If at First You Don’t Succeed… Get GoReact

Sean McCarthy:

We’ve actually been on a long journey toward making sure we could utilize this. And when we first did it, we were having mentors try to upload video to our Microsoft Office platform. And we just found while it worked in some cases, it was very clunky in others, it was hard to upload videos, it was hard to share videos. We didn’t have that capacity to make comments right in the videos.

So we started looking for a very specific platform. I’m going to be very honest with you, GoReact is not the first one that we turned to. We actually used another platform initially to meet all of these needs that I’m showing on our screen. We did a big rollout, a big launch of that video platform, and it did not go well. The platform did not work as advertised. It was not user-friendly as we thought it was going to be. We had all sorts of challenges and within just a few weeks of the year that we rolled it out, it was clear that this was not going to work and our mentors and candidates just stop stopped using it altogether. So when it came time to revisit finding a platform, I was extremely shy about even bringing up the topic. So what we did is we examined, we did a lot of research of some potential programs and I just did it initially.

Once we kind of settled on GoReact as the one we wanted to pilot for these five cycles of inquiry video feedback we like to do every year, I had my leadership team pilot the platform. We did this in spring of 2022, and honestly I was ready to get all sorts of pushback even from my leadership team, but instead they absolutely loved it. It was like night and day compared to the first platform that we attempted. And they thought it was so easy. They said, we think we can pitch this and sell this to our mentors. And in fact, my leaders were the ones who kind of eased the way and got the other mentors willing to even consider it after that challenging experience.