4. Resourcing

It was requested that two people from the participating organisations would attend the coaching. This was aimed at increasing peer learning, sharing of information and enabling organisations to start their development work efficiently. The participating organisations considered this a good solution. The participation of two people meant that there were more perspectives, that there was more peer pressure in the development work and that things spread more widely within the organisation.

The participants attended the on-site events for two full working days. In addition, there was an online lecture (2 hours), individual coaching (1–2 hours) and an optional Q&A session (1 hour). In total, these took about three working days per participant, that is, six working days per organisation. In addition, writing the application, making the assessment plan and giving peer feedback took the participants’ time.

The work time spent by the coaches (3 persons) was divided as follows:

In total, the impact coaching took about two weeks of working time per coach from the organising organisations. The working time spent can be considered reasonable in relation to the importance of coaching and the verified increase in competence.

It is also noteworthy that this time was spent on creating a coaching pilot. The next round will require less working time.

Implementing impact coaching with this model requires skills related to assessment and impacting from the coaches. All three coaches had their own experience of working in the organisational sector, and all were familiar with impact assessment either through their previous jobs or as part of their studies. The coaches also had experience in organising events and training as well as facilitating events, both live and online.

One of the coaches was responsible for all communication and coordination of the coaching. The centralisation of communication was perceived as a very functional solution in the coach team, and the communication was also praised by the participants. 

In the pilot coaching, rental premises owned partly by external parties were used, which entailed costs. In addition, the planning meeting was held over two days, which entailed travel and accommodation costs. The participants were offered morning and afternoon coffee during the on-site coaching days, but they had to pay for lunch themselves. 

Working time spent on coaching has not been counted towards financial resources, although it certainly constitutes a financial resource.

The participation fee for the coaching was EUR 100 per organisation. The purpose of the payment was, above all, to commit the participants to the coaching programme, rather than to cover the costs. 

Both free and paid tools were used as IT resources. A free version of the Slack chat platform and Google tools were used in the coaching. The paid tools included Webropol and Zoom, which were already used by the organising organisations, so no additional costs were incurred for the use of these.

The coaching can be carried out with very different financial resources. The pilot project had a little more funding available than usual. On the other hand, in the future, the implementation of coaching does not require, for example, an equally extensive planning meeting. On the other hand, it was considered good that enough time was reserved for the coaches’ meetings and that the meetings (a total of three days) focused only on the planning and conceptualisation of impact coaching. Although this caused costs, it was a financially sensible solution from the point of view of the use of working time.

Three different channels were used for communication: e-mail, Slack and Drive.

All instructions and information about the coaching process were sent to the participants via e-mail. The aim was to centralise the e-mails in such a way that one message was always compiled as comprehensively as possible with information about upcoming appointments and tasks, so that the number of e-mails would remain reasonable. 

The Slack platform was used by the participants to share their own materials, have peer-to-peer discussions and comment on the assessment plans. Channels were created in Slack for peer feedback where the discussions took place. The coaches had access to all channels. At the end of the coaching, the coaches sent short feedback on the coaching through Slack to the participants they had been coaching.

All the coaching material was collected in the shared Drive folder, which included the coaches’ slideshows, additional materials and the participants’ final day presentation materials.