The CoachAccountable Blog

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!

As a platform for making details and happenings within a coaching relationship clearly documented for all interested parties, CoachAccountable excels.  The same is true when it comes to its handling of Group coaching.

In fact, perhaps too much so.

A nutritional and weight loss program of well over 100 participants has, as part of the program, the whole Group participating in a Group Metric to track weight over the span of the program.  By default, Group Metrics make visible to all group members not only the Group’s aggregate numbers (be it averages or totals), but the specific, individual numbers as well.

In a weight loss program that large one can well imagine the potential problems with THAT much detailed information on display for the whole group.

So in response to the most understandable concerns this brought about, I’ve added settings for Group items to make it entirely up to the coach how much information is appropriate to share among all group members.  Here’s the new setting, which applies to Group Metrics, Group Actions, and Group Worksheets:

How much should group members see of a given group item? It’s up to you.

These four options bear a little elaboration.  From most secretive to most open:

• Totally hidden as a Group Item means that, as far as your group members are concerned, the Group Item doesn’t exist.  The item will appear as just an individual assignment with no ties to the group. This forgoes any group comment thread about it.
• Visible as a Group Item but hide group performance means they’ll see it as a Group Item, can have a group conversation about it, but not see the overall result: for Metrics that means no aggregate graph will be visible, for Actions and Worksheets that means they’ll have no idea of the overall level of completion of the assignment among their fellow group members.  You as coach get to see aggregate performance, of course, but they won’t.
• Visible including aggregate performance means group members will see, for example, how many other group members have completed the assignment and how many have not, and among those completions how many were on time and how many were late.
• Visible including aggregate and individual performance offers a level of complete transparency.  With Actions, everyone knows who’s done it and when did they get it done.  With Worksheets, all members can read the completed worksheets as submitted by all other group members.  And again, with Metrics, everyone can see the exact reported numbers of everyone else.

The last level is so very open it often works wonders for group collaboration when appropriate, and indeed in some instances is simply not appropriate.  Total transparency is often quite nice for smaller, more intimate coaching groups, but as CoachAccountable is employed for increasingly large and sophisticated programs it is a very good thing that the level of transparency among group members can be reeled back to just the right level.

Here’s an example of what a Group Action looks like at each of the visibility settings:

Fully visible including group and individual performance:

Visible including group performance:

Visible but no performance info:

And not that anyone really needs to see a diagram illustrating the “hidden” setting, for grins here’s an artist’s rendition:

Yep. Intentionally.

For total flexibility, this visibility setting can be set by the Group coach on a per-item basis, and can be updated at any time as well.  Here’s to keeping group members informed of their fellow member’s participation at just the right amount!

I can’t speak to other professions,  but in programming crafts the whiteboard is the ubiquitous wall-mounted display of a collaborative work in progress.  Marked with a few of the standard dry erase colors (red, blue, green and black), the whiteboard contains lo-res drawing of high-impact ideas, priority lists of things to do, and hastily scribbled notes capturing the key takeaways of recent collaborative pow-wows.

It is often a crude yet to-the-point map detailing the state of affairs, proudly displaying the what’s so for all parties who should gaze upon it.

For example, here’s my whiteboard for CA:

My wife tells me CA Land looks a lot like Europe.

For the sort of ongoing, collaborative work that coaching relationships entail, the whiteboard is a worthy addition.

Conventional whiteboards are mounted to the wall of someone’s office, and so are useful only when both parties are in physical proximity.  For the sort of virtual collaboration that coaching so often comprises, CoachAccountable offers virtual whiteboards.  Let’s take a look at how they work.

This is easy to miss.

Whiteboards live in the widgets column, on the side of a client page or the coach’s dashboard.  This is to keep them ever present: unlike journal entries, worksheets, and other such items they aren’t dated and thus don’t get buried in the historical record of happenings within the relationship over time.

To add one, just bring up the widget control panel on a given page by clicking the little double arrow icon just above the widget column, and then click the Whiteboard “Add New” link.

Upon creating a whiteboard you’ll see the familiar WYSIWYG editor.  Type away, add pictures, and otherwise create on this blank slate.  A whiteboard can be shared with your client or kept private.  If shared, you can either allow or disallow your client to make edits herself.

Let’s look at a few ways to employ whiteboards in your coaching.

Refining a draft

If you’re helping one of your clients write up an important piece, say something central to their marketing, a whiteboard is a perfect way to do back-and-forth feedback and iteration.  Using different colors both coach and client can highlight their comments and changes made across revisions.  The series of drafts accumulates to show the evolution of the document.

Both parties can make their edits, and view earlier drafts to see the evolution.

Sharing easy-access info

Because they stay put in the widgets column for your clients, Whiteboards are an ideal holding place for information that needs to be accessed frequently, such as recordings of coaching calls, links to tutorials, and conference call dial-in information.  This way, the client doesn’t have to search in their history of past notes to find information quickly.

Whiteboards are also a great place to store info central to the coaching process itself, like assessment results, overarching aims, and anything else that is big picture to a specific client.  These can be shared or not with a client as appropriate.

Tracking the state of things

One of the reasons Whiteboards were created came right from a request made by a CoachAccountable user:

I want to create a couple of updatable areas to maintain a changing list of challenges that need to be addressed.  What I am trying to do is to create a Green, Blue and a Red Sheet. Green means these are the areas where the coachee is doing awesome. Blue is that he is okay and getting by. Red requires immediate attention.

Idea here is that we can inventory and categorize all areas based on their current state and then as they coachee works on it and things improve they can move them across buckets. This then allows a coachee to review all 3 buckets at any time and get a complete perspective on where they stand.

This is a nice structure, the utility of that complete perspective is unexpectedly high.  It’s easy to set up (and makes a fine getting-started task to assign to your clients), and updating is as simple as cutting and pasting an item from one list to the next.

Whiteboards have been technically out for, uh, a while now…

Whatever the purpose, Whiteboards have a number of other useful features about them:

• The history of saved drafts made by both parties are kept and can be recalled at any time.  This is nice to look back at the evolution of the whiteboard through weeks and months.
• Any whiteboard draft can be saved off as a Journal Entry with a few clicks, a useful way to take a snapshot of things for the running historical record.
• Whiteboards are readily emailed to the other party with just a few clicks.  Printing is just as easy.
• Again, Whiteboards are not just for sharing with clients: they can be added to a client’s file for the coach’s eyes only.
• Coach can add a whiteboard to his or her own dashboard, for more general use not connected to any particular client.

Session Notes, Worksheets, and Journal Entries are highly complimentary ways of documenting and sharing written work, but indeed there are a few use cases and workflows where they are just not ideally suited.  The addition of Whiteboards nicely rounds out the mix.

Actions are very much a bread-and-butter way to use CoachAccountable to support your clients in following through on their coaching.  This 7 minute tutorial video walks you through how to make the most of Actions, including how to prepare your clients mentally to take their action plans seriously.

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

The hallmark of good coaching is taking action.

Through action a difference gets made and real world impact becomes possible. Without it, coaching reduces to a lot of good ideas, most of which will be soon forgotten.

CoachAccountable Actions provide a way for you and your clients to set good ideas in motion, make them real, and cause reliable follow through.

Every person you coach in the system has their own Action plan, just waiting to be set up. Setting up an Action is simply a matter of indicating WHAT to do, and BY WHEN it is to be done.   To set one up, click on your client, browse to the Acti ons tab, and click the “Add an Action” button.

Again, we just type in what to do, and by when to do it.

Note this hint here for clients in different timezones.

Reminders can be set for your client or even you, at times relative to the due date.   If you’re in the US or Canada and have entered your cell phone (see the My Account page to do this), CoachAccountable will know to offer you the option of sending reminders via text, as an alternative to email.

You can optionally add a comment about the action, and I recommend this: just a little note of context, perhaps a recap of why or how to effectively go about getting the task done.

Click “Add” and you’re done: you can add a sequence of actions rapidly for a given client if that’s what there is to do.

Now on the client-side of things, they have EXACTLY the same view of action items as you do, which makes this a truly shared list: they know unambiguously the action plan you two have created together, and can manage it from there until your next session, marking things complete as they go.

Action reminders will fire off to your client on schedule which is vital: this mitigates the all-too-common phenomenon of just plain forgetting to follow through.

A reminder keeps awareness up in the middle of the week between sessions, and makes it dead-simple to mark an Action complete: your clients need only reply “Done”.

For you as coach, this means you have an up-to-date window into how things are unfolding with your clients’ action plans: you know what’s done and what’s not on a given day, which empowers you to intervene with a little encouragement or support when things just aren’t getting done.

A little encouragement goes a long way. And even if you don’t want to be so high touch as to reach out between your sessions, just the very fact that you are able to peek in on your clients progress is powerfully motivating.

Furthermore, having updated view of what’s done and what’s not before going into your sessions is a very nice leg up: this allows you to tailor your coaching intentionally to the situation at hand, rather than reacting on the fly to the update your client provides.

Now then, there’s a color convention to Actions: green means on time, red means late, and yellow means either about to become late, or it was done a little late. This makes it very easy for both you and your clients to get a sense for how reliably things are getting done. An all-green action plan becomes something for your clients to aim for.

There’s an art to creating good action plans and you want to guide the process skillfully. You want to set your clients up with the right balance between stretching and boredom: not too much that they can’t possibly finish on time, and not too little that they are merely coasting.

If you have a week when a lot got done late or went undone entirely, note this and reel back accordingly for next time.

Try to avoid making actions for things that your client was already going to do as a matter of routine anyhow, and instead focus on the novel efforts that will move them forward according to the coaching you’re providing. By doing so, the growing record of completed Actions will be a satisfying monument to the things your client has accomplished within your coaching.   This is a nice souvenir at the end of your coaching relationship, and nice reminder that they’re accomplishing a lot during it.

Remember that comment you added when you first setup the Action? That can be found again by you and your client by clicking this little comment icon. Comments can also be found for Actions (and everything else) under the Stream Tab. Use comments to create a dialog between you and your client about the Action as it is in progress: this is great for asking for and giving support. Comments are easily added while logged in, and also by replying to reminders about a given Action.

There’s one other piece I want to show you about Actions, and that is Action Projects. Any Action you create can be assigned as part of a project. These allow you to group related actions together, useful for multi-step efforts, and for creating roadmaps and milestones.

Actions that are part of a project can be given a weight, which is just a way of telling the system how significant a given Action is relative to the entire project. You can use whatever numbers you like; for example quick little tasks might have a weight of 1, and more major accomplishments within the project might have a weight of something more like 10, which is to say “this action is 10 times more important than one of those little ones”.

As your clients mark Actions complete, the progress meter of the Project will fill up according to the weights you’ve set. If checking off items on your to-do list is satisfying (and for most folks it is), seeing this little progress meter fill up is really a delightful bit of eye candy for your clients. When your clients mark an Action complete via email, they get back an updated view of the project.

You and your clients can arrange Projects however you like: using this drag icon you can move more immediately relevant projects up, and projects that aren’t currently relevant for whatever reason can be collapsed by clicking this arrow here.

Like elsewhere in the system, both Actions and Projects can be edited by clicking this icon.

That’s everything there is to know about setting up Actions. Armed with this you can now have a truly tangible record of what is and isn’t getting done within your coaching. With this in place, you can impart to your clients a powerful lesson: that doing what you say you’re going to do, by when you said you would do it, MATTERS.

Think about it. When you do this, when you reliably follow through, you know yourself as genuinely effective. And when you don’t, you can’t help but degrade that sense of self. That’s just the way it is for people—for you, your clients, pretty much everyone.

So let your clients know that you’ll be watching, and that they too will be able to see quite clearly the degree to which they’re following through as they said, and the degree to which they’re not.

With CoachAccountable the record of this performance is real in a way that it seldom otherwise is, so this is your chance to support and guide your clients, to knowing themselves as reliable and effective. So let them know that you’ll be expecting them to do what they said they would, and that they should expect it of themselves as well. THAT, without even counting the value of the actual Actions they’ll be taking, is a powerful thing to offer the people you coach.

To recap:

• Have your coaching be acted upon through Action plans
• Set reminders to assist your clients in following through
• Let the record of what’s getting done and what’s not guide your coaching
• Make realistic and meaningful action plans, and in return EXPECT timely follow through to be the norm

Do this and CoachAccountable will be doing its part to make you and awesome coach through Actions.

Want more?

• Check out this in-depth explanation of Action Projects as mentioned in the video.
• Use the same (or a similar) Action sequence for multiple clients: build a Course.

And if you’re ready to just start building stuff for your clients already! you should probably sign up for a free trial of CoachAccountable.