Partner Retainer FAQ

When is a Partner Retainer most helpful?

All Pathwright plans come with self-service guidance through our Help Center, email support, and Pathwright Grow courses. Customers and partners of all sizes benefit from those channels, but additionally find our Partner Retainer Service especially helpful when...

• Reaching an ambitious goal or accelerating progress is strategic for your online education initiatives and you'd benefit from extending your busy team with professional help from the Pathwright team. This is especially true if there are multiple Partner Services projects we work together on through 6 or more months.
• Online education is new to the organization or team and having experienced guidance and support in determining how to best plan for optimal results, avoid common pitfalls, and successfully roll out new programs is helpful.
• Multiple team members would benefit from personalized training on how to best use the platform to design courses, teach them, keep people engaged, manage the entire program, determine a pricing model, and more...
• Technical and/or organizational complexity is high and the learning platform is one component within many other systems and goals that need to be well coordinated and integrated over time.
• Any unique scenario where having professional, experienced people to provide support and guidance is helpful. If you're wondering about whether or not a Partner Service Retainer is a good fit for you, just let us know and we'll be happy to discuss.

What's the difference between a Partner Retainer and working with Pathwright on projects?

Partner Retainers are designed to provide ongoing and timely answers to your questions, consulting on specialized topics, basic staff training, and to help coordinate any additional projects you have Pathwright helping with through our Partner Services should you choose to use them.

Often, planning together within our retainer relationship leads to opportunities to provide additional hands to help through our project-based services that we scope, budget, and schedule separately.

Partner Service Projects typically last anywhere between 2 weeks and 20 weeks and include services such as:

• Custom course translation, design, and building from our Learner Experience Design Team.
• On-location meetings through Pathfinding Retreats.
• Advanced training that goes beyond how to optimally use the software platform (for instance, training on our Learning Experience Design Process or custom Blocks developer framework.)
• Custom design and development of new interactive Blocks, custom integration support, and occasionally, new platform features.

To learn more about the project-based services we provide, see our Partner Services Guide.

Can we have a Partner Retainer for less than 6 months?

While the minimum amount of time for a Partner Retainer is 6 months, you may include different levels of service in 3 month increments (e.g., 3 months at Level 3 and then move down to Level 2 for the next 3 months). Additionally, you can upgrade or downgrade your service level in 3 month increments as well.

Do Partner Retainers include a number of hours?

Our Partner Retainers don't include a number of hours, but instead provide a mix of referenceable deliverables created by specialists within our core team.

While we've offered retainers on an hourly basis similar to other professional consulting groups, we found that the ad-hoc nature and open-endedness of a pool of hours can lead to two issues:

1. 1.The pre-paid time gets underutilized (i.e., either not used or is used up in a rush).
2. 2.The results of hourly consultations aren't easily referenceable by anyone who wasn't a part of the conversation and often get lost over time.

Our alternative approach is to package consultations with a retainer into referenceable, sharable deliverables we call "Guidance Sessions" and "Guidance Reports".

What's included in a Guidance Session or Report?

A Guidance Session or Report is a way for us to provide a timely and high quality answer to a question of your choice that's unique to your plans or program. These questions are also new or complex and can't be answered simply using existing resources. While the types of questions we answer in a session or report can be about anything related to online education, here are a few general examples:

• How do we accomplish _______ unique aspect of how we teach or structure our programs that the platform doesn't seem to support directly?
• What's the best way to convert our existing material into an online course?
• How do we best use the _______ feature for our unique use case and audience?
• What should we prepare in advance of our pilot or public launch?
• How can we best accomplish these strategic goals for our next year?
• Should we pursue a subscription plan pricing model or a an à la carte pricing model for our program (or something else)?
• Should we pursue a subscription plan pricing model or a an à la carte pricing model for our program (or something else)?

At Level 2 and 3, we can also explore more technical or product roadmap questions such as:

• How much would it cost to do _____ integration or custom feature?
• How do we integrate or share data from the platform with our other back-office software?
• In the future, how could we best accomplish a new way of teaching or marketing we don't currently support?

Pre-work: Before we schedule a session, we'll ask for just enough background information to ensure that we fully understand the context and can include the people on our team who are best equipped to provide guidance on it.

If you'd prefer to discuss the question live, we'll schedule a 20 or 40 minute meeting and share notes on what we discussed in follow up.

If you'd prefer a more thorough, documented recommendation we'll put together a report.

What's included in a Guidance Report?

While the format for Guidance Report varies based on the question we're exploring, the document typically includes:

A summary of the primary question we're exploring and the intended outcome.

• A summary description of our recommendation.
• A list of of recommended steps for accomplishing it.
• If it's related to a new project, estimated additional costs to complete it.
• Reference material for further explanation.

Guidance reports are delivered via your Dashboard for easy review and future reference.

What's included in a Guidance Session?

A Guidance Session is a 20 or 40 minute live meeting by audio or video to discuss recommendations for how best to accomplish question of your choice.

In follow up to a Guidance Session, we'll share notes on what we discussed and the recommended next steps in your Dashboard.

What if we need more or less than our allocated number of Guidance Sessions or Reports in a given month?

You'll have a number of Guidance Sessions or Reports available to you each month based on your service level that you may use as the need arises. Unused sessions and reports don't carry over to the next month (e.g., if your service level includes 3 sessions or reports and you use 2 out of 3 in January, come February you'll have a total 3 available).

If you need an additional report or session in a given month occasionally, we'll provide that at no extra charge. However, if more sessions or reports than allocated are needed for a couple months in a row, we'll recommend that you upgrade your service level to include more in each month.

Tip: keep in mind that most questions can be answered simply within your Dashboard and don't require a full Guidance Session or Report.

What can I expect in response to a question to my Partner Guide?

Your service level includes a minimum response time from your Partner Guide, between 1 and 3 business days. Our "business days" are Monday through Friday, excluding holidays.

Provided your requests is received before 5 pm ET on a business day, your request will be responded to within the next 1-3 business days (e.g., if you have a 1 business day response time and ask a question on Friday at 3 pm, you'll receive a response no later than the following Monday at 5 pm.).

Note: any technical questions or issues my be reported separately to our Customer Guidance team via hello@pathwright.com.

What's included in a Dashboard?

Your Partner Dashboard is a single page with interactive areas that include:

• Quick links to contact information, your Pathwright account(s), project agreements and other reference material.
• A Question & Answer area where you can post any (non-technical support) questions for our team to answer.
• A Project Milestones area with the status, next steps, and estimated deliver dates for any projects we're working on together.
• A Guidance Sessions & Reports area for reviewing and archiving each Guidance Session, Report, and Check-In.

At the beginning of our Partner Report Retainer, we'll ask that one person on your team act as the point person for coordinating questions and other information, but we can grant Dashboard access to any number of your team members at your request.

What's included in a Roadmap Update Path?

A Roadmap Update Path is a Pathwright Course path we'll create within your account (set to private access) that includes:

• A summary of the things we worked on together during the past 7 weeks.
• A summary of new Pathwright features or services that are relevant for your plans.
• At higher service levels, a summary of the features coming up in our next 6 week development cycle with an opportunity to share ideas and feedback.

Are discounts available?

Yes, up-front payment of for 6 or more months includes a 10% discount.