The CoachAccountable Blog

I’ll level with you here: I totally just Photoshopped last year’s cake to add second a candle.

Today CoachAccountable marks its second birthday.

With the release of the Client Manual, Groups, remixed Billing, Happenings Reports, appointment worksheets, Engagement Reports, Team Edition, Action Projects, client records exporting, embedded videos, and a whole host of other improvements it’s been a good year.

To celebrate, I have a big announcement:

Effective today, CoachAccountable Courses and CoachAccountable Groups add-ons are FREE.

My decision to do this comes at the confluence of two things:

1. Business is good, good enough that I simply won’t miss the added revenue of charging for Courses and Groups as paid add-ons.
2. Both Courses and Groups keep revealing themselves to enable a lot of nice functionality, functionality that is useful and wanted by coaches beyond the niche users for them which I’d originally envisioned.

I’m really excited about this change.  I’ve had numerous questions and feature requests wherein my answer is some variant of “Oh yeah, you can use [Courses/Groups] to set that up, though yes, since you’re not actually doing [courses/group coaching] that may be a bit steep just to be able to do…”

With Courses and Groups rolled into the core subscription package I can forget about those extra programming projects to fill in the gaps, and instead focus on further bettering Courses and Groups themselves to make an overall more powerful system for everybody.

Here’s what the add-ons section of the “My Account” page looks like now:

Oh, right: I also added the ability to turn off Billing in case you don’t need it. :)

As before you’ll need to visit the “My Account” page to turn on Groups and Courses, but now it won’t impact the price of your monthly package.  And if you’ve already been using Courses or Groups, your monthly price has already been reduced accordingly.

In my defense THIS was a new Photoshop job.

Looking Forward

For CoachAccountable’s third year of public existence there’s plenty more in store that I’m excited about.

A big part of this year will be about teaching coaches to be great coaches.  Through the accumulated experiences of me and many who have shared with me there’s now a lot of systematic, demonstrably effective techniques and expertise to coaching that are made possible by CA.

To that end I’m working on a video series to illustrate and convey this expertise.  The first one, titled Being an Awesome Coach with CoachAccountable Appointments, is nearly complete and coming very soon.

Also in line with sharing expertise I’ll be creating a CoachAccountable user’s group.  Based on the several hangouts I’ve hosted with CA users I’m clear that you all talking together and sharing ideas is a very good thing, and the community is now big enough I think to support a vibrant dialog.  (I suppose it might still end up a ghost town boasting little more than the sound of crickets chirping, but we’ll see, right? :)

Also in my plan for this year is a much improved affiliate program, substantial evolution to the relatively young Team Edition, an API, a mobile app, and of course the usual stream of improvements large and small based on the feedback and experiences of the many.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see for the platform in the coming year, let it be known now in the comments.

Thanks as always for being on this journey with me–here’s to great coaching.

Got videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo or Viddler that you’d like to share with clients as part of their coaching program with you?

CoachAccountable now lets you share such media (as well as audio clips) right within the system itself, allowing for seamless delivery of video and audio content in your programs.

You can now embed from:

• Video
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Loom
  • Wistia
  • Viddler
  • TED
  • educreations
  • Cubby
  • LibSyn
  • Spotlighr
  • Viloud

  Audio

  • Soundcloud
  • Audio Acrobat
  • Clyp

  To do this, simply add the video or audio clip to your Library by pasting in whatever embed code is provided by the hosting site.  YouTube’s embed code for a given video, for example, can be found under Share:

Once you’ve got the embed code, paste it into area indicated for adding embedded files, like so:

Hit the preview button, and if CA is able to recognize the code as a valid embed from one of the supported sources, you’ll see the media right in the preview.

Video and audio files which are added this way will behave a tad differently for you and your clients when shared.  Instead of a Download button, you’ll see a Watch or Listen button.

Click that and the media file opens right up within CoachAccountable:

Just click “watch” and the lights go down.

Like with other types of shared files, CoachAccountable keeps track of if and when your client last accessed embedded files.

This started out as an experimental feature, unlocked for a few coaches a while ago.  It’s pretty sharp and ready for prime time now, but even so I’m open to adding other established sites for hosted media beyond the 11 that CoachAccountable currently recognizes and supports.  If you know of one that I missed which would be useful to you, let it be known!

It was last fall when I first made the acquaintance of Michael Leahy of BraveHearts on the telephone, and since then he’s been one of CoachAccountable’s most discerning power users.

His thorough use of Groups and Courses have pushed the platform forward, and his perspective and insight of what would be useful have lead to an impressively high rate of his feature requests ultimately making it into the system¹.

One of our more recent exchanges led to the creation and launch of Client Engagement Reports, and as with so many other bouts of his feedback CA is better for it.

In June Michael was kind enough to favor CoachAccountable with a testimonial.  I usually prefer kind words regarding CoachAccountable to be more about the software than about me (because the software should stand on its own merits, right?), but I suppose the customer support aspect of CA is worth touting now and then (and my wife will tell you I spend a lot of time on that part of the business!)

Take it away, Michael.

If you are a successful coach or mentor and you’re looking for a best practices, leading edge platform to work with, look no further. As a discriminating and hard to please  technology industry veteran of 20 years, I spent YEARS trying to find a robust, fully functional solution for my mentoring practice that integrated appointment management AND client/practice management tools, AND that also offered excellent, responsive support. The winner hands down is John Larson and Coach Accountable

Rarely have I encountered an application developer like John who is so level headed, responsive and easy to work with. He truly believes in his product and loves his work, and it shows. And while I don’t always get my way re- new feature requests (who does), when it comes to fixing those inevitable software bugs or adding that logical functionality that might have been overlooked in a new software release, I’ve never met anyone more capable or responsive as John has been.

So let me save you a lot of wasted time and effort searching to and fro for a rock solid coaching/mentoring platform from which to grow your practice – choose CoachAccountable and spend more time doing what we all love and really want to do – coaching and mentoring!

Respectfully,

Actions are CoachAccountable’s way of helping coaches structure action plans with their clients and manage completion between sessions.  Actions recently got a big leg up this week with the addition of Action Projects.

An Action Project is a way to group related actions under the banner of a single project:

How close is the project to being done? The progress bar gives the overall picture.

Tying a new Action to a new (or existing) project is a snap.  Just choose an existing project from the drop down menu, or create a new one simply by giving it a name:

When an action is part of a project, weight is relevant.

“Weight” is simply a way to tell CoachAccountable how much a given action contributes to the overall progress of the project.  Effectively, it dictates how big a slice of the progress meter should be filled up when the action is marked complete.  Actions that are more important and/or entail more work should be given greater weights, and quicker or less significant Actions get smaller ones.

You can think of weight as being on a 10-point scale, but really they can be represent whatever scheme of weighting you like.  For programming projects where features to-be-built are contract line items, I like to make actions that mirror the line items with weights that match the dollar amount of those line items.

The progress meter is cool because it gives a visually satisfying look at how much is done, plus it’s fun to watch the meter fill up in the moment an action is marked complete.

Hover your mouse over any of the completed slices of the progress meter to see details about the corresponding action:

Hovering reveals an associated color for the completed action: red means it was done late, yellow, a little late, and green on time.

By editing the action project you can set a description for it, as well as set weights and update due dates in bulk for all of the Actions in the project:

The due dates of already-completed Actions can’t be updated, but their weights can be.

For my sake I already really like Action Projects: to queue up related actions into 2 or 3 projects is a major leg up from having a big, interlaced list of to-dos, organized only by due date.  To see the progress bars of each and recognize at a quick glance both how far we’ve come and how much further there is to go for a given project is super satisfying for me as coach, and my clients like it as well.  After using them for a few weeks, a big list of standalone Actions seems almost primitive by comparison.

I’m happy to report that already others have similarly weighed in.  L. T. from Australia writes:

Well done on the projects, makes working with businesses so much clearer!

and M. M. from Texas says:

Totally love the new Action Projects! :-)  Congratulations.

Enjoy!

In addition to the testimonial she so generously provided last month, Twila Gates offered to write a mini series reviewing the various features of CoachAccountable as a way to share with other coaches her experiences and how she’s made it serve her practice so well.

Recently I’ve had a few requests for a CoachAccountable user’s group, and until that’s ready I imagine Twila’s accounts make a fitting way to fill some of that void.

Twila has opted to start with the basics for her first piece, and herein describes CoachAccountable’s documentation of coaching sessions.  Take it away, Twila!

CoachAccountable is, by far, the very best interface for collaboration and coaching with a client.  After coaching for 19 years, I have several systems in place that I have utilized with my clients to promote success throughout the coaching experience.  One of those systems is documenting the actual coaching session in a way that my clients have added benefit beyond just reading an e-mail.

When I started using CoachAccountable, I was very happy to see that there was a way within the system to document the coaching sessions – even better, the documentation is stored in chronological order within the interface – and is searchable.  This immediately eliminated my need to remember the beginning of the e-mail address of my clients for sending the e-mail to them (I was using Outlook).   I also don’t have to save a copy of the documentation to myself, however, since there is the option to have the notes automatically sent to myself, I go ahead and keep a copy of the documentation in a client Outlook file.  The only reason I do this is in the event I need to review something about a client when I don’t have access to wifi.  Of course… how often does that occur – so I’m probably wasting my time and effort.  Hmmm… I might consider giving that up, now that I think about it!

Being able to pre-create templates for various types of coaching sessions is a real time saver.  It also creates some structure for my busy brain to latch onto so I can write optimal documentation to assist the client.  A typical session is easy enough, but what about “fire drill” sessions OR “focus sessions”…  You stay on track with giving your clients the notes they really need to promote continuity with their needs/desires.  Writing notes becomes easier and even enjoyable through the use of templates

I love the way CoachAccountable appends all actions created to the end of the documentation as an immediate reminder of agreements made during the session.  This creates the entire picture for the client to move forward… and I don’t have to go through gyrations to write notes at the top and the bottom in an e-mail.  It is all automatically pulled from the actions created during the meeting.

Sometimes I do take advantage of the little check box at the bottom of the documentation screen to make the notes private for my eyes only.  This is great for remembering something that might not be appropriate to include on the client’s notes and yet is important to me.  Of utmost importance is that both myself and my client have easy access to all notes since they are web-based.  I can’t tell you how many times my clients asked me to re-send notes previously because they couldn’t remember where they saved them or maybe they deleted them and realized that the notes included important information that they wanted to review.  Having it all online is invaluable.

So, all in all, CoachAccountable provides an excellent package for doing documentation of meetings.  This is a huge added bonus for your clients as you are able to focus on documenting the things that really matter for various types of coaching sessions.  Of course we as coaches need to focus on what our clients need from us in our notes and CoachAccountable supports our efforts in this important endeavor.

Happy documenting with less effort and better outcomes!

Last week my wife and I were in Vancouver enjoying a little getaway, during which I had my second international face-to-face with a CoachAccountable customer.  This time it was David Frank Gomes of Life Compass Coaching.

Relative to the timeline of CoachAccountable, David and I go way back.  He was one of the very first people checking it out with whom I chatted on the phone, one of my early attempts to convey in words the how and why of the system.  This was in November of 2012, just over 2 months into CA’s public existence.

I think the job I did of convincing him was good but not great in that green period of my sales call ability: it wasn’t until 5 months later that David came back as a full-fledged user of the system, but to my delight he’s been a vocal fan ever since.

During our visit we talked of Team Edition’s imminent release, our mutual paths as entrepreneurs in the coaching space, and David’s experience of using CA for his year+.  For David’s practice though he loves the system he finds a lot of its mechanics (for example of Metrics and Actions) to be cold, uninspiring, a little too right-brained.  For his sake, he told me, he’d love to give his clients a more visual experience: something to viscerally inspire the dynamic process that dealing with life’s issues and ambitions generally is, and communicate more than just numbers and graphs.

“Like sharing images,” he said, “yes I can upload it as a file to share with the client and put it in their Files tab, but then they have to click through and download it to their machine and open it.  It’s clunky.  It would be nice to see them just appear in the Stream tab.”

He went on to explain how “Yeah you can do a Metric of ‘how do you feel about your dad’s death today?’, but what does that mean, when they report a 2?  I want them to go out in the world, take a picture that expresses how they’re feeling.  When they share that we can have a conversation, create and build a story based on that rather than some sterile graph.”

It was fantastic to see and hear things so clearly from his perspective.  The way he described the situation gave me several ideas of low hanging fruit to put more imagery into the coaching experience.

So today I’m happy to announce the release of two tweaks to the system which allow the coaching process to be just a little more visual.

The first is that clients are now able to upload and embed images into their journal entries.  Like coaches have enjoyed for a while now, a little image button on the WYSIWYG editor allows them to access and add to their image gallery:

Fun fact: that sketch of me was done by some nice gal during a drunken draw-off competition at a house party in college.  Pretty sure she won.

You may need to let your clients know that they can insert images into their journal entries, as that little picture icon is easy to miss.  And remember: as coach you can add images to your templates, worksheet assignments, session notes, and even client messages.

The second tweak is that shared files that are in fact images are now rendered inline in the stream.

Taken together the Client Stream can now be a much more pictorial account of the coaching process:

The client has included an image in his journal entry. The shared image file shows right up with no need to download.  Also: that’s what I looked like in grad school.

David, it was a pleasure hanging with you on the Granville Island harbor.  Thanks for sharing your inspired perspective!

While it’s true that I’m not getting yet making any headway on translating CoachAccountable to other languages (Portuguese and German are leading the small pack in number of requests), today I’ve added support for 24-hour formatting of times throughout the system.

This is nice for folks not accustomed to seeing times with “am” and “pm” appended (which, much like seeing 7/3/2014 versus 3/7/2014, can be quite disorienting!).

Like dates this formatting option can be set by each user independently, allowing everyone may see times in the format they’re used to.  Coaches and clients alike can find this setting on their My Account page right with the other localization settings:

Team Edition supports multiple coaches, administrative oversight and more.

CoachAccountable Team Edition is now publicly available.

With this release CoachAccountable is a suitable platform for managing an entire team of coaches, including administrative oversight, coordinated team coaching, shared team resources, and mentorship of newer coaches by more senior ones.

The well-loved and thoroughly-honed supporting structures for client-coaching relationships remains at the heart of the system.

See the full lowdown here.

This week has been a deep dive into client engagement in coaching programs, from why it matters and is worth managing to how to cause more of it.  To round out the series I’m happy to unveil CoachAccountable’s brand new Client Engagement Reports.

The impetus to create these reports began 12 days ago during an inspired conversation with Michael Leahy, wherein he expressed the desire to see how his clients were engaging but in a manner more efficient than clicking through to each one and manually reviewing.  The vision was further brought into focus last week when Nicky Roberts shared how keeping up with clients who are falling off in their engagement has made a substantial difference in her client retention.

So now I get it.  Between action plans, marking things done, accessing shared files and more, CoachAccountable already maintains a seriously detailed record of how much clients are engaged in their coaching process.  Knowing that a client is falling behind is actionable information: a chance for coach to check in and offer whatever support might be appropriate.

All that’s needed to make an actionable gauge of client activity is to pull it all together and present it to coach in a way that’s super simple to understand.  Thus the new Client Engagement Reports:

Move your mouse over any band of activity to see the breakdown of what it entails.

A client’s engagement is summarized on a per-week basis, and is comprised of whichever bits you think are an important indication of their participation: action completions, metric reporting, journal entries, and so on.  Even the number of times they logged in during a week can factor in to their level of engagement.

The setup is simple: pick the date range you’re interested in (the most recent month is a handy default) and which items you want to view engagement on.

Just pick a date range and which things you care about for gauging their involvement.

These reports make keeping tabs on who’s keeping up and who isn’t a snap, which is especially important when you’re coaching a lot of people in which case folks might easily go unnoticed when lagging behind.  Given how powerful it is to manage client engagement for the sake of results and a continued relationship, I suspect that this will be a useful addition for many coaches.

As illustrated earlier, client engagement with your coaching is vital to their getting results, and is a major deciding factor in whether or not they stick around.

Here are some practices for causing greater and more regular engagement with your coaching that you can enact with the benefit of CoachAccountable.  And if you’re worried about how much work this is going to be to get your clients up to speed with these practices, included with each one is an estimate of how much time it takes per client to set in motion.

1. Get them in the habit of creating their own actions.  Do it for them perhaps the first time, a basic setup.  Include one action to “Mark this action complete”, and one action to “Create your own action”.  These two may seem trite, but are actually quite useful.  The pair gives them the excuse to play around with Actions, see how they work and get the satisfaction of building up a collection of completed actions.  Bear in mind: the typical client when just getting started will often feel like a guest in someone else’s house, and accordingly will want to tread lightly and not mess anything up.  So it makes a big difference to give them permission to feel right at home and experience this as a resource for them to fully use as well.

Encourage them to set reminders and make comments when they create their own actions.  Let them know that actions can be easily marked complete by replying to reminder emails and texts.  Reminder replies can include comments too, making the dialog super easy to keep going.  Explain how comments keep the communication channels open for more support, and serve as tangible records of both progress made and obstacles overcome.

Time to set in motion with a client: 3 minutes the first week to setup relevant actions + a 2-minute conversation to illustrate the how and why of doing it themselves.

2. Schedule appointments that have pre-session worksheet assignments tied to them.  Appointments are easily setup with reminders for both you and your clients, and can be configured to always have a worksheet assigned beforehand.  Reminders for your clients remind them of the fact that they’re being coached on things that are important to them, and thus gets them thinking about those things.  Filling out a pre-session worksheet gives them an opportunity to take stock of what they would like more support on, and sets you both up for a focused and less meandering coaching session.

CoachAccountable manages the assignment of the worksheet at the right time prior to appointment, and puts your clients one click away from being able to fill it out.

Time to set in motion with a client: 1 minute per appointment, or 2 minutes to setup a regular sequence of up to 12 appointments.  Zero time is required if you allow your clients to schedule themselves with you.

3. Get them in the habit of reporting on Metrics.  You may not have concrete numbers that you are working on, but even subjective elements like how they feel about their progress (on, for example, a 1-to-10 scale) are a useful thing to track.  Regularly reporting Metrics builds a story of progress and what’s working over time, which helps them focus more on causing results in the desired direction AND gives you hints on what to focus on in your sessions.

Remind your clients that Metrics are quick and easy to track, just by replying to regular email or text reminders.  If you’re not sure what to track, see the Four Types of Metrics for ideas.  For a full primer on Metrics and how they work, check out Why Metrics are Awesome.

Time to set in motion with a client: 2 minutes to create the first relevant metric + a 3-minute conversation to explain the concepts and importance of regular reporting.

It’s typically hard to cause high engagement without being high touch, and being high touch is often impractical for the time it requires (and even then it may be off-putting to clients!).  With these practices however you can cause your clients to more regularly engage with your coaching, both with a very small outlay of time for you and in a way that is satisfyingly interactive for them.