 I am super excited for the opportunity to be presenting with you and alongside my colleague, Veena. Today is really all about you and the nonprofit sector and understanding how you can not only leverage AWS in general, which we'll talk about, but specifically these credits. So in the spirit of the title of the webinar today, and we can see the screen perfectly, Veena. So thank you so much. It's awesome. I just wanted to ask, put a one in the chat if you already have AWS promotional credits that you have gone to TechSoup and procured your credits and you are here to really understand, okay, awesome. I'm seeing a lot of ones. Thank you, Shelley, Carlton. And then put a two in the chat if you're really just here to learn. You haven't yet gotten the credit, but you wanna know more. Okay, so now I'm seeing some twos. Oh, actually more twos. Okay, I saw it. I don't even know what this is. So a variety of familiarity. We have some with the credits already for Amazon Web Services, and then we have some who just wanna learn more. So that's great. Variety is exactly what we like to hear. Again, I'll just say before we move to the next slide, this is absolutely all about you. You have taken the time out of your busy day to show up to this webinar, it's live. And I encourage you to really leverage and take advantage of this time to ask us the questions that are top of mind. How can AWS support your organization specifically? We're here to support you. So before we jump into the meat and potatoes of today's presentation, I'll ask Vina, if you go to the next slide, we'll just overview a little bit of what programs are available to all organizations, no questions asked. The first one is the nonprofit credit program. And as I saw earlier, we saw some ones in the chat. This is familiar to a lot of the people on the phone today. But for those who aren't yet familiar with it, organizations of all shapes and sizes, different mission areas, have the opportunity to work with TechSoup to procure an AWS promotional credit. And in short, an AWS promotional credit is much like a gift card, although instead of it going to Amazon.com, it instead helps offset some of the costs and makes it more affordable to leverage AWS. So all organizations, again, no matter your size or mission area, have the opportunity to leverage $1,000 in promotional credit once per fiscal year. In addition to providing credits, we also like to inspire organizations about the various ways that you can leverage AWS to help your organization achieve its mission. So in the spirit of that goal, we have the Imagine conference and tons of different events that are on demand ready for you to watch and learn more about. So if you're curious about something more technical, we have technical trainings from this conference. But if you're more curious about what is the business value of leveraging AWS for your nonprofit, then we have those recordings as well. I'll be sure to put the link into the chat so you have easy access to watch those videos. And then the last thing is I really wanna emphasize the fact that we have an entire team. You're seeing me and you're seeing Vena, but we have an entire team dedicated to supporting nonprofits use for cloud technology. So definitely reach out. If you have questions, please do ask them. I'll be sure to put in a link to the ways that you can ask us questions off of this webinar. But again, we're gonna go through a presentation about the ways to use AWS, save some time at the end for some Q and A, but if we don't get to your question, that's totally okay. We'll follow up after to make sure you get the information you need. So with that in mind, I will pass the mic over to Vena. If you wanna talk a little bit about the roadmap to the nonprofit cloud. Yeah, thanks, Jamie. Hi, everyone, I'm Vena. I am a solutions architect on the AWS nonprofit team here at AWS. I'm really excited to talk to you today about how you can design a roadmap for your nonprofit cloud journey with AWS. I saw in the chat that a lot of folks have not yet taken advantage of those TechSoup AWS credits. And so hopefully once you go through this presentation, you'll get an idea of what you can apply those credits towards. And just wanna be clear if you're not sure what a solutions architect is, if you're not sure what AWS is, that's fine. That's exactly what we're here to learn today. So I just wanna preface this talk with like a 10,000 foot view of what actually is AWS. I saw in the chat some folks were like, what does it stand for? It stands for Amazon Web Services. So as you may or may not know, AWS was spun out of Amazon.com. So we had been operating Amazon.com for hundreds of millions of customers all over the world for over a decade. And we realized that we got pretty good at one thing, operating these massive scale technologies and data centers globally. So we decided to embark on this mission to offer this as a service to developers, to organizations, to nonprofits, to businesses so that they too could start to build sophisticated scalable applications just like Amazon.com. So that's pretty much where the AWS cloud came from. But what actually is AWS? So it's Amazon Web Services, right? We provide everything that you might find in a traditional data center. So that's gonna be things like servers, storage devices, databases, routers, all of the things that you need to put those Lego blocks together. But without you actually having to own or rent out space in a data center. So we manage and maintain all of this technology and infrastructure in a secure environment. And then businesses, nonprofits like yourself can access those resources via the internet or private connections. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you wanted to build a website. Normally what you'd have to do, like in the traditional sense is you'd have to get access to a data center. You would need to purchase servers. You'd need to wire them up, stack them on top of each other. You'd have to deal with air conditioning throughout the whole building. You'd have to hire folks to maintain all of that infrastructure. And so as you can imagine, those costs can get really, really high really quickly. So our model is very different. It's actually similar to how customers can flip a switch to turn on the lights and the power company just sends you electricity. Except for in this case, you're flipping a switch and you get access to maybe a server over the internet that you can pretty much do whatever you want with. So you can, like I said, host a website. You can run complex data analytics. I saw somebody in the chat mentioned that they are doing video streaming. You can do that. Pretty much anything that you can imagine you can run on top of one of these servers that you're getting from us that we are managing for you. And when you're done, you can just turn off that server and you stop paying for it. So this makes it really easy for you to just experiment with new ideas. So let's talk about what some other nonprofits are doing in the cloud. Now, if you look up AWS nonprofits stories, you will find many, many, many different case studies. I have just picked, I think three that I'm gonna go over real quick for you so you can get an idea of the breadth of the options that you have and just get an idea of what other nonprofits are up to. So Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their mission is to engage, teach and inspire through the power of Rock and Roll. So in 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame established a library and archives which basically is supposed to collect and preserve and provide access to the Rock Hall's archival material. So this is all gonna be digital files of the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. It could be oral histories, B-roll, artist interviews and live concerts from anyone from, you know, Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, all the greats, right? So Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is maintaining all of this stuff but they realized that the storage mediums that they were using to preserve this material were outdated, they were expensive, they were prone to failure. Can you imagine losing some of this stuff? And so they decided to try to do that in a digital way. So they contacted AWS and they started migrating some of that storage into AWS. So they used a couple of services called Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier Deep Archive. All you need to know about those is it's a place where you can store your files. It's scalable, it's cost effective and it's secure. So using AWS and some partners that they worked with, they have been able to recover and preserve 2,000 files and 300 terabytes of their most valued digital video assets and much, much more to come. Next up is Code.org. So Code.org is dedicated to expanding access to computer science education to kids all around the world. So they are a nonprofit and one of the biggest things that they do is the hour of code. So this happens once a year and it's basically an event where folks can log on and learn how to code really, really quickly. It's supposed to just be an hour. So kids log in from all over the place. There are over 100,000 different hour of code events that take place globally. So they needed to prepare for a massive surge of traffic to their website during the time the hour of code is running. It's something like 10 times more traffic than they're used to, like their normal day-to-day traffic is nothing near that level. So what they did was they came to AWS and they said, look, we need to be able to scale our website so that it doesn't crash when all these kids are logging in and trying to learn how to program. So they were able to use AWS to scale their infrastructure. They are using tons of servers, but only for a very short time. And so for the rest of the year, they don't have to use all those servers, right? The alternative is that they'd have to purchase all that stuff, put it in a data center and they'd be paying for it regardless of whether they were using it or not. So they came to us, they were able to have this really nice scalable and elastic infrastructure. So they were able to stay up and running during hour of code and then scale right back down after it was over, saving them over $1.3 million per year in operational costs. And the last story I want to talk about is the Los Angeles LGBT Center. So about four years ago, the LA LGBT Center wanted to establish a call center to support questions from their community. So at that time, they didn't really have any idea what a virtual call center really was. So they explored a bunch of different options including a service that we have called Amazon Connect. So this is a virtual call center service that AWS provides. So they found that by using the service, they were able to spin up a basic call center in just a few minutes. And then within a week, they had a fully operational call center taking live calls for their health services programs. So pretty incredible. They were really amazed by the speed. They were able to go from idea to production in such a short time and it helped them serve their over 30,000 clients in their clinic. So pretty great. And then they decided, this is not that difficult to use. Why don't we use this to maybe try running a telephone to raise money? So they did that. They were able to spin up that call center, get it going to run a telephone and they raised nearly $1.3 million. And this is a big deal because this was the first of its kind event for this organization. So really neat. All right. So now you've heard a few stories from different nonprofits, but everybody's different. I wanna get a feel for where all of the folks are in the chat. So if you are coming here and you're really like, I barely know what the cloud is. This is the first time I'm hearing about it or don't really understand what it is, put a one in the chat. If you are actively running workloads in the cloud, maybe in AWS, maybe elsewhere, put a three in the chat. And if you're somewhere in between, you're working on it maybe, you're exploring options, put a two in the chat. Cool, seeing lots of answers come in, seeing lots of twos, lots of a couple of threes. Cool. Yeah, keep them coming. I am keeping an eye on this. Very cool. A few ones. Hopefully the explanation helped a little bit. If not, please feel free to put questions in the chat. Awesome. Okay, so we went through a few different case studies, right? You learned about how the raw call is using AWS to preserve some of their most important digital assets, which helps them educate more folks on the legacy and the impact of rock and roll. Code.org is able to scale their hour of code websites, giving more kids a chance to learn coding skills. And the LGBT Center went from nothing to a virtual call center nearly overnight, allowing them to better serve members of their community. So you can see that these three organizations that we're talking about were able to find value and further their mission by running applications in the cloud. They are not becoming tech companies, rather they are focusing on their mission and then just figuring out if technology can help them move faster. So I mentioned before how AWS provides basic building blocks, servers, databases, storage, routers, things like that. But there's also much, much more. There are fuller, more complete solutions, such as the call centers that we just talked about. Also, we provide translation services. We have even artificial intelligence. If you wanna do personalized marketing for your donors, we've got a service that can help with that as well. So we offer the tools for you to build almost anything you can imagine. And then some fully featured services on top that you could potentially use kind of out of the box. And I mentioned before how I am a solutions architect. So what that actually means is that my job is to deeply understand what your organization's mission is and figure out how and if technology can help you meet your goals. So I learned the ins and outs of these 200 plus services so that I can help to support and educate you as you're experimenting and building applications. And I provide a completely free service to you. So as we go throughout this session, I'll be able to call out ways that I myself as a solutions architect and my peers, how we support customers in different stages of their journey. So just keep in mind, I provide a free service, speaking to me or speaking to one of my colleagues, emailing us, getting on the phone with us, that's totally free. So you can get advice from a solutions architect at any time. So real quick, I wanna talk about five different benefits that some nonprofits are seeing when they either build new applications or migrate existing applications to the AWS cloud. So the first is the ability to easily experiment with new ideas. So let's say that you wanna build a nice new search engine for your organization's website. So you could try out our services. We have some search engine services. You can try them out often for free. And if an experiment fails, you can always just shut it down without the risk of any long-term contracts or lingering costs. The second reason kind of along the same lines is cost savings. So like I mentioned before, no contracts, no upfront costs, rather you are only paying for what you're using on a month-to-month basis. Plus we have reduced prices 111 times since our launch in 2006. And I don't see that stopping anytime soon. The third reason is scalability. So imagine that you have, for example, a fundraising application, maybe a telethon, right? Like the LALGBT center that launches next week. So you're expecting lots of traffic, but maybe only during the nine to five business hours because maybe this is like a telethon that primarily targets corporate donors. So you could provision enough resources to meet that peak load 24-7 to keep your application from crashing. But what would be even better is if you could only provision the right amount of resources for the right amount of traffic so that you're not paying for this crazy amount of stuff that you're only using during nine to five. So with AWS, you can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of your organization, which also reduces costs because you're not paying 24-7 for resources that are only needed sometimes. And keep in mind, these $1,000 TechSoup credit that you get can help you with a large part of what I'm talking about as well. This low-risk experimentation, even if the service is not free to try, those TechSoup credits that you get could easily cover most of the experimentation that I talk to my customers about. A lot of times it takes less than $40 to $50 to play around with some of these services. And that's probably on the upper end of what I'm talking about. So the next benefit is the pace of innovation. We are constantly building new features, new services, and our roadmap is determined by what our customers are asking us for. So you are benefiting from the fact that we're continuously evolving and we get to benefit from all of your cool ideas. So if you're looking for a translation service for your website or if you're looking for a way to easily send out push notifications or SMS text messages to your donors, we have tools to help you do all of that so you don't have to build from the ground up and you can focus on what is actually making your nonprofit unique. And the fifth reason is that AWS enables customers to deploy globally in just a few minutes. So that is not an exaggeration from wherever you're sitting. I saw some folks from all over the country. I think I even saw some folks from Canada. This is not an exaggeration from anywhere where you're sitting. You could launch virtual machines in Asia if you wanted to. And that is really useful for nonprofits with a global presence who want to make sure that their customers all over the world are having the same great fast experience. So I recognize maybe this all sounds nice but using the cloud is not the answer to every problem nor does it come without challenges. So one of the challenges I see with my customers is cloud sprawl. If you don't have folks at the top of your organization who are leading the charge and defining how you want to move forward in the cloud for your organization you might end up leaving individuals and teams largely on their own when it comes to working on AWS. So this might technically work but you run the risk of creating sprawl. I see similar issues with nonprofits who are used to using various third party solutions out of the box. It's nice because you have a bunch of solutions that are ready to go but they all might have different data sources different security requirements, different logins. Basically it's a lack of consistency. So this is something that we see regardless of whether you're using the cloud or not. And another one of the problems that we see sometimes is small or non-existent IT teams. This is something I see all the time. And the last is the perception of not enough funding to get started or make real genuine progress. But look, you might be surprised to learn that with the right mindset there are ways to move past all of these challenges and other ones. We have been working with thousands of customers for years on these exact problems. So you're definitely not alone and between all of the different programs that we have Jayman talked about a few partners, support offerings those $1,000 credits from TechSoup and grants we can definitely help alleviate all of these concerns. So basically we are ready to get started whenever you are and we have laid out this framework that I'm gonna explain in just a second which I'm hoping will help your organization feel ready to. So we've told some cool stories about how other nonprofits have worked on AWS and the cool things they're doing but your organization is different, it's unique. So how do you actually get started? So over time we have been able to distill most success stories into four cyclical steps. So just to be totally clear this is not a one and done transformation being okay with an iterative approach like this will help you build momentum and learn from experience without setting goals that feel unrealistic or unattainable. So we'll just go through these four phases really quick and then we'll talk more about them in detail in a bit. So the Envision Phase focuses on what do we want to do and why? This involves identifying goals and associating each one of these goals with senior individuals within your organization who can influence and drive change. And then also what's important is figuring out how to measure success. So a lot of you in the chat mentioned that you maybe were at like a one or a two and this might be where you're at. You're just trying to figure out what are your goals? What are the projects that you want to put together? The next phase is alignment. So this is about focusing on identifying gaps across your organization. Do you have the right skill sets in-house? Are you gonna need to hire additional personnel or maybe work with a partner? Do you have existing licenses to consider? Getting all of these concerns out into the open really early will help to build trust among all the different folks involved and get everybody on the same page. The launch phase is focused on delivering pilot projects. So you laid out your goals, you got everybody thinking about what you need to get past. Now we're talking about building. You're starting to build these pilots and possibly more importantly on demonstrating value from these pilots. So you're gonna think back on what were those measurable outcomes we wanted to see in the Envision Stage? We're gonna try to make sure that we actually meet those goals. And if you didn't meet those goals, no problem. Why didn't you? Let's use this as an opportunity to learn and pivot a little bit until we do hit those goals. And then the scale phase is exactly what it sounds like. It's all about expanding pilots and making sure that you're seeing the value of your investments while continuing to learn and grow. So one thing I wanna be clear about, I don't want anybody to think of these phases as four rigid steps in a schedule. Rather, it's just a way to look ahead and make gradual progress, just to give you some structure. So based on those definitions, where do you think you and your organization are right now? If you're in the Envision Phase, you're just putting together goals for the future, put a one in the chat. If you are at alignment where you're trying to get everyone on the same page about these goals and plan for the future, put a two in the chat. If you are launching, you are building pilot projects, trying things out, put a three in the chat. And if you are scaling, you already have some applications up and running in the cloud and now you're ready to go back to Envisioning, put a four in the chat. Cool, seeing lots of ones, that's what I would expect. Ooh, a lot of fours too. Very cool. So let's go through these phases in a little bit more detail. I'm gonna start with the Envision Phase. This is about having a goal. This is all you really need to get started. What do you wanna get out of building this application in the cloud? Are you looking for a better efficiency, cost savings, access to technology you might not normally have, something else entirely? Once you've identified the why of your cloud journey, you can work on aligning this vision across your different stakeholders inside and outside of your organization. So a lot of folks are in the Envision Phase. So what are your next steps if you're there? Well, I recommend that you lay out a list of goals or projects that you wanna take on and assign a senior leader to each one of those. Someone who's really gonna be able to drive change from the inside. And if you don't know where to start, I would recommend looking to your organization's mission. It can really help to inform the goals that you lay out for yourself. So let's just talk through an example. A lot of nonprofits are not able to deliver on their mission without a certain level of funding. So we could say that our objective is to increase funding and there could be a whole set of goals that are associated with that objective. Maybe you want to do better donor management. Maybe you want to start to build personalized email campaigns for your donors. Maybe you want to put together some public dashboards that show the impact of the donations that people are already giving you. So you can see how there are multiple means to an end here. This is just to kind of get the gears turning. Just a general idea of the type of goals that you can set. And sometimes we have customers coming to us and asking, what should I do with AWS? Maybe you've got this email from TechSoup and you're like, okay, cool, I get $1,000. What am I supposed to do with it? So very valid question. And I want to share some thoughts on how I think you should proceed. So I just want to be clear. AWS, we are not in the business of prescribing tools to nonprofits as a whole. A nonprofit that provides health and human services is going to be so different from one that does nationwide public media who is again going to be so different from a nonprofit that does medical research. So the nonprofit community is so vast and so diverse that trying to push services just because is unhelpful. So what we like to do instead is to start with what your needs are and work backwards from there to try to figure out how and if technology can help you meet those goals faster. That being said, I know it can be hard to come up with ideas if you've never used the cloud before, you've never built a new application. So one of the questions I like to ask is what annoying tasks do you have to do that take away from your ability to deliver on your mission? What could be better? What are you currently spending a lot of money and time on that you just don't want to deal with anymore? So think about things like, how are you doing donor management today? How are you doing fundraising? Is there a lot of manual work on these that you don't want to be doing anymore? How are you interacting with your community? Could they benefit from more or better channels to connect with you? Are you storing any data? What kind and why? Is there anything useful that we could learn from that data that you're storing? So again, these are just questions to help you get started. But this is really a good conversation to have internally. Then you can come to us with like, hey, I've got all these cool ideas. What can we do next? Next up is alignment. So getting alignment might be the hardest part of the cloud journey. In many cases, you're asking people to change and even good change can be really hard. So it's really useful to have a single leader who is responsible for cloud adoption efforts. If you're a larger organization, this leader ideally will oversee a team. But if you're a smaller organization, one person might be totally good enough. So that leader should be responsible for answering these sorts of questions. How are you going to do the work? Who's going to do it? When will it be done? And making sure that everyone is on the same page about the answers. So let's say that you're at this phase. You're at the alignment phase. How do you move forward? So ideally by this point, you're going to have a list of goals with leaders associated with each one of those goals. So now you can lay out requirements for the project. And making sure that you include folks who interact with all aspects of the project is crucial at this phase. Who are the end users? Often there are multiple different types of people who are end users. Maybe they are your administrators who are going to be using the application. Maybe they are actually people within your community that you're serving who are going to use the application. So that could mean a bunch of different things. Who is the developer? Who is responsible for maintenance? Maybe you want to hire external folks to help you. Maybe you have folks in the house that can help you. It could mean a bunch of different things. So you want to get those folks together and identify the fears and the blockers that are associated with achieving these goals and possible ways to overcome those fears. So I'll give you an example. A concern might be that you don't have the right expertise to build a better, whatever it is, donor management solution. So it would be my job and our job at AWS to help you find ways to overcome those fears and blockers. That is why we're here. And again, I as a Solutions Architect, I provide a free service. So in this particular example where you fear you don't have enough skills, the right skill sets in-house, I might help you find a good partner to help you build or manage your donor management solution. Another might be to upskill your existing workers. So if you've got an IT staff that we can work with, we can help get them trained so that they feel comfortable with building the solution on their own. So hopefully you get the idea here. Making sure that you get all the concerns out into the open, we'll get everybody on the same page and make sure that everybody feels ready to get started. The next step is launch. So how will you know if you were successful? This is all about putting together a pilot project and actually getting started in building. So let's say that you're in the launch phase. How do you move forward? Well, this is where you can really start to work with your AWS team to identify a proof of concept project and start building. So you can identify a challenge, work with us to design a solution and then build out a pilot. These pilots should have really clear goals and metrics and we can help you put those together. These metrics will help you determine when you are ready to fully launch and scale your application or if there's further opportunity for improvement. There should always be a clear path to move forward. So we talk a lot about working backwards here at AWS. I kind of alluded to it a second ago but basically all this means is knowing the end goal really, really well and tracing steps backwards to determine the requirements and the steps to help you get to that goal. This helps us stay laser focused on the end state and maintain flexibility in how we actually achieve it. This is how we build services internally and it's how we support our customers. So everything that you do at this point should always be tied back to what is your initial goal that you came up with? You don't wanna get lost in the weeds of the services and the code and the technology. Keep the focus on the big picture. You should always be asking yourself, where is the value? And then identifying what constraints are keeping you from realizing your goal to get to that value. And you can tell us, right? We can help you figure out ways that AWS programs, TechSoup credits, anything that you have can help you speed up your move towards that value. So more simply, it might not be as hard to get there as you think it is. Then the last phase is scale. So this is all about measuring your progress against your original goals. Did you meet them? Are there still some gaps? It's totally fine if there are. This is an opportunity for you to pivot, adjust little things, tweak things, and continue to iterate. This is also where you're gonna wanna make sure that every part of their organization knows their role really well in making the project successful and is educated on the aspects of AWS that they need to know. So your finance organization might wanna upscale on our cost exploration tools. Your operations team might wanna know how to engage with AWS support. And if you're like most of our customers at this point, you're gonna find that this first win helps spark many other ideas and projects. The first one might feel like the most difficult, but once you begin, you'll see an almost immediate flywheel effect. Now we do have a bunch of different resources that are available to all of you as nonprofits. So we've got the nonprofit credit program. Obviously that's the $1,000 that you can get from us in AWS promotional credits. You can also work with our vast AWS partner network where they can do anything from helping you launch a database to building an entire website to helping you put together a streaming application. Really the opportunities are endless here. We've got the nonprofit technical hub as well where you can find a bunch of different technical resources but you can always reach out to us as well from there. And just generally you can get help on your journey. So if you wanna speak with your account manager, if you wanna speak with the solutions architect, we can make that happen from here as well. So please feel free to just scan this QR code. And I will actually stay on this slide and pass it over to you, Jayman. Fantastic, thank you so much, Veena. I really like what you said about just having that idea of what is that boring or annoying task that might be something that we can automate. And it doesn't have to be, using AWS doesn't have to be this grand solution. It can really be something that everyone on the phone, even the people who have put ones have access to. So thanks for that presentation and helping us get started. I now wanna welcome Audrey onto the line who is working at a nonprofit that is currently using these credits and using AWS for mission impact. So if you're still with us, which I certainly hope you are, if you don't mind coming. Okay, there we go on screen and excellent. Well, thank you so much, Audrey, for being with us. And if you don't mind kind of sharing a little bit about your experience and then we'll jump into some Q&A. Sure, be happy to. Hi, everybody. My name is Audrey Cropin and I started a nonprofit back in 2020. I'll tell you just a little bit about the nonprofit and then my experience with using AWS and what features I'm using and why I chose those features. So the name of my nonprofit is Sibs Forever. And you can see it by going out to sibsforever.org. I'll put that in the chat at the end. So the purpose of the nonprofit was to create an online memory book that people could access from all over the world for surviving siblings. Those of us that have had siblings that have passed away and were left to be surviving siblings on our own. Sometimes we're called the forgotten mourners. So I wanted to design and build a really secure platform that was very separate from the major social media platform. So I didn't want to do it on Facebook or using Instagram or something like that. And I wanted it to be something that would be very easy and very intuitive for surviving siblings to be able to chronicle their memories through telling stories, uploading pictures and videos. And through that build kind of a vibrant community where people could support each other. So that was kind of my goal that I set out to do. And I attacked this as a surviving sibling myself because there's a significant lack of resources for the surviving sibling community. There's been a lot of resources focused on the surviving parent community, not so much for the surviving sibling community. So that's what I set out to do by creating Sibs Forever. And by starting to build an application call that you can find at SibsForever.org. So I decided to do it on AWS. I have had some experience on AWS. I've had experience on actually all the clouds but my experience on AWS has been better. And so I set out to do this and I'm kind of a one person show. So I wanted to do this very intelligently. I was very excited to learn about the $1,000 credits which I immediately started to use. And so that was my budget. I mean, I really didn't wanna go over that. I kind of said, okay, I'll be able to spend about $83 a month. And I basically would be able to stick to that more or less. So those are my goals. If I look under the sheets, what I wanted was really something that was gonna be very private. So privacy was a big factor and certainly very secure and something enduring. People were gonna be uploading these artifacts often that they've had for many, many years. And so it needs to be enduring over time. Needed it to be resilient as what was described earlier needs to be able to scale up and down. And certainly since I'm very budget conscious when, but it's not being used heavily then I want it to scale down. So I guess, if I were to look at the services I'm using the main thing I'm using is the storage. And I think a lot of people that use AWS really focus on storage because you basically have infinite storage. And for things like photos and videos which could be kind of large, that's really important. So I called S3 but it's basically storage of various artifacts. So photos for me, for my non-profit it's photos, videos and journal entries because we support like an online diary. So that's probably the main thing because I'm supporting those things. I have a lot of processing and when you upload a photo it has to be resized and you upload a video has to have different formats so that you can show it on various browsers. And so I'm using what's called Lambda which is basically functions. You get to write functions for the processing of those artifacts. So that's probably the second one. I'm using CloudFront which is a content delivery network. And I'm using that because it provides some additional security. Has a web application firewall and some other things that make it just a little bit more secure. And that was one of my goals is for it to be very private and secure. I'm also using the database service which is called RDS Relational Database Service. So I'm using that for Postgres and I have some servers as well. I have an application that's running and so I have servers that do need to scale up and down and be resilient. And I have some schedule processing. So that's kind of what I'm doing and it also has to be accessible on mobile in addition to desktop. So I'm using a smattering of services very cost conscious and relatively within a year. So I was able to build this application. So I have a second application. I'm just gonna mention real quickly because I'm gonna be using completely different set of services. And I'm also probably gonna be taking advantage of the solution architect that's been described because after I finished this, what I did was I reached out to a lot of nonprofits attempting to get my service kind of listed on resource pages. You go to places like grief.org and you can see a list of resources. And what I discovered was a lot of stale stuff. Disorganized pages and kind of stale, outdated sometimes even a little misleading. So I said, okay, well, that'd be a great way for me to kind of solve that problem in addition to making SIPs forever easier to find so that I would write an application kind of like Yelp sort of to curate rank and crowdsource reviews for online resources. So it's gonna have an artificial intelligent component with machine learning or basically deals with scraped search results. So I'm going to be moving into that space where I'll be using a whole different set of services including some of the solution architect I'll be reaching out for that. But generally my experience has been great and I've been very successful in not going over my budget. So the credits have really been a lifesaver. I'm not sure how I would have been able to do it without having those credits. That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Audrey. What an inspiring cause and organization. And that last application you just described was a bit of a surprise to me but as you can see on my face I'm smiling ear to ear just hearing about how your organization is expanding into different uses of AWS. So thank you again for your time and for your commitment to that cause. It's really, really inspiring. Now I'm gonna pivot a little to some Q&A and at the end stick around because we'll be sending over some very useful links to help make sure you have the resources you need. But Vina, if you wanna come on screen or not audio is fine too. Hi. Okay, hi there. And I think we'll answer the questions in the order that they've been asked. So definitely continue to ask questions. There is a Q&A function in the chat. This is the way that Vina and I can see your questions but we've got a couple that have already compiled and again, this is your time. So please do speak and ask the questions that are on your mind. The first one is to you, Vina, speaking about kind of the other hosting providers like and perhaps you're familiar with these like Bluehost, Dreamhost in motion and understanding the difference between AWS and those other web hosting providers. Are you familiar with those names? I actually looked them up just now. Oh, amazing. I wasn't familiar with those names but we do have lots of customers who are using web hosting providers such as those. There's a lot of organizations that do kind of similar work. So there is a bit of overlap between what they do and what we do. I would say the biggest difference is that AWS doesn't just do web hosting. We, web hosting is one part of what we do but like I mentioned before we've got 200 plus services, right? So web hosting is just a small percentage of that. So can you host a website on AWS? Heck yeah, we've got loads of nonprofits that are doing it but you can also do a whole lot more. So to give you an example, let's say that you've got a website that you are hosting wherever and you start to collect information from your users. You're starting to maybe get their email addresses or you're starting to see, what are they clicking on? So with AWS, you can take all that information. You can take that data and do more with it. So you can start to run analytics on it. Audrey mentioned that she's doing some machine learning. I'm super curious to hear more about that. You can start to do machine learning within AWS as well. I can't speak to other providers necessarily but just the fact that you're calling them web hosting providers makes me think that they're a little bit more limited in the scope of what they're able to do. So think of AWS as web hosting plus a whole lot more. Fantastic. And in the spirit of that question and kind of I think it's a similar type of question, John's asking kind of how does AWS vary from other SaaS solutions that offer donor management in those types of vendors? Why might someone wanna work with AWS for that type of solution as opposed to another SaaS offering? Yeah, sure. So one clarification I wanna make is that it's not necessarily one or the other. We actually work with a lot of, I mentioned, actually on the slide, you can see right there AWS partner network. A lot of those partners that we have do have SaaS solutions that run on top of AWS. And so you might be using AWS in those SaaS solutions that you're currently using that you don't even know about. You don't even know that you're running on AWS. So a lot of these partners do run their infrastructure in the cloud and it's just kind of abstracted away from the end user, which is yourself. So all that's to say, you don't necessarily need to stop using your SaaS products. And some of the customers that I have will continue to use certain SaaS products and hosting them wherever they are. Maybe it's on premises or maybe it's in a different cloud, it's totally fine. But then maybe they can pull out data from those SaaS products, put them in AWS and then be able to do other things. So the products that you're currently using don't necessarily need to limit you in terms of how you adopt AWS. You can continue using both. You might find that they're actually one in the same. You can host SaaS product on AWS. So yeah, it doesn't need to be an either or, I guess is my point. Excellent, thanks so much, Beena. We're gonna bump up to the next question by Kevin talking a little bit about how he's feeling some encouragement to move off of Azure to AWS. Is this something that you and your team and our team help them do in terms of moving and scaling those resources? Yeah, absolutely. We have actually programs that are specifically catered to this. We have folks that specialize in migrating workloads and we have programs that can give you additional credits on top of the $1,000 in TechSoup credits that you're looking at. So yes, the answer is yes, definitely. It's definitely warrants a deeper conversation. So please reach out to us and we can make that happen. Awesome. The next question I'll take from Andre. It sounds like they're asking a little bit more about if the credit covers all AWS services. And the best way to answer that because there are hundreds of services is that it covers 98% of them. So I feel comfortable saying not all, all but the vast, vast majority of the services are in fact covered by these credits. The 2% that aren't covered typically have savings already baked in. So we have things like saving plans or upfront purchases for certain services. And those types are already discounted so they're not covered by the credit. But when in doubt, the answer is most likely yes. So that's how the credit covers the services. So the next question comes from John asking, is AWS able to host CMS? I suppose that's customer management systems like Drupal, if you've heard of Drupal. Yeah, sure, content management system. So we can. Yes, we can. So if you look up AWS Drupal, you will find actually a whole guide on how to do this. We have loads of customers who are doing this already. And so this is a really comfortable lift for customers to make and that's why we put together just a tutorial because it comes up so frequently. So the answer is yes. Awesome, good answer. We've got one last question unless I'm sneaking in the very end, but what AWS services might be available for video live streaming, video hosting and webinars? Another way of putting it is does it offer a Zoom type of alternative? Yeah, sure. So the closest thing that we have is called Amazon Chime. So Amazon Chime is a service that helps you, it's actually the service that we use internally when Jamie and I are messaging each other internally at AWS a lot of times we're using Amazon Chime. So you can do online meetings, you can do chat rooms, you can do recordings of it, you can run it in a browser, you can run it in a window like an application window, you can run it from your phone, dial in. It'll feel like a very familiar, if you're used to using Zoom, it'll feel really familiar to that. So that is Amazon Chime. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. That wraps up the Q&A portion. Yes, you can absolutely see me. I wanna thank everyone for their time today for their thoughtful questions and ultimately for the work that you and your organizations are doing. Veena and I are just here to enable the real heroes and that's you all working in the sector helping make our communities and world a much better place. So as we wrap things up, we've been speaking a lot about different resources that are available. Please do feel free to scan the QR code that's currently up on the screen. But additionally, I've provided some short links to help you access some of the resources that will enable your organization. The first one is absolutely the credit program. We've spoken a lot about that. The next one is our Imagine Grant program. The cycle for this year is closed but it's a wealth of information about the ways that your organization can be supported financially and otherwise to use AWS. Then we have our Imagine conference which is an annual conference that's in-person and then complemented with some virtual content throughout the year. And then this last one, this is a little bit of a new link that I wanna send over, but I wanna encourage those that feel like they might be champions, heroes or what we're calling all stars within the sector to click on this last link to reach out to us so that we can help you take the stage and telling your story about your organization and the way that it's using technology for mission impact, whether it's through social media or blogs or getting you up in person on stage or in a webinar, we really wanna empower and uplift you in the ways that you're using cloud technology. So definitely click on that all stars link and we'll be in touch. But again, thank you for your time. Thank you to all of our speakers and to those at TechSoup for making this possible and we look forward to staying in touch to support your organization. Have a great rest of your day.