportunities within CA. Some coaches assign an initial Worksheet that welcomes the client to the system and walks them through certain features and how to use them — a personalized coaching tools manual if you will. You can also use a Whiteboard as a persistent reference. Feel free to use both.

Some coaches record screencast videos of themselves as clients, clicking around the system and talking about the experience. None of this needs to be long — the best ones are relatively short and to the point (videos less than 1 minute). Starter Kit Courses are great for onboarding new clients so that they hit the ground running.

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics

Another important thing is to set up at least one or two Metrics for your clients. If you’re not sure what to track, you can ask them. Metrics are important because they make progress real for your clients. Metrics basically take your coaching, and the impact that you make, and turn it into numbers that your clients see. This is exciting stuff and should be communicated to the clients as such. Clients should know that Metrics are a way of showing that the coaching that they’re paying money for is having a tangible impact on their lives.

Happenings Reports

The Stream allows a client to view a record of their work within the system. It does its job well, but still requires the client to log in CoachAccountable and actually click the Stream tab.

Especially for clients that seem to interact with CA only via email, Happenings Reports can be a nice way of showing them their progress. Having an automated email summary of what they’ve been up to show up right in their inbox can certainly be a delight. More on Happenings Reports here.

Everything discussed above assumes a certain amount of proficiency in CoachAccountable — in other words, knowing the coaching tools that exist and how to use them. Understanding the system well and being able to communicate its benefits increases the likelihood that clients embrace CA.  To that end, I encourage you to reach out to us at support@coachaccountable.com if you’d like to brainstorm about anything regarding your coaching, or simply just to do a session to understand the system better.  Happy Coaching!

I’m going to open this discussion with a quote:

With great power comes great responsibility.
– Voltaire (or maybe Spiderman, for some reason it’s not clear)

CoachAccountable gives you, as coach, great power to cause accountability, follow through, and ultimately results with the people you coach.  It can serve as a brilliant “auto nag” system that can gently guide your clients to act upon your coaching, doing so in a hands-off manner that takes the edge off any creepy feeling that you’re obsessing over what they’re doing (or not doing) in a given week.

You have the power to set in motion timely reminders for the assignments you give your coaching clients, helpful reminders for upcoming appointments, notifications of when deadlines have slipped, and routine prompts for tracking things of importance.

These things can be sent via email or text.  They happen automatically.  They nudge your clients to succeed.  They’re great.

Until they’re not.

This great power entails great responsibility: you can set up CoachAccountable to be this lovely vehicle of awareness, but by the same token you can (inadvertently!) set up the coaching software to spam your clients into annoyance and tuning out the whole thing.

With great power comes great responsibility.

We occasionally hear from coaches (sometimes as part of their cancellation feedback!) that their clients are overwhelmed by the notifications that our online coaching platform sends.

I’m going to make a provocative statement here and now about client overwhelm and CA:

If your clients are overwhelmed by the notifications of CoachAccountable, you’re doing it wrong.

This is good news, though: like any bad thing with which the ball’s in your court, you have the power to do something about it.

Happily, CoachAccountable gives you a LOT of control by which to do something about it.  Let’s take a look!

Notification Settings

The first place to go to tune how much and when CoachAccountable notifies your clients (and you!) is over on the right in Settings >> System >> Notifications.

This page offers numerous settings; here are the ones concerning Actions and Worksheets.

Maybe we just shouldn’t notify our clients when things fall behind, and just talk about it on our calls instead?

With a few clicks you can turn off notifications for late assignments for all of your clients.  Note how many of these are to do with YOUR preferences, when YOU want the system to send you notification of things your clients are up to.  (So if you as coach are feeling overwhelmed by the coaching software’s notifications, this is a good page to visit!)

Appointment Reminder Defaults

If you use CoachAccountable to schedule coaching appointments with your clients, the system will send handy reminders to both you and them to ensure you’re both prepared for a productive session.  When setting up your Appointment Types (Settings >> Appointment Config >> Appointment Types) you can create a set of default appointments.

In these defaults you can find a nice balance between being reasonably certain your clients will be prepared for your session, like this…

This should suffice to have ’em come prepared.

…and just plain annoying them, like this:

Why would anybody do this? Please nobody do this.

Assignment Reminders

Like Appointments, when setting up Action items and Worksheets for your clients you are able to set in motion a collection of reminders to go with it, like so:

One thing working in our favor here is that once an Action (or Worksheet) has been marked complete, the coaching management system won’t send out any more reminders for it (no need to be reminded to do something that’s already been done, right?).

There is still to use moderation.  It might be tempting to set up a big string of reminders (it’s not due for 2 weeks, I should have the system remind them every day so they don’t forget!), but again we want to make sure our clients don’t get more reminders than would actually be difference-making.  When we cross that threshold we risk entering the eyes-glaze-over zone for these notifications (wherein they’re simply ALL ignored).

For longer-term assignments I like to give 2 reminders: one that’s somewhere in the middle of the time span between assignment and due date (a sort of “hey, this assignment is still out there, so make sure you’re working on it!”), and one that’s just a little before the deadline (ideally functioning as a “hey, you’ve still got enough time to get this done on time, so please get on it if you haven’t already!”).

Smaller or more near-term assignments I like to give 1 or zero reminders.  Why would I not set any reminders at all?  Well…

Be Mindful of the Whole Picture

In a coaching call you and your client might come up with a dozen good things for he or she to get done in the coming week.  Reminders for each is apt to be tedious: you might attach a reminder to just a few key Action items, or maybe even make an additional Action item to serve as a helpful prompt for your client to get crackin’ on their list:

Your preferred degree of flippant vulgarity, of course. Never underestimate the boon of a little levity.

Mind any Metric Mayhem

Metrics keep your clients on top of performance and reporting of key thing they’re out to track/improve over the course of working for you.  Reminders make reporting a breeze, being sent off whichever days a data point is called for.  Some things they’ll be tracking weekly, some things they’ll be tracking daily.

Like “Being Mindful of the Whole Picture” above, think about how the collection of Metrics a given client is working on will play out in terms of reminders.  If they have, say, 8 things they’re tracking daily, it could be a bit much to get 8 emails every day, each prompting your client for “What’s your number on this thing for today?”.  If you’ve got your client tracking a lot of things regularly you might skip all the reminders and setup something like a regular Worksheet into which they can report on everything in one fell swoop.

Group Notification Settings

CoachAccountable’s group coaching tools give even more opportunity for both greatness and overwhelm. They are great in that they serve as a hub for your coaching groups to communicate about the shared experience of going through your coaching program, a way to foster a sense of community and shared accountability.  But for some people in some groups, getting an email every time someone posts a message or a comment to the group is just too much.

Let your clients know that they can opt out of comments and/or messages from other group members by simply clicking the “Settings” button while logged in and looking at the Group.  You as coach can set the defaults for these settings to whatever is going to be most appropriate for your people:

Zero to Sixty in 4-5 (settings)

Ultimately CoachAccountable can be configured to send way too many notifications to your clients, or none at all.  Between these two extremes lies a sweet spot for any given client, a volume in which CoachAccountable is sending helpful prompts to keep progress moving along between your sessions and without blowing up their inbox.  Tuning the settings in these 4 or 5 areas will allow you and your clients to find just that right balance.

There’s no one size fits all, but know that you don’t have to get it perfect right off the bat.  After they’ve been on it for a week or two, ask your client how the system’s automated notifications are working and tune as needed.  It’s a great way to be truly of service to your client, and to help them get the most out of your coaching.

Curious about all this customization? Try CoachAccountable free for 30 days.

Most of the time, I interact with CoachAccountable customers through phone, email, or screen share. While I think those are all perfectly acceptable forms of communication, I relish the opportunity to meet with one of our coaching portal customers face to face. Getting to know coaches is one of the perks of my work, and the best way to do so is in person.

That opportunity — my first — came up the other week. David Frank Gomes, of Life Compass Coaching, emailed John to ask a couple of questions. David recently joined the volunteer board of Create Change, a charity working to empower girls and youth in Canada and Ghana, and he wanted to know how to best set up program participants in CoachAccountable.

David, who resides in beautiful Vancouver, has been a user and fan of CoachAccountable for a couple of years now, and had actually met with John in person back in 2014. Since I had a trip planned to Vancouver to visit family, John suggested that David and I meet up. Thank you John for keeping me in mind!

David and I ended up meeting at a cafe right next to the scenic Granville Island. Coffee in hand and laptop and iPad open, we talked about how to best setup the Create Change program — a leadership and marketing program for Vancouver highschool kids who raise money to send girls in Ghanan to school — in CoachAccountable.

It was a fantastic time. I listened to his vision for the program and how CA would fit, especially including our group coaching tools. We went through Courses and Groups and piping in Worksheets from Metrics. One suggestion I gave that seems to be much appreciated with whoever I talk to is the idea of Starter Kit Courses. If nothing else, take advantage of the automatic delivery of Courses to send onboarding messages, Worksheets, and maybe even a short screencast tutorial to get new clients off and running with the system.

The beauty of meeting up in person is the conversation: the attempt to understand the coach and the program and the subsequent feedback and back and forth that occurs as new questions and ideas inevitably arise. And to top it all off, selfies are possible:

I appreciate the chance to get to know our customers because I end up learning more about coaching, why folks become coaches, and more and more, what quality coaching looks like. All valuable knowledge in and of itself, but especially in the context of the work I do.

Thanks for meeting up with me David. It was lovely chatting with you and I’m glad I could be of service!

Here is a great example of where CoachAccountable’s coaching software gets better through me being exposed to a style of doing things other than my own.

The calendar feed of appointments is a lovely thing, allowing both coaches and clients to have appointments [set within CoachAccountable] appear right within their usual calendars (like Google Calendars, iCal, and Outlook).

Beyond the what and when, calendar software aficionados know that it’s handy to have location and descriptive information about a calendar event right there as well.

For my sake when it comes to coaching appointments there’s nothing to it: “where” is invariably on the phone, and there are no access or dial-in details to speak of, or really anything else–I call them and that’s that.

But last Thursday I had a great call with Liz Heiman of Percio Strategies.  We went over a bevy of great questions of how to set up and do this or that within our coaching tool, and Liz made a great case for how useful it would be to have location and description information about an appointment appear right along side appointments within people’s calendars: vital for coordination of meeting locations and a great boon to timely attendance to have dial in information right there for attendees.

I.e. CoachAccountable really should have location and description information settable for appointments, and that information should appear right in people’s calendars.

I was sold.  I spent the afternoon adding this to CoachAccountable.  Let’s see how this works!

Adding location and/or descriptive information to your CoachAccountable Appointments starts with your setup of Appointment Types.

When adding or editing any Appointment Type, scroll down and you’ll see a new line toward the bottom, “Extra:”, with a link to click:

Give it a click and you’ll be presented with places to type in your extra information:

Once setup for a given Appointment Type, you’ll have this information pre-filled in for any appointments you schedule of this type.  If you’d like to modify this information (or even just give it a peek) you can by clicking the “Modify location/description information…” link when scheduling:

This is nice if, say, the dial-in information varies sometimes, or you want to add a little note for your clients to see in their calendars:

Once this is set, where can this be seen by coach and client?

First off it’s visible to both parties within CoachAccountable in the widget listing of upcoming appointments.  Simply click on the Calendar icon for an appointment that has either or both a location and description set, and it will appear:

But the real fun of this is having this information appear right in your calendar system of choice, provided you’ve done the one-time setup to make your CoachAccountable appointments appear there.  Here’s how that appointment shows up when viewed in Google Calendar:

And there you have it!  You can put key location and descriptive information in your appointment types if it’s standard and consistent, customize it when scheduling specific appointments in case it’s not, and ultimately have this information appear right in yours and your client’s calendars automatically.

My thanks again to Liz for her insightful glimpse into the world of relying upon calendar scheduling and integration for more than just the what and when, CoachAccountable is better for its expanded support of calendar integration!

If you love how responsive we are to customer requests, why not become a customer?