Case 1

COach
VZW

Under the umbrella of Coach vzw, there are five training centers for people working in hairstyle, beauty and fitness. They encourage lifelong learning for their people. When the coronacrisis made live classes impossible, Coach’s plans to provide online sessions suddenly gained momentum. Together with her colleagues, Coach vzw’s Director Ingrid De Wolf went looking for a partner to help them with this project, who could give them complete peace of mind. Enter GoCreate. Ingrid: “We’ve had a lot of compliments about the setup and the quality of what we broadcast. The people of GoCreate really excel at their job.” Find out how the partnership came to be, and how it resulted in the creation of an entire video library.

Online learning during lockdown

Ingrid De Wolf takes us back to the beginning of 2020, when our country went into lockdown, and hairdressers and beauty professionals were no longer allowed to come over to Coach vzw. “We then decided to speed up a project that had been on our minds for a long time, namely online classes,” Ingrid explains. “We did some research into potential partners, and we ended up relying on GoCreate. They were very quick to respond, and we immediately got along.”

Ingrid: “It’s our job to make sure the classroom is ready, that the trainer is there and that he or she knows how to teach in front of a camera, but GoCreate takes care of all the rest. They install the equipment, create the link allowing participants to log in, and ensure high-quality content for the duration of the streaming session.” The lessons are live, and participants can ask questions via the chat window, so there’s plenty of interaction with the trainer. Coach vzw refers to those live sessions as‘marathons’, and that’s not too far off the mark, actually. “We start shooting at about nine in the morning and we push on until half past three in the afternoon,” Ingrid explains. “We do one-hour sessions, and our members decide which courses they want to attend.”

GoCreate as part of the team

Ingrid stresses that GoCreate is really a part of Coach vzw: “They act as our colleagues.” She feels that this is a key aspect of the partnership: “We are a relatively small team, so we don’t have an in-house expert on every topic. Fortunately, we can always rely on GoCreate for advice, and they are very easy to reach. When we have a last-minute idea for a session and our regular contact at GoCreate is no longer available, they always manage to send someone else who is just as knowledgeable about our organisation and our needs. In all these years, we’ve never had to postpone a single session because GoCreate was unavailable.”

Setting up a video library

Ingrid and her team quickly realised they had gold in their hands with their webinars, and that it would be a shame if all that content were not available for members to (re)watch whenever they wanted. Ingrid: “We decided to create a digital library that would contain not just the marathons but also additional content that we would shoot before or after filming our live sessions.”

Coach vzw currently has an interesting pilot project: before the lessons take place in the training centers, they provide the accompanying theoretical framework as a video. “Members who register for a course get access to the theory via the library. This allows them to prepare for their class. We save time and, as a result, can devote more attention to the practical aspects of the training when we get together.”

All recordings are subtitled, and the video library is very easy to use. From “doing highlights on short hair” to “cutting curly hair”: members can enter keywords and find all the information they need. Their subscription allows them to (re)watch Coach content for an entire year.

To be continued?

“Thanks to these projects that we have implemented at a faster pace than we’d ever imagined, our small non-profit has taken giant leaps forward,” Ingrid realises. The team of Coach vzw wants to continue exploring the possibilities of online teaching and of their video library, and make using video even more of a habit. “We still have a long way to go, but we keep counting on GoCreate for our webinars. As soon as the opportunity arises, we will definitely take on new projects with them, because we couldn’t wish for a better partner.”