ICF Chapter Best Practices
Boulder Coaches Alliance (Colorado)
The Boulder Coaches Alliance (BCA) first held officer elections August 2000 and by June 2001 grew to 42 members. Our goal is to provide sample sessions to 1000 community members by years' end. We provide workshops and coaching on location at shopping areas and libraries. Our biggest impact is joining the Boulder Chamber of Commerce.
The membership gives us the opportunity to attend networking/educational events and serve on Chamber committees--Business Women's Leadership and Brown Bag Seminars. BCA was featured in the Chamber newsletter. BCA made a big impact at the recent Business to Business Expo attended by over 2,000 businesspeople. Highly interactive, our booth contained a wheel listing personal and business coaching categories. After spinning the wheel, attendees selected category cards containing powerful questions and challenges. After a brief coaching conversation, fifty visitors left their cards for a complimentary coaching session. Other vendors were amazed to see BCA coaches, all independent business owners, working together to promote the gifts of coaching!
Denver Coach Federation
CHANNEL 4 Coaching Call In Center: Twice a month, the Denver Coach Federation sends a panel of Coaches to appear on the late afternoon--2 hour segment of the local news: Channel 4 (CBS affiliate)- where they field telephone calls from the viewing audience. Once a month the focus is on Career Coaching, and the other session is on Relationship Coaching. The Anchors introduce the availability of the coaches several times during the news - and the Coaches briefly appear on camera (looking like anchors). Typically a group of 5-6 coaches field from 40-80 calls in the 2 hour segment. The coaches provide listening, ask powerful questions, provide resources, describe what coaching is as distinct from therapy and if appropriate the callers may turn in to coaching clients.
Denver Coach Federation: Coaching Pool Program
Includes over 100 volunteers, offering free coaching to nonprofit boards of directors.
Objectives:
· Contribute to the Colorado Community,
· Raise public awareness about Professional Coaching,
· Build coaching community camaraderie,
· Provide education and diverse experiences for the participating coaches, and
· Attract clients.
Two programs:
o Two months of one-on-one coaching for members of the board, with an experienced and new coach team.
o A board workshop, customized for the organization - includes initial one-on-one coaching sessions, development and delivery of workshop (coaching model), and one-on-one follow-up coaching sessions with each participant.
All coaching includes a lead coach (experienced coach) and a support coach (new coach).
Both programs require pre-approval by the board and follow-up feedback by the board. Program objectives have been met very successfully with a number of organizations, and there is a waiting list of volunteer coaches and nonprofit organizations.
Greater Phoenix Coaches Alliance
The New Coaches Collaborative (NCC) was created nearly four year ago to provide coaches with a forum for gaining new ideas and information on building a coaching business from more seasoned, successful coaches, and offers structure and support to these coaches as they build their businesses.
NCC meetings follow our ICF chapter monthly meetings from 5:30-6:30 pm on the 2nd Thursday in March, April, May, September, October and November, with an optional virtual meeting during the summer.
Participants receive:
Six or more monthly group meetings by phone or in person
A host of excellent guest coaches
Business development coaching
Personal development to promote business development
Accountability/action planning
Support from other professional coaches
A network of great coaches
The chapter’s NCC program is currently based on Master Certified Coach Allan Milham’s “10 Success Factors to a Full Coaching Business.” At meetings there are guest speakers (generally chapter members who are Master Certified Coaches), who facilitate discussions and exercises designed to help the coaches apply the business building ideas and coaching techniques. Files are posted online for easy downloading and an online system is used by the members for between-meeting communications and sharing of ideas and opportunities.
Participants are grouped with one or two other coaches as “coaching buddies.” Buddies provide support and accountability for each other between meetings. Frequently buddies decide to collaborate together on business projects and become life long friends and colleagues. We have had great feedback on the NCC program, and an unexpected benefit is that many of the NCC coaches have grown into the future leaders and committed volunteers for our chapter.
Participants are charged a modest “commitment fee” of $50.00 for the entire group of 6 meetings over the course of 1 year. This fee encourages full participation at each meeting.
If you have questions about the NCC, contact Rachelle Taylor, ACC, or Debra Exner, PCC, at www.icfphoenix.com.
ICF New England
The PR Committee launched the first edition of the New England Coaches Network News, ICFNE's first online monthly email newsletter. Its purpose is to keep members informed of chapter activities and invites members to post workshops, seminars, recent publications of articles, books and coaching materials. The newsletter is circulated to members only but is frequently forwarded to clients and other interested parties. The results of this effort are evident in increased exposure for coaches and increased enrollments in workshops and seminars.
The bi-yearly print newsletter, Coaching Insights and Perspectives, was also launched. Its purpose is to serve as an educational vehicle providing greater understanding of the complexities, skills, models and tools of coaching. It features articles, interviews with expert coaches, and a book review section. It serves to promote coaching to the general public, and offers a means for chapter members to air opinions and views, and share their knowledge.
ICF Toronto
Our Toronto ICF Chapter created and presented the first annual Prism Award for Corporate Commitment to Coaching, recognizing a local organization for making coaching a part of their company strategy. It was presented to winner Aventis Pasteur Canada during International Coaching Week at a sold out meeting at the Board of Trade.
We created the eligibility, nomination and selection criteria in keeping with carefully chosen principles, and designed the award - a quartz crystal cluster on a Rosewood base and accompanying Certificate with intentional symbolism and meaning.
Aventis and 2 finalists are now doing more coaching in their organizations. The Award has become a symbol of pride and ICF leadership for our members. And Companies and Coaches are using it in their promotional materials.
We created a legacy that will live into a future, one that includes plans for logo and branding that companies aspire to like an ISO designation.
ICF Toronto: Themed Coaching
Themed Coaching Inspires Great Performance, we created 5 events to highlight International Coaching Week in Toronto.
We worked together 5 months and co-created:
- an intention: To attract interest, excitement and participation to ICW within a spirit of mutual value and profit for all - with grace and ease.
- an innovative promotion and referral campaign
- a hugely successful week of exciting sold-out events that had passion and meaning for us and our guests
- a legacy: The First Annual Prism Award for Corporate Commitment to Coaching and awarded it Aventis Pasteur Canada.
With lots of passion, creativity and commitment, we easily attracted corporations, professionals and entrepreneurs, and inspired them with real life stories and possibilities of how Coaching Inspires Great Performance in business and in life. Perhaps this acknowledgement captures it best: You have indeed put COACHING and ICF Toronto on the map! The results are spectacular.
New Jersey Professional Coaches Association (NJPCA)
We presented an International Coaching Week workshop that drew approximately 60 attendees, and every person attending rated the event as "excellent" or "very good." We also presented an event to promote public awareness with Laura Berman Fortgang as our main speaker. We had 80 attendees at that event which was also very highly rated. We have a well designed website with a keyword-search enabled Coach Referral Service, with links to the ICF. An average of 60 visitors a day visit our site, with approximately 25% of the visitors seeking a coach. Finally, we have had several articles published in regional and statewide publications, including the New Jersey Business News, which reaches over 20,000 businesses in New Jersey. A stated intent and dedicated, hard-working, and talented Board members and other volunteers are the reason that we have been successful.
ICF-NYC launches automated Speakers Bureau and Find-A-Coach Member Directory!
We have spent many months redeveloping our chapter website. Two of the noteworthy benefits that our website offers to our local membership is an automated Speakers Bureau and automated "Find-A-Coach" Member Directory. It has been our objective this year to provide substantial benefits to our local membership. To promote the Speakers Bureau, we are notifying professional organizations in the NYC area about our "pro bono" speakers bureau service, which offers an automated system in which a speaker can be found by topic or name. Similarly, our Find-A-Coach member directory offers an automated search system whereby a coach can be found by specialty area or name. Please visit our site at http://www.icfnycchapter.org/ to see what we have done.
Rochester Chapter
For Coaching Awareness Week last February, our Chapter put on a total of seven free public events in venues all around the Rochester NY community. Topics included The Power of Coaching, Marketing, Coaching Teens, HR and other Professionals, Gay Youth, Parenting, and Managing/Fostering Others. We also had proclamations honoring Coaching issued by the City of Rochester and neighboring towns.
To the credit of our entire Chapter, we put all this together in a little over one month, using email communication, phone calls, and lots of hard work. Publicity was largely via newsgroups, flyers, media coverage, and word-of-mouth.
There are now many hundreds of people who thought coaching was about Little League who are now aware of our profession, its relevance, of the ICF as our governing organization, and of our Chapter as a local Coaching resource. We are still--in June--receiving positive feedback from our events.
San Antonio Chapter
With only 30 days before it (help!), we applied the combined talents of all our membership. So we sent out ICF colored letterhead "snail mail" and used color photocopies of book covers on our posters, emblazoned with "AS SEEN ON OPRAH!" (and later we added store handouts weeks in advance) and sent Emails to anyone who was breathing in the print/radio/TV media! We intentionally used five coaches as presenters, and used well-known Cheryl Richardson's books as reference points. We had handouts with all our coaches names, phones, and Emails (along with specialty/niche). We used hooks like "Be More While Doing Less" and "Careers 4U:Design Your Life!" And this was a free event! They considered 20 people and a few books sold to be good. Over 40 people showed up and STAYED FOR TWO HOURS! 20% were standing room only! Results? Uncovered new coaches, connected with the public, got known by local media, created a website at no cost, membership ranks are swelling, and fewer questions of "what is coaching?"