Ask Steph: Do you have to have live calls in your online course? Nope! (Here are 6 alternatives to coaching and Q&A calls)

Today I'm answering a question from a listener who wants to know whether it's necessary to include live Q&A and coaching calls in her cohort-based courses. Whilst I am a big advocate for Q&A calls, in this episode I break down 6 alternatives and how to determine what's right for your program.

– How understanding the transformation your audience needs within your course will help determine the engagement level that's required
– The benefit of offering a community within your program and how to get the most out of it
– How running accountability groups and calls can be a great alternative to drive student support and engagement
– The suitability of mini-mastermind calls as a perfect workshopping solution
– How training a team member to coach or lead on your behalf can reduce your workload (if you can access the best person for the job!)
– The benefits of identifying your students' challenges AND enlisting the support of an expert

Have a question you’d like me to answer on the show? Write in with your question at https://stephtaylor.co/asksteph

 

Today is another episode of Ask Steph. The question was submitted by Brittany at Actively You and the question was:

“Do you need to do coaching, Q&A calls for online courses, not evergreen ones? What are alternatives to keep it personal, but keep the workload minimal?” 

So Brittany wants to know about an online course that's not a fully self-paced course that somebody can join all the time. But rather one that is I'm assuming a cohort-based course. She wants to know what alternatives there are to doing live Q&A calls and live coaching calls. 

So the first part that I want to start with is does your audience need live support to get the result? Now, when you're making a really small shift, they might not. But if they're making a really big shift, they probably will. Now I'll give you some examples. A small shift might be tidying their pantry versus a big shift, which would be organising their entire house and then keeping it that way.

And now Brittany, who submitted the question, I can see your businesses in the area of health and fitness. So you are dealing with a pretty huge behaviour change element when it comes to your course. I'm not entirely sure what the cause is about but I'm assuming it's in the realm of health and fitness, if that's what your business is doing. And these habits that people have around their health and their fitness. they're probably very ingrained. 

Like they've probably been doing these bad habits for decades, so it's likely that they're going to need a lot of support to make the shift that they need to make for them to get the end result and then decide what other structure, other format could you create? That's not a live Q&A call. We first need to figure out what kind of support they need.

Now, there are alternatives to doing the traditional coaching or Q&A call model with your online course. But I first do want to share a little bit about why I love Q&A calls. Now, even though everyone's question is in the Q&A calls, there is almost always something in the question for everybody who's listening to the call. They can see themselves in some part of that person's story. Or they could take one little bit from my answer and apply that to their business or their launch. 

So it does have that massive benefit to it. It also has that awesome community feel where you are on a Zoom call. You're seeing everybody else's faces. They get to see each other. It feels less lonely when you can see people's faces rather than just someone's name in a Facebook group. 

Now, if you enjoy doing the calls, but you're worried about the workload, so in that case, ask yourself, What could I do to make this less work and less of an energy drain? I love mine because they are an hour or 90 minutes. 

 

6 alternatives to coaching and Q&A calls

 

Option #1:

Have it completely focused on the community instead of on-calls. So have them ask their questions in the community for you or your team to answer. This way you don't need to be showing up live and often the same questions will come up again. And again, So you can actually template some of those responses and have a team member respond to them with the template.

But this can still be very time-consuming if you don't have a solid process around how you manage the community. It can end up being quite a big-time drain. Now something to consider is, do you want the community to be centered around you with everyone asking you the questions or do you want the community to be centered around the community? 

So they ask each other questions. This is going to depend on how much expert advice they need and how knowledgeable the other people in the community are. And then you really need to make sure that you set those boundaries with them. 

So if you say, Hey, look, this community is here for you to ask each other questions. Then communicating this with them and letting them know those expectations is very important.

One thing that I have seen work really well for others is hiring alumni. So people who've already been through the course, or the program comes back and answer the questions that are in the group. This can work really well because somebody who's been through the entire process is probably going to have a really good understanding of the bigger picture.

They might not have the same expert insight that you do, but they'll probably still be able to answer the questions reasonably well. Now, for the community approach rather than calls for this to work, you need to have a pretty engaged group. Otherwise, it can actually feel even lonelier than not having a community, right? Because if you're in this empty Facebook group and nobody's responding to you, that's pretty lonely. That's not a great place to be. 

 

Option #2:

Now the next alternative is accountability groups or accountability buddies. So this is really useful if accountability is one of the areas that they need support with. So you can set up little pods or you can pair them up with a buddy and this can be fully hands-off where you're saying, Hey, you've got to connect with each other and organise yourselves.

Or it can be very hands-on where you are organising them into pairs or into groups, and you might even arrange a time for them to meet or it can be somewhere in the middle. So it can be a little bit more challenging when you're hands-off to organise this. 

 

Option #3:

Mini mastermind calls. So yes, these are still live calls but you don't actually have to be the one running the calls. And how it works is that everyone in your course can jump on the call and then you split them into breakout rooms where they can discuss each workshop, a little challenge that they're struggling with. 

So you'll set a timer and you'll say everybody has five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever, and set a timer and then they get to workshop with each other. This is really great if you have a good mix of students, maybe some are experienced or they've been there, they're alumni, and then some are a little bit fresher. 

It might be a bit of a challenge if everyone is brand new and nobody knows the answer and it's kind of like, they're all lost essentially but on the other hand, this can work really well if they want the general morale boost and they want to have that more connection with each other within the course, which is really hard to achieve when it's all a hundred percent self-paced or even when it's a community, but you don't get to actually see each other's faces.

 

Option #4:

Train other coaches to lead calls on your behalf. So if you have a specific process or method that you lead your students through, you could train somebody else really thoroughly in that process and then train them on how to coach in your style if they already aren't a coach. And then you could have them coach on your behalf, or you could have them lead those Q&A calls for your students. 

Now, this is a much more advanced approach. Most of the success stories I've heard with this is when somebody has hired a past student, they've hired somebody who's been through the program themselves and experienced the process. And then they've taught them the coaching skills. Now, of course, this doesn't work for every program in fitness. 

For example, you might just need to hire someone with particular certifications rather than someone who has only completed your program. It can also depend a bit on whether the questions that are getting asked are about the program and the content of the program or whether they are much more specific.

 

Option #5:

The fifth alternative is to bring in other experts to coach on your behalf. Now, this sounds very similar to the last option but slightly different because, in this approach, you are basically bringing in an expert that you trust. And you're saying, I trust your coaching style, I trust your expertise, you do it your way. 

Now in your case, Brittany, you could potentially bring someone in to do mindset coaching a few times a month in your program because when it comes to changing our behaviour and especially with a health and fitness mindset, is the biggest thing that gets in the way.

The biggest thing that stops us from getting the results we want in pretty much any area is the gap between knowing what we need to do and actually doing it. And mindset is that bridge between knowing what to do and actually going out there and doing it and sticking with it.

And now this is relevant to like 90% of courses, right? Even if it's not health and fitness, you're pretty much always changing a behaviour. 

If you're teaching somebody how to start a podcast, you're potentially changing the behaviour that they have where they hide in the shadows and don't like stepping into the spotlight or where they find that they're not consistent with their content.

 

Option #6: 

Have someone on your team do accountability calls with them. So if accountability is the biggest area where they need support you could have a team member run accountability calls. 

 

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