The CoachAccountable Blog

Lordy me, has another year gone by already?

Fresh from the Photoshop I mean bakery.

Indeed!  It’s now been a full 3 years since the public release of CoachAccountable2.0, and what a delightful year.

Year 3 marked Team Edition’s move into real use.  Much like CoachAccountable Basic, Team had little uptake for the first few months of its public existence.  But after that similar stint in obscurity a number of organizations took to using it, and with that real world feedback I continued to refine it.

In a similar vein a few power users pushed the envelope of what they needed CA to be able to do, resulting in support for more complicated, fancy things like Group Courses, Group Item visibility settings, and weaving Project grouping into Course Action items.

Inspired by the needs and structure of some intricate programs offered via CA by power users, CoachAccountable also got Form-based worksheets, which when combined with Metrics and Courses make possible the delivery of some rather sophisticated programs indeed!

Teaching coaches to be better coaches with the benefit of CA was another direction of creative output this year, including videos on how to be an awesome coach with Appointments, Actions, and Metrics, and presented all together in an in-system Tutorial.

Click the “Tutorial” tab on the bottom right when logged in for these lessons.

Here are some of the other fun things that got added in year 3:

1. Sync with your regular calendar to avoid double booking and offer accurate scheduling options.
2. Group Directories to let your group members opt to share contact information.
3. Support for clients to pay your invoices online via Stripe or Authorize.net.
4. A calendar feed for your clients so they’ll keep up on their appointments with you.
5. Whiteboards for general purpose sharing and posting of information.
6. System Email Addresses which are seriously cool but most people have overlooked: post messages and share files with the benefit of CA but do so from your regular email program.
7. And perhaps my favorite, the spelling out of how I run this business known as the Terms of Awesome.

Oh yeah, and there’s an API now.

Way cuter now than when she was sporting the CA onesie.

For me personally, the majority of CA’s third year was marked by the arrival and presence of our daughter, Kira, who was born one month in.  (She had a cameo appearance on this blog earlier, showing off the first ever CoachAccountable merchandise.)

Upon looking back at the list above I’m happy I managed to get as much done as I did, despite the broken sleep and adorable distraction!  Fun fact: both Kira and CA have tripled in size during this year, by weight and customers, respectively.

As CA’s third year comes to a close, I’ve an announcement that I’m very happy to make:

CoachAccountable mobile will be released in September.

It’s been in the works for a while now and coming together beautifully.  This is one of the most requested features for CA, and indeed one of the last major pieces of the system yet to come for it to be truly complete.

While fully functional on any device with a modern web browser, CA as-is takes some pinching and zooming to get around on a smartphone and so could be better.  Mobile means it’ll work great on smartphones for both you and your clients, making regular usage like reporting Metrics and scheduling Appointments super smooth and super practical to do on the go.

My focus with Mobile is to make things in the regular flow of coaching (and being coached) as good as they can be, so I’m keeping the stuff of getting set up (like building Courses and tinkering with configuration options) limited to the desktop version.

Here are a few screenshots.

Login page.  White label branded when appropriate:

Actions.   Swiping on a given Action reveals relevant controls:

Setting up a new client Action:

Client Metrics:

Looking Ahead

The near release of mobile-friendly CA is of course the most immediately exciting thing I have to point to.  You’re probably wondering, will CA be then found in the app stores?  The answer is yes, eventually.  I just haven’t yet worked out what to do about white label customers: it’s straightforward enough to put CA branded as CA into the app store, but submitting and maintaining apps and the approval process is much less tenable for a multitude of customers, and might well raise some ire with the folks at Apple who generally seem pretty keen on careful curating.

More teaching via tutorial videos is on the docket.  After making the well-received trio on Appointments, Actions and Metrics I put others on hold, realizing that there was still much changing in the system and it’s hardly fun to have to redo them (the Appointments tutorial, for example, is already outdated!).

Last year in this space I said I would be creating a CoachAccountable users group and an improved affiliate program.  Those didn’t happen, they probably will this year.  Call it part naivety in my estimation of what I could complete amid the onset of parenthood, and part they got bumped in favor of other things that weren’t then on my radar.

I’ve got work to do to grow the system to better fit more enterprise-y needs: a few times I’ve been asked how well CA would handle 1000+ clients, and the answer is it’ll take some tweaks so as not to be a clunky mess.  But there are still more goodies ahead for smaller coaching businesses as well, such as letting prospective clients schedule themselves for appointments.

All in all it’s been a good year, and I’m excited for the next one.  Growing and evolving this platform continues to be a lot of fun, and my thanks as always to the growing community of coaches and organizations on this journey with me.

Hot on the heels of releasing the ability to have Worksheet answers populate Metrics, I got a question from Laura Watson of Venture Coaching, which asked if a similar thing could be added to support setting up Actions:

I am building a project planning worksheet for my clients. We use this on a quarterly basis to plan personal and professional projects together. The worksheet includes an area for creating action steps.

On the worksheet I’m creating in CA, I will have my clients fill in their action steps using the simple text field. I’m wondering if, at some point, it would be possible to have these action step fields linked to actual actions so we don’t have to enter the data twice.

To that I replied:

Good question, and it’s in many ways a good idea.  On first consideration however the answer is PROBABLY not ever.  The reason is that Actions within CoachAccountable are so much more than just what would be filled out in the single line: in addition to the “what”, CA also tracks the “by when”, reminders, and optionally which project the action falls under.

Since the complete data entry process for a given action is so much more complex, I doubt I’ll support having worksheet inputs pipe into Actions (to wit, setting up Worksheets to pipe into Metrics with a comment is complex enough to get right when creating a worksheet template! :)

Still, perhaps at some point I’ll allow simple action creation with just the what and by when, perhaps a date picker type of input to be put into the form-based worksheets.  It’s good food for thought!

She thanked me for the reply, and liked the idea using the worksheet for the “what” part and having clients fill out the rest in the Actions tab.

With a little more time to mull on it, I added the following in reply:

Since writing you another thought does occur to me: you MIGHT consider an alternate approach in which you in your worksheet prompt your clients to more literally make their action plan, rather than type in a few one-liners that don’t have the same sort of supported reality.  After all, Actions are living things with due dates and alerts, and optionally (ideally) have project-based organization with progress meters which satisfyingly fill up as things are marked off.  By contrast, it’s an uphill battle to get clients to go back and read an already completed worksheet.

So you could skip the double-data entry, by preferring instead that your clients make actual Action plans to just typing into a worksheet.  It won’t be that much an interruption as it’s guaranteed they’ll be logged in already, and 3 Action Projects will be perfect to organize the 3 Benchmarks.  Extra bonus?  A worksheet once submitted CAN’T be edited unless you send it back their way, but Actions can be added to and/or modified at any time as a quarter progresses. :)

I was honored to get back a simple reply:

Great ideas, thanks for this!

And I was honored not just because I was able to be helpful and not just because I avoided putting another new feature on my to-do list (both super cool, don’t get me wrong).  But rather because here was an established way of doing things, and there exists within CA a way to do it better if only by being willing to restructure a little.

More generally speaking, it occurs to me that any established part of your coaching style is worth revisiting to see if it can’t be tailored to how CoachAccountable works.  Not for CoachAccountable’s sake, because who cares, right?  But for the sake of making your coaching better in ways that would not otherwise be possible.

Sometimes that takes shifting out of an established way of doing things, disrupting inertia in favor of giving your clients a better experience.  Don’t hesitate to ask if you could use a little guidance in how to bring your style of coaching to life with the tools of CA–with a little creativity there are some real wins to be had.

A few weeks ago a CA user, about a month in on his Team Edition account, sent me a support request note that simply read:

Can I hire you or someone on your team to build out our system?

To this I replied:

Depends on what you need.  In an ideal world I would be able to get you guys up and going with an hour or two of collaboration, and I’m happy to do that gratis.  If you’re looking for more than that I’d have to see what exactly you need.

Give me a call whenever convenient today and I’ll see what I can do to get you sorted!

We were talking shortly thereafter, and while I like to think that just a little direction over the phone is all anyone needs to set up even really sophisticated programs, it was after about 20 minutes I was asked if I could come out to work with the team directly, next week, if possible.  “That would be ideal.  We’re at a breaking point with scaling up our programs and we really need to nail our setup to have things go smoothly.”

I quick checked my schedule and confirmed that an overnight would be alright with the Mrs. (‘cuz you know, we’ve got a little one and I don’t want to ride roughshod over my wife being saddled with full-on Kira duty), and then sent back the thumbs up.  Within minutes my flight and hotel were booked, and my day rate was paid, half-day plus a half-day.

This was my first taste of doing business with Garrett White of Wake Up Warrior.  I immediately liked his style.

Garrett is thoroughly tatted, decidedly cut, and has a booming voice and personality.  Contrary to any stereotypes that the preceding adjectives might’ve conjured in your head, he is a fellow who meditates daily, constantly builds up the people around him, and signs his program emails “Love and light,”.  For a taste of his style and intensity go watch his 4 minute introductory riff about his programs.

I arrived at John Wayne Airport on a Wednesday early afternoon and was immediately picked up in the ‘Warrior wagon’, a big ol’ van black van decked out with 6-foot-tall Wake Up Warrior insignia.  Jeremy, Garrett’s Chief Marketing Officer who picked me up, explained this was for taking participants in their Warrior Weeks out for intensive, day-long programs.  Off we headed to Maro Wood Grill in Laguna Beach to get started proper with lunch.

Garrett welcomed me with a big hug and a handshake.  Over lunch we got to talking about our respective paths which got us to where we are in the coaching world, and how CoachAccountable was poised to be instrumental to their continued growth.  The key thing was to automate the systems they already had in place (largely a patchwork of Wufoo forms, Schedule Once appointments, and coaching call & webinar recordings)  so that they could continue to scale without being spread too thin on the coaching side of things.

After lunch we got to it back in their office.  Garrett began by outlining on the whiteboards the current weekly flow of their 90-day programs: the touch points, the interactions, the assignments, all of it.

“This will be fun,” I declared when everything was written up, “CoachAccountable as is can do pretty much everything you need.  Fire up your account and let’s get to it.”

Garrett and Jeremy both had their laptops out and logged in to CA, and took turns plugging in to the wall mounted flat screen by which I could oversee their work and backseat drive.  “Click here, okay now go over there and set that up.”  I barked orders with impunity, assured that bossing them around and guiding the setup of their systems was the very reason I was brought out.

We covered a lot of ground, including:

• Setting up availability and the appropriate Appointment types for the coaches to manage their weekly one-on-ones and on-demand sessions, including setting up the right pre-session worksheets to be sent to program participants automatically prior to appointment, the so-called “One-on-One Hot Seat” form.  This was to eliminate the pain of crisscrossing schedules and participants forgetting or not being prepared for their calls.  The pre-session worksheet was a nice touch to make things easier and save time, and the team being able to see all of the coaches’ appointment schedules in one place was a win as well.
• Setup daily checklist Worksheets to record numbers into Metrics using the newfangled ability to do so.  This served to make tracking of the so-called “Core-4” practices as frictionless as possible, a key component to instilling the core practices taught by the program.
• Setup a Course to manage the 3 worksheets per day that participants are to fill out.  This served to both make the guys more likely to actually do the work, and eliminate the serious weekly pain of tracking down who’s done what and getting on the case of those with incompletions.
• Created Groups so that members could have transparency and accountability among each other for their key Metrics, thereby eliminating the pain of having one of the staff spend hours each week painstakingly compiling all the stats into an Excel spreadsheet.  That group members can each see each other’s stats has the nice side effect of creating a healthy sort of pissing content about who’s keeping up the best, and a positive pressure to not fall behind.
• Experimented with daisy-chained course items (e.g complete the first worksheet and then you are assigned the second one, complete the second one and the third one finally goes out) and decided that could be a fantastic way to get participants to actually fill out ALL of the assignments each day (“There are some guys who like to fill out their numbers each day but never both with the Power Focus and the Positive Focus worksheets.”  The solution?  Make the numbers Worksheet follow the completion of the other two.)

On the morning of the second day Garrett invited me to meditate with him and Jeremy before we got going, or if it wasn’t my thing to just hang out while they did their 20 minutes.  I was happy to join, and felt remarkably clear headed and refreshed at the end.

I saw wisdom in that detour prior to commencing work.  “Wow, good one Garrett,” I said as we got going, “Since I’m very much a brain worker, I think you’re going to get more of your money’s worth by taking out that 20 minutes.”

“Of course!  You do much better work when your mind’s all settled.”

What a delightful working environment.

On day 2 I whipped out my own laptop and got to making a few improvements to the system in response to perspective gained watching these power users do their thing.  Jeremy was having fun making daisy-chained sequences in the Course builder, and since that was to be a daily set I improved Course Item cloning to clone daisy-chained items as well.

Since they were building out a 90-day course with very regular, repeating components, I also made it so that course item cloning can be done a multiple of times at once, making it a very quick matter to build out a repeating course timeline spanning months.  “Hey Jeremy, hit refresh.  Okay, now click the little clone icon.”

I don’t make a regular habit of coding on the fly for an audience, but man is it satisfying to build out improvements in real time and have them be immediately useful.  It’s a sort of feedback that with a web-based business I seldom get to enjoy.

Wake Up Warrior is indeed one of those power users who push the limits of the system and cause it to become better in response.  Thanks to them, the rest of the CoachAccountable users get to enjoy the following improvements:

• Individual Group Members can work at an independent paces on daisy-chained Group Course items.
• Team admins can directly update the message templates for other coaches.
• Notifications of new items sent out in response to completing prior items are delivered right within the system when a client is logged in, rather than always defaulting to email.
• A course participant can be jumped directly into any point in the course other than Day 1.
• The display of dispatch and due dates for assignments is more logical in the course builder.
• Clicking on a Worksheet in the Up Next listing brings that worksheet right up for working on.
• Public-style calendar feeds are now correctly understood and used for carving out availability for appointment scheduling.
• Several subtle bugs fix and subtle usability tweaks that just make the system nicer and more robust.

All in all the trip was a real win.  Contrary to my earlier belief that just a little time on the phone would do the trick to get them going and making the most of the platform, my time spent guiding Garrett and his team was received as a huge boon to their efforts leveraging CA.  Indeed, I was able to talk them through a lot more of the nuances of how to coach and how to setup the structures than I thought I could fill in an hour (or even two) on the telephone.

Garrett even casually insisted on paying my day rate for a second day, even though our agreement had been for just one day.  “I mean, you’re here a second day, taking this time away from your family and all that, right?”  Can’t argue that logic when so politely applied.

For my sake there was something deeply satisfying about being among people who are benefiting from and excited about my creation.  “We’ve got this great software”, Jeremy mused at one point aloud to Garrett, “and the guy who created it is sitting right here beside us.”  Goodness it’s nice to get out, a nice bit of perspective to underscore what I’m doing with CA and the impact it makes.

(Yeesh, that last paragraph was quite the pat on my own back, right?  Seriously though, it’s fun to be onsite.)

When it was nearly time for me to head back to the airport Garrett thanked me for being there and headed off to do his next thing.  As Jeremy and I left the Wake Up Warrior office it finally occurred to me to get a picture of us, but Garrett was by then gone.  Jeremy was a sport an took one of me outside the office–I swear it’s legit and not just me doing a selfie from the sidewalk as an uninvited guest. :)

I look forward to seeing how things unfold for Wake Up Warrior, their coaches, programs and participants.  Two weeks in and I’m told the new system is already a hit, well loved and a most welcome improvement over the old.

In the two previous posts we’ve covered the basics of using Worksheets within CoachAccountable, and how to wield their Form-Based variant.

Now let’s look to the next level of power in using Worksheets: setting them up to have your clients’ answers feed into their Metrics.

This is a bit abstract, so let’s consider a concrete example to see how this is useful.

A quick warning before we dive in: the ideas to follow are the stuff of putting a lot of features of CoachAccountable together to make elaborate, sophisticated setups to serve your coaching clients.  It is cool stuff, but requires a certain familiarity with some of the basic building blocks of the system, like Actions, Courses and Metrics.  If you’re familiar with these things already then you’re set, and might be delighted to learn of the fancy, integrated and automated setups that are possible.  If you’re NOT familiar, you might want to learn those basics first (though reading on here may serve as good motivation for that learning!).

Right then, let’s dive in.

Say you offer your clients a 3 month program.  It could be business coaching, a nutrition program, sales training, or any number of other variations.  Whatever it is, you know that in order for them to get the most out of the program, it’s a good idea for your program participants to keep up with several daily practices.  Say for example you encourage them to every day:

• Exercise for 20 minutes
• Call or email someone important in their life just to catch up
• Take at least 10 minutes of quiet time
• Write in their gratitude journal

You might have more, fewer, or different practices for your participants to take on as part of their program with you.  Whatever they are, there are several that are useful and you want to support your people in having these be regular, daily habits.

To a large extent these are like Action items to do every day.  But doing these as Actions would be cumbersome for both you and clients, and clutter up the Actions tab with largely redundant stuff anyway–not a great fit.

Metrics would be good: a Binary Metric to track the things that you either did or you didn’t (like the journaling and calling a friend), and a Measurement Metric to track exactly how much you did of a practice (like how many minutes spend exercising and taking quality time).

But reporting on many Metrics every day can be a cumbersome task: your don’t want to flood your client with too many Metric Reminders on a daily basis, either by email or text, to get their numbers all in each day.  (Incidentally this point also applies to series of Metrics you might have them track which have nothing to do with daily practices but instead more regular performance tracking.  The scenario of tracking numerous Metrics of any kind is applicable to everything that is to follow in this lesson.)

Here’s where a Worksheet comes into play: something like a daily checklist for clients to fill out, allowing them to quickly report on their daily practices (and more generally, any daily Metrics).  Here’s a worksheet template I made to do this:

Anticipated time to fill out: 24 seconds.  If that.  Why did I say “take 2 minutes” in the preamble then?  I dunno, some variation of “under promise, over deliver” I suppose.

Simple worksheet, right?  Should be a snap to fill out, and effectively has our clients reporting on how they did on their daily practices (and perhaps more importantly, merely being presented with this worksheet goes a long way to remind/encourage them to actually DO these practices–who wants to fill out goose eggs?).

Now then: wading through a stack of Worksheets to see overall performance would be a slog, tough to gauge how a given individual is doing over time.  This is where having these tracked as Metrics is ideally suited.  So let’s look at how to pipe the answers from this daily checklist into Metrics which can span our 3 month program.

The key here to linking a Worksheet to one or more Metrics is the name we give to the inputs.  See the name given to the first question:

The name of a form input is one of those things that doesn’t SEEM important, but turns out to be key for playing with data.

The name of a form input is one of those things that doesn’t SEEM important, but turns out to be key for playing with data.exerciseMinutes is the name we gave to the first input.  Let’s go now and create a Metric for tracking those minutes of exercise, and set it up so that the filling out of this daily worksheet causes the corresponding daily data point to be reported.

Pipe data into this Metric? Ooooh, say more about that.

The key here is the little “Pipe data into this Metrics from a worksheet…” link.  Give that a click and we’re presented with the option of WHICH worksheet input should pipe into this Metric, taken from the input names that are present within our Form-Based Worksheets:

No need to remember what we named our inputs when we made the template, we’re given options to choose from.

For this Exercise-tracking Metric we want the exerciseMinutes input, which is effectively telling CoachAcccountable “Whenever a worksheet is submitted with an input named exerciseMinutes as part of it, please take whatever was filled in to that input and make a Metric data point out of it.”

Since we picked the “Must be a whole, positive number” option for validation (see the “Edit Form Input” figure above), we can be assured that whatever is typed in by your clients for that input will be a sensible data value for this Metric.

Metric data points of course are always tied to a date, and the date of a Metric data point (as piped in from a Worksheet) will always match the date that that Worksheet was assigned.  So when your client fills out their Wednesday Worksheet, even if they mark it complete one or more days later, doing so will fill in Metric data points for that Wednesday.

We set up 3 other Metrics to track our other 3 practices: reaching out, taking quiet time, and gratitude journaling.  In each case, we choose the right input name from which we’ll be piping worksheet values in.

We assign our client the worksheet, and she fills it in like so:

Actual time taken: 8 seconds. Not bad!

Then, almost like magic, the data points for the 4 Metrics are filled in:

Completion of the February 4th Worksheet fills in data for that day in the 4 Metrics.

Kinda fun.

Piping In Comments

One of the thing that makes Metrics so powerful is that, in addition to the raw number for a given day, they allow your clients to add a brief comment on that number, which helps to tell the story behind a particular set of results.

But when Metric data is piped in from our example Worksheet as we have setup, there’s really no place for your clients to type in comments to accompany the numeric values they’re entering.

Let’s fix this by augmenting our Worksheet with inputs for clients to add comments:

The placeholder text serves to prompt for respective comments. We could’ve also typed out those prompts the old fashioned way, just above the inputs.  Stylistic variations, yo’.

Now here’s the trick to make it work: the names of our new input items were crafted to match the names of the inputs that are themselves setup to pipe into our Metrics.  Specifically, the name of the comment input is the name of the input that is to feed into a given Metric with “_comment” slapped on to the end.

So for example the input for collecting comments on our exerciseMinutes value is exerciseMinutes_comment.  Likewise, the input for commenting on the reachedOut value is reachedOut_comment, and so on.

The “_comment” suffix on the input name is the key.

Right then, we’ve got our modified Worksheet all setup to capture values for our 4 Metrics, PLUS comments on each.  Let’s (magically fast-forward one day and) assign it to our client for reporting on the April 12 data points:

Adding comments gives more to the story of what we’re tracking. Admittedly now this takes closer to 2 minutes.

Sure enough, when the Worksheets is completed our Metrics are updated once more, this time with comments filled in to match what our client filled in on the Worksheet.  Here’s what the exercise Metric looks like now:

Hover over the data point for the 12th and indeed we find the comment is there. Nice!

Inferred Values and Comments

When our client typed a “45” into the exerciseMinutes input, it follows naturally that that was recorded as a 45 in the corresponding Metric.  Type in a number, the number is recorded.  But what about other kinds of form inputs, can the system infer Metric values from them as well?

Yep.

In the above we’ve already seen one example of an inferred value: the single check boxes.  When checked that registers as a 1, when not checked that registers as a zero.  This works quite perfectly for having a single check box input pipe into a Binary Metric.

Similarly, if you don’t add a companion _comment input, the system can still infer a useful comment to add to Metric data points.  (Not as good as something thoughtfully typed in by your client, but better than nothing!)

Let’s look at the full set of rules by which this works, broken down by input type:

Simple Text

As said above, simple text boxes glean their number from whatever is typed in.  If it’s not just a number (but instead contains some other, non-numeric text) the system will try to pluck a number out of whatever was typed.  For example if your client types “I ran 12 miles!” CA will pull out 12 as the Metric number.  If they type “I ran twelve miles!” then well, sorry: I hereby confess the dirty secret, that CA doesn’t actually speak English.

Multi-Line Text Boxes

As a form input usually reserved for for free-flowing written answers, multi-line text boxes would usually be a poor fit for getting some sort of number out for the purposes of a Metric.  But there is one use case that fits nicely: if you are prompting folks to type in a list of something, when how many items in that list is a useful number.

For example:

The placeholder text prompted “Type in one person per line”, an instruction that is simple enough to follow.

In this case if you hooked this input up to a Metric, the above answer would register as a 3, and the inferred comment would be “Dave, Ed, Sally”.

Dropdown Menus

Probably 8 is what we should record.

With dropdown menus the system will first-and-foremost try to grab a number out of the option that was chosen.  In the example above, 8 is a clear winner.

If a number cannot be pulled from the text of the chosen option, CA will mark down WHICH option was chosen relative to the ordering of all options presented.  In other words, if the first option is chosen that’s a 1, if the second option is chosen that’s a 2, and so on.

Check boxes

Take a look at the following two examples, and see if you can guess what CA would assign for each:

Nothing personal, bananas. I just wanted to not have everything checked for this example.

For the fruits question, 4 of the boxes are checked and so that would pipe into a Metric as a 4.  The comment, if not coming from a separate _comment input, would be “Apples, Cherries, Durian, Fig”.

In the second one, there are numbers present in each of the options, so CA will use those to add up a total value for the collection of check boxes, counting only those boxes that have been checked.  So it would compute as 5 + 30 + -2 = 33 total.  The inferred comment would be “Stretch, Go dancing, Eat a corn dog” (in some, but not all, cases the system is smart enough to strip off the points portion to make it read a little more human).

In case you were wondering, if some check boxes have a number in them and others don’t, the number will be used when present and otherwise a checked check box will contribute a one.  So yeah, feel free to mix-and-match.

Radio Buttons

Again, see the following examples and guess:

Blarg. Not actually a word, but it sounds rough, right?

The first set of radio buttons lacks anything numeric, so the index of the chosen item is what would be piped into a Metric.  In this case “Good” is the 4th option, so it would be a 4.  The inferred comment would be “Good”.

The second set of radio buttons has numbers in the option, so here CA gloms on to those numbers.  In this case 5 would be the Metric value, even though it’s the 3rd option.  “Medium awesome” is the inferred comment, as CA is often smart enough to strip off the comment and extraneous punctuation (in this case, the dash that separates the number from the label).

Putting it all together with a Course

At this point now we know how to set up a Worksheet to capture daily reporting (on our positive habits, and more broadly anything to be tracked regularly as a Metric), and how to pipe what our client fills in into one or more Metrics, including thoughtful comments to make this tracking be more informative than just numbers.

Now make this super easy for ourselves, let’s make it so CA will send out that Worksheet to our clients on a daily basis, so that we don’t have to (‘cuz yeesh, right?  How much work would that be over 3 months?).

Hop over to the Courses tab (you may need to take a detour to the My Account page to turn Courses on) and click “+ Course”:

Fun fact: 3 months is only exactly 90 days if you start it in January in a non-leap year. But whatever.

Then we put our Worksheet as an item to go out on Day 1.  We tune things to be just right for the stuff of a daily reporting ritual: we have it send out at 11am in order to let some of the day pass, so that they’ll have something to report on (though you could make a case for both earlier and later), we make it due zero days later (i.e. due on the same day) and due late in the day (9pm, but perhaps 11:59pm would be a more suitable leniency?), and we’ll have the system send ’em a text reminder one hour before it’s due, JUST IN CASE they haven’t already marked it complete by then (if they have, of course, the reminder will not be sent).

We notify the client with a nice little message that includes the [loginLink], which is a magical way to put them just one click away from having the worksheet front and center, ready to work on with no fuss (any friction we can remove from our clients actually getting around to filling out the worksheet goes a long way towards ensuring that they actually do, so this is key).

Assigned at 11am, reminder sent at 8pm, due at 9pm. Perfect.

This looks good, so we hit Save.  Now we hit the little “clone” icon in the upper right corner of our perfect little Worksheet assignment, and with a few clicks clone this item down the line, effectively telling CA to send out and manage this worksheet assignment for all 90 days of this course.

Fun fact: I banged out the feature to clone an item multiple times in a single go while sitting beside a CA customer who had me onsite for a consulting visit. They were working on a similar setup as I am describing in this post, and I figured I may as well save everyone the effort of all those clicks. Onsite visits are super fun, ask me about ’em sometime.

At this point now we have a Worksheet that will be sent to our client every day for 90 days, prompting them in the simplest possible fashion to go and report on their performance for the day.

The last step in building our Course is to add the Metrics to Day 1.  This will have the effect of setting up the standard Metrics that our 90 daily Worksheets will be piping into.  Doing it here means it will be instantly done for every participant who enters into our 3 month program.

Here’s what our Exercise Metric looks like as part of our course:

Things of note include a duration of 90 days, a perfect match for how many daily Worksheets will go out.  The every day frequency is what we intend, and we’re piping in from the worksheet value of exerciseMinutes, which lines up with the Worksheet input name.

We DON’T set a reminder because sending out Worksheet is prompt enough: a reminder for any specific Metrics would be redundant.  Similarly there’s probably no need to send a notification of this Metric: the Worksheet send out is notification enough that this Metric (and the others) have been set in motion.

Right then, that’s the setup of our Course.  We could (and in most cases, naturally would) build upon this Course to include everything else that is comprises your 3 month program, including materials and assignments that are to go out for each of the weeks.  But at this point our Course is fully set to manage the Metrics to be tracked.

Back in the main Course tab we can set the whole thing in motion for participants of our 3 month program with just a few clicks.

Click this Plus Tiny Human icon to add a participant into your course.

Set the whole thing in motion with just a few clicks.

Adding a participant has the effect of creating whichever Metrics are pertinent, and managing the daily Worksheets by which those Metrics will be reported on.

This is a bit off topic, but I’d like to mention that if you really want to have some fun and it fits with your style, try putting a coaching Group into your course.  A Group Course like this puts the members into what you might frame as a transparent competition to outperform one another on their regular Metrics (as you have the option to make ALL Metric performance, including aggregate and individual, transparently visible to each group member).  Food for thought as you design your programs.

Holy moly that was a lot–good on you for sticking with to the end.  To recap, you now know how to setup Worksheet answers to pipe into Metrics, which in turn makes possible the creation of highly automated of tracking and recording your clients’ progress throughout your programs, and does so in a way that gently yet persistently nudges them to keep up on tracking (and thus accomplishing) that progress.  We’ve looked at doing and reporting done on a daily basis, but all of this can be modified to suit other frequencies, like weekly, just Monday through Friday, and so on.

This is powerful stuff.  Wield it well and your clients will enjoy a highly supportive program that is uncommonly results-centric, which they will typically recognize and appreciate within the first week.

The basic style of Worksheets within CoachAccountable is as a Word doc that is freely editable, both by coach creating the worksheet, and client filling it out.

But with Form-Based Worksheets, coach can create Worksheets with the free style editability of a Word doc BUT with form elements interspersed, which in turn are specifically what a client is meant to fill out.

“Form elements” refers to check boxes, radio buttons, drop down menus, text boxes, signature areas, image prompts, and computed values.

Let’s see how this works.

That little guy, fifth in from the right.

When creating a Worksheet you’ll find the WYSIWYG editor toolbar has a button for adding inputs: the one with the little check box and radio button.  Give this a click and you’re presented with an interface for adding in your input of choice, either a text box, text area, dropdown menu, checkboxes, radio buttons, image prompt, or computed value:

This looks like a lot, but really, it’s quite manageable.

The first option you are presented with is the most important:

Let’s make a simple text box for people to type in their answer to the question “How do you feel about form-based worksheets?”:

Notice the validation option we picked: that this input must have something typed in.  By doing this the user is prevented from marking this worksheet complete so long as this input is left blank, and presents them with the message “Please, we’d love to know how these make you feel.” if they try to.

Of special note: hitting the “Insert” button ONLY adds the input into our worksheet.  It’s up to us to put the actual question that the input is for into the worksheet template.  (This is nice in that it gives us a lot of flexibility to format questions any which way we please around the form inputs.)

In this case we’ll type it in first and then add the simple text box right after, like so:

We’re off to a nice start.  Now let’s ask another question by which the user will answer by using a dropdown menu:

Note the 40% width, which allows this item to sit on the same line as the question.

Here’s what that leaves us with:

Lookin’ good.  Again here we pick a validation rule, “Must choose something other than the first item.”  We put a “Please choose….” option for the first item, which is what shows (and is selected) by default when the user first starts the worksheet.  That validation rule means they have to pick some item from the dropdown menu other than that first one, and they’ll be asked to “Please indicate your level of stokedness.” if they try to submit without doing so.

Right then, let’s put in a question asking “What might you use these for in your coaching?”, and present the user with some options.  We’ll use check boxes, since the user might want to indicate a few of them:

We pick 50% to let the 4 options all nicely fit on two rows.

We type the question and insert those check boxes, which give us the following:

Let’s now add a radio button choice and a comment box to wrap up.  We’ll type “How much do you agree with the following: ‘These are super useful.'” and “Please add any other comments about this:” into our template and then insert the appropriate form inputs to match:

100% width means each item takes up a full line, making the options stack vertically.

Our placeholder text invites feedback in an enthusiastic but non-pushy way.

Here’s the result with our 5 inputs in place:

This’ll get us some unbiased feedback, right?

Cool, good to go.  Let’s add a little intro text, hit save, and then assign this to one of our clients!

This works just like assigning a regular worksheet.

When your client moves to fill it out, instead of the usual WYSIWYG editor they’ll be presented with your form rendered out, with real inputs ready for them to fill in.  There is the crucial distinction here, so let’s spell it out:

• No form inputs in the worksheet template you’ve assigned?  Then this is a freestyle worksheet like a Word or Google Drive doc for your client to fill out, and they’ll be given the WYSIWYG editor with full editability.
• One or more form inputs in the worksheet?  That kicks it into “form” mode, meaning your client WON’T have the WYSIWYG experience of filling it out, but rather be presented with the form inputs only to fill in.

Here’s what our worksheet in form mode looks like to your client:

Buttons and inputs, just begging to be filled in by your clients.

If they try to submit the worksheet without passing the validations you set for each of the inputs, they’ll be lovingly given a notification with the message you set:

“Ah, right! I forgot to indicate precisely how stoked I am!” thought probably no one, ever.

Once completed, the worksheet as filled-out goes into the client record under the Notes and Stream tabs, and is emailed right off to you as usual:

Fun fact: Gmail for whatever reason replaces the “chosen radio button” symbol with a big, orange target-looking icon. Sigh, at least it’s crystal clear which option your client picked.

You’ll notice we’ve got a couple other form-based inputs to choose from:

• Signature Area (a box for the client to physically sign in)
• Image Prompt (a place clients can upload one or more images as an answer to a question)
• Computed Values (some basic formulas that can auto-calculate from other fields in your Worksheet).

And that’s all there is to it.  Adding one or more form inputs turns a worksheet into a form-based worksheet, which drastically alters your client’s experience of filling it out.  For each of your worksheet templates you have the choice of making it WYSIWYG style or form-based, whichever is more appropriate to the substance of that worksheet.

Enjoy!

Worksheets are CoachAccountable’s way of letting you create, manage, and organize written assignments for your clients.  Similar to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, they allow you to create a series of questions in free-style fashion with blank spaces for your clients to fill in (OR in form-based fashion with text boxes, radio buttons, etc. – more on that HERE, but here we’ll just cover the basics, as the title of the post implies).

Everyone seems to chuckle at the WTF check-in.

Here’s a look into how they work, and how to use them to their fullest in your coaching programs.

Worksheet Templates

Our overview of using CoachAccountable Worksheets starts with a look at templates.  Templates are your collection of stock worksheets common to your style/methodology/programs.  We’ve pre-loaded your account with eight templates that serve as examples of how you might do your own.  You’re welcome to use these in your coaching, modify them to better suit your style, or delete them outright and create new ones from scratch.

Set up as many templates as you like.

Assigning a Worksheet

Once you’ve got templates ready, you can add an assignment for your client with just a few clicks.  Visit your client’s page.  The big +Worksheet button on the sidebar is one way to assign a worksheet to that client. You can also use the +Worksheet button on the Worksheets page.

Upon clicking the worksheet adder button you’re presented with a number of options.  First the system invites you to pick (from among your templates) which worksheet you’d like to assign.  You don’t strictly NEED to have any templates because you can always start with a blank worksheet, but having them is a leg up: a serious shortcut when the assignment you’re about to give is one of your regulars.

Pick one from your collection of templates, and it fills right in.

You’re not stuck assigning one of your template worksheets as-is: when you pick a template, its contents load right in for you to see and, if needed, edit to better fit the situation at hand with your client.  This is the best of both worlds: you’re able to give an assignment quickly from your established collection AND you can add or remove questions as warranted.

Tailoring a worksheet assignment like this (especially when it’s one that your client sees on a regular basis, like a weekly check-in) is a way to let your client experience that your coaching truly suits their specific needs.  When it feels like that (as opposed to going through some cookie-cutter process), your clients are apt to put in more thought and effort.

Worksheets have due dates/times associated with them which you can set, add, or remove.  If your client is in another timezone the system gives you a hint to ensure you set the right time.  You can also set one or more reminders to be sent to either you or your client, via email (or even SMS if you are in North America).

Negative one weeks before, what’s that about?

A reminder for your client one day before the worksheet is due works well to have him or her reliably complete on time.  If it’s a longer-range assignment, due more than a week out, you might set a second reminder around the halfway mark to get your client thinking about it.  Reminders sent via email are especially nice because it puts your client one click away from hopping into their account with the worksheet loaded front-and-center, ready to be worked on.

Note the third reminder in the example collection above, where it says to remind the client -1 weeks before via email.  Using negative numbers is a little trick to tell CoachAccountable to send a reminder AFTER a worksheet’s due date has passed.  This is handy if you think it likely that a worksheet will go undone for so long, a way to have the system gently remind your client that “hey, this is overdue but it’s still due so please go complete it”.  But what if they’ve already completed it on time?  Not to worry: like all reminders, a negative reminder will NOT be sent for a worksheet if it has already been marked complete.

Finally you’re given the option to have CoachAccountable send your client a notification about the new assignment immediately.  The notification message is pre-loaded from your email message templates (customizable under My CA >> My System >> System Communications) for convenience, and can be personalized to suit the situation.

Click “Assign” and you’re done.  The worksheet will appear in the “Assigned” section under the Worksheets tab (as well as the “What’s Next” tab of the Overview), there for you to see and your clients to work on.  As coach you can modify an outstanding assignment, including its due date and reminders.

Notifications

To help along the process of your clients actually getting their Worksheet assignments complete, CA offers a few notifications.  Under Settings >> System >> Notifications you’ve got options:

Notifications can be sent automatically when interesting things happen.

Notifications of completed worksheets are especially nice because they put the content of the worksheet right in your inbox: no need to log in to see what your client filled out¹.

Notifications of late worksheets keep assignments from falling through the cracks.  As coach it is nice to be alerted when a due date has slipped; it gives you the opportunity to check in with your client and see if you can offer any help to get them back on track.  In fact, text and email notifications about late worksheets can be replied to directly, which both passes the message back to your client AND captures it within the CoachAccountable client record.

Here as in other emails sent by the system, the “Reply ABOVE THIS LINE” message tells us what we can do from the comfort of our inbox.  So we hit reply and type:

You, of course, will probably be much more tactful.

This message is emailed on to the client as well as captured within CoachAccountable:

After Completion

Once completed a Worksheet becomes part of the client record, living in both the Worksheets tab and the Stream tab (which is the running log of all things in the coaching relationship to date).  You and your client can easily print out a completed worksheet, or email it off to whomever.  If you as coach deem for whatever reason that it’s not complete, you can un-mark it so, and effectively send back to your client to work on further.

With that you have the whole flow of worksheet assignments for a typical, single client.  Worksheets can also be sent out automatically as standard prep work for appointments or as a follow-up, can be included in Courses as part of the timeline of materials and assignments, and can be assigned to members of coaching Groups for the purpose of collecting and sharing individual responses.

Give them a try.  Worksheets are a wonderful way of getting your clients to really think through and put down thoughtful responses to the questions or exercises you lay out for them.  That work is the stuff of transitioning them from passive recipients of your coaching insights and wisdom to a place of actively thinking about and applying that wisdom.

In short, they make your coaching more real.

Get your WTF on with a free CoachAccountable trial now.

Note:

A common concern with using a web-based system like CoachAccountable is one of privacy: the information that is captured and stored over the course of a coaching relationship is of course of a highly personal and often sensitive nature.  To use a system like CoachAccountable, wherein that information is stored and managed with a third party, requires confidence that such private matters will stay private.

This is a worthy and well-founded concern, and the expectation of confidentially is most reasonable and in fact should be present.

To address that concern I’d like to first contrast CoachAccountable against web-based companies like Google and Facebook, whose business model is to give away the platform for free and monetize customer relationships by owning and selling the customer data.  CoachAccountable on the other hand is a platform which charges for use of the product itself, and does not traffic in the sale or sharing of data in any way whatsoever.

Here’s a question which nicely expresses another aspect of concern:

Are the client records confidential or can you or any other admins go in and read intended confidential client accounts?

As it says in Item 11 of the Terms of Awesome, it is technically IMPOSSIBLE for our team, as custodian of all data stored within CoachAccountable, to NOT technically be able to access client records.

(This is the case for EVERY web-based collaboration platform which allows two or more parties to access shared data.  If you as coach were the only person who needed to access your data, it could technically be stored encrypted by your password, which, in a well-designed system is made unknowable to system administrators¹.  But if your account data were encrypted with a key that only you possessed, sharing that data with your clients–and vice-versa–would be impossible because their password would not be able to unlock it.  Any comparable web-based service which claims otherwise is lying².)

So yes: I AM technically able to go in and read confidential client information.  The ability comes from the same power that allows me to help folks access their account when they can’t log in.  The good news is that authorized members of the CoachAccountable team are the only ones with that level of access, and we tread very respectfully with the well founded expectation of confidentiality that you and your clients have³.  The only reason we ever access account data is if needed to troubleshoot a support issue upon request.  When we do, it is as a plumber on a house call: go directly to the kitchen sink and get it fixed, paying no heed to unrelated surroundings and certainly not poking around in bedrooms or rifling through drawers.

There is even slightly cynical line of reasoning that might instill confidence around safekeeping privacy: as a small-team operation with literally thousands of clients being coached on the platform, we have neither the time nor curious inclination to rifle through anyone’s data.  To spend time at an activity which wantonly disrespects the privacy of our customers is an exceptionally poor use of time at cost of good will–I’m not having it.

Ultimately if you and your clients are comfortable using email as a medium of exchanging coaching information, you have every reason to be similarly comfortable using CoachAccountable.  In fact a system like CoachAccountable has a leg up, as email is rarely encrypted in transit and generally leaves more of a digital paper trail.

For more of the technical side of how CoachAccountable is secure, see the CoachAccountable security page.

It happens: even with the login helper that CoachAccountable provides, sometimes your clients can’t get themselves logged into their account. As coach you always of course want to ensure your clients are having a great experience in all facets of working with you, so helping them get logged in is a natural thing to want to do.

First things first: make sure their client account is active.  By design, a client you deactivate CAN’T log in, so be certain that’s not the reason for their issue OR advise them appropriately if it is.  (Assuming you deactivated them because your coaching relationship finished, this might be a good opportunity to invite them to start up work with you again.)

For security purposes the username and password of your clients are strictly their own, so you can’t tell the client their username or reset their password for them.  There are a few things you can do, though.

The Login Helper

The login helper is always accessible by clicking the “Forgot your username or password?” link from wherever your clients are logging in from:

The login helper gives your clients (and you, it works the same for everyone) a choice of what to recover based on what part of the login is forgotten, username or password.

When you provide an email address the system can look up the associated username and send it to the address provided.  If there is no username account tied to the email address you provide, the system will let you know in the message it sends.

When you provide a username, the system sends an email with a magic link by which to log in automatically, which of course makes it possible to reset your password.

Maybe.

Here’s the catch: the system can send an email out with that magic link ONLY IF the username provided is actually on file:

It’s SUPER common for folks to not read this whole message. Sigh.

To prevent nosy or malicious parties from fishing around to see if certain individuals have an account (by guessing at plausible usernames), the system DOESN’T tell you whether or not the username you entered actually exists: the above is the same message whether CA recognizes the username or doesn’t.

This brings us to the common gotcha: if the login helper fails to send you a helper email when you request one, the most likely reason is that you’re not entering your correct username.  So the thing to do is enter your email on file to get your correct username, and THEN use that correct username to request a login link by which you’ll be able to reset your password.  (And in all cases you should check your spam folder just in case the login helper emails are landing there.)

The above is a general lesson on how to use the login helper, and it applies to coaches as well as clients.  If your client is having trouble, you can always remind them of the email address on their account, and from there they should be able to use the login helper to get the rest of the way using the two steps: first get the username, then use the username to get the login link.

A login link that YOU can send

All that said, you as coach can send your client a Message through the system that contains a magic login link to get that client right into his or her account.

To do this, compose an email to the client by clicking on the email icon in the upper left on the client’s page.

Include the [loginLink] magic tag anywhere with the body of the message and send it their way.  Add that tag by clicking on the magic tag at the bottom of the message composition screen, or by typing it in, exactly like this: [loginLink], brackets and capitalization included.

Once in, they’ll be able to visit their My Account page to confirm their username and, if needed, reset their password.

One thing to note: if you CC yourself on this message, the [loginLink] will still simply say [loginLink] in the email you receive.  Rest assured your client got an actual login link.  The reason you didn’t is because that would be quite a security hole if you could send yourself a login link for your clients’ accounts!

Thus you have two things you can do when your client can’t access their account.  Granted the second approach is much more direct, BUT that requires you to be involved each time.

If your client has trouble logging in I recommend you get them right in with a Message containing a login link, AND you let them know how to help themselves in the future by using the login helper, making them aware of the common gotcha so that they’ll be successful with it (because presumably they weren’t if they’re telling you of their problem).

It’s a nice one-two combo, like giving them a fish for now and then teaching them how to fish for next time. :)

Most of the legalese-filled documents like “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” are lengthy, uninteresting, and full of jargon that is generally inaccessible to humans.  CoachAccountable has such documents and they indeed fit that model: they are fully vetted as legit and covering all bases by qualified lawyers, but that still doesn’t mean they’re not boring, boilerplate, and overall uninteresting.

Perhaps that is as it is meant to be to satisfy the needs and eventualities that can arise in our current system of law.  Fine, so be it.

But when it comes to outlining the parameters of the relationship between CoachAccountable and its customers, there really is (and deserves to be) more to the story.  Enter the CoachAccountable Terms of Awesome.

Written like a manifesto of the rights and privileges one can expect as a user of CoachAccountable, the Terms of Awesome is essentially an account of how I’ve been doing business with folks since launching back in 2012.  It’s been working well, so I’m happy to declare publicly that that is, in fact, the deal.  Read the Terms of Awesome here.

“I love having messages to my clients captured in CoachAccountable.  It would be nice if I could just send a regular email without having to log in, and have it show up in their file.”

– Like, a dozen coaches.

CoachAccountable messaging is nice, a quick way to fire off messages between coach and client, affording tidy, on-topic comment threads and becoming part of The Record of the coaching process.  But traditionally, messages sent via CA had to be send from within CA.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could post a message to your clients from right within your usual email?

Introducing CoachAccountable System Email Addresses

CoachAccountable now supports posting messages right from your usual email program, no logging in required.  As coach, you can find a system email address for each of the clients you are coaching.  This magic email address is tied to a specific client, and routes through CoachAccountable.  Sending an email to this address is equivalent to posting a message to the corresponding client from within CoachAccountable.

To do this, a coach needs only find the system addresses for his or her clients, and (probably a good idea) add those addresses to his or her email contacts for easy reference later.

System email addresses are found under Settings >> System >> System Email Addresses.

Lots of goodies here. For now, System Email Addresses is what we’re concerned with.

The System Email Address page offers a listing of all of your clients and their respective, magic email addresses:

You could do a bunch of copy-and-pasting between here and say your Outlook address book, but there’s a quicker way. :)

To make getting these magic addresses into your email address book easy, you can have CoachAccountable send you emails from each of them, putting you two clicks away from adding the right “from name” and address for each.

Gmail actually requires a few clicks nowadays… hover over the sender’s name, click “More info” to see the sidebar on the right, then click the little teeny “add to contacts” button.

Having the “via CoachAccountable” (or whatever suffix you tell the system to send with) makes it easy to keep system email addresses separate from an individual’s regular address: one will route through and be recorded by CA, and one won’t, so you’ll want to be sure you’re sending to the right one.

Once added to your contacts, addressing a message to your client to be sent via CA is a simple matter:

Type a few characters and the system email address pops right up from your contacts.

Then compose an email as you usually would, and send:

Within a minute, this email is received by CoachAccountable, posted as a message in your client’s stream…

…and sent along to your client via email as usual:

Want to add a little formatting to your email, perhaps even a picture?  No problem, just put it all into your email as you normally would and CA will handle it:

Ponies.

This goes right into CA as you’d expect it:

Finally you can also share files this way.  Attached files will be stored by CA as shared files under the Files tab:

Attach one or many, they’ll all be stored.

The email your client receives comes with links to the file or files you shared.  This is nice in that this way you’ll be able to see if (and when) they viewed the file, and the file will be delivered in embedded fashion when applicable:

And of course these files will be accessible from the recipient client’s Files tab:

What do you mean Mikayla has never accessed these yet; I sent ’em like 3 minutes ago?!

There’s one other trick to using System Email Addresses: if you just want to share a file and don’t necessarily want to post an actual Client Message, you can do so by sending a specially crafted message: have the subject line start with exactly “File:”, and attach exactly one file.

This example illustrates:

The subject line prefix “File:” is the key.

Files shared in CoachAccountable have both the file name (e.g. “lotsOponies.png”) and a title (e.g. “Ponies”).  A title is nice in that it can be a more descriptive label than just the raw file name.

Shared files also can have a description, a simple blurb about the file.

Unlike when posting files as attachments to a regular message email, sharing a file in this way allows you to set both the title for the file (which otherwise defaults to the file name) and a description (which otherwise defaults to blank).  The title will be whatever follows “File:” in the subject line, and the description will be the body of the email itself.

Here’s what the file from the email above looks like captured in the Files tab:

Note how the title derives from the email subject, and how the description matches the email body.

So system email addresses allow the coach to post, from their regular email program, messages and files to each of their clients.  What about the other direction, clients posting to their coach?

The process works just the same in reverse: clients each have a system email address by which they can post a message (or share a file) with their coach.

Much like you can have CA send you all the email addresses for easy adding to your address book, you can have CA send to each of your clients a message that gives them the magic address by which they can post messages to you.

The System Email Addresses page as found under Settings has a tool for exactly this:

The email your clients receive will allow them to get the magic address to post to YOU.

System Email Addresses are another way to empower communication between coach and client in a way that is seamless and in the natural workflow of all parties, while getting the full benefit of CA for managing, tracking, and documenting things.  Enjoy!