 just going to start with here. I know there's only four of us. If someone wants to repeat or they come in late, I don't want to hold anybody up. I'll strive my best to start on time. We'll keep it short. If we don't need all the time, we could wrap it up sooner. If we have a little bit of time at the end and people want to brainstorm about something, we can do that. So here we go. Cold start. We're going to jump right into poll everywhere. And we're going to push it. I'm going to back up the car if I'm moving too fast. But what we want to experience is that there's some things that if we haven't used them before that it's pretty easy to get started. And many of these tools and applications are free. And we want to support anyone and share tips and tricks about how we take advantage of them. So this first one, I just want us to go through an experience with it. And then we'll talk about what's the point where you can use that, who cares, you know, stuff like that. All right. So if you would like to participate, if you have a handheld device, a cell phone, if you would please send a text message to the five-digit number 22333, just those five digits. And in the body of the text message, enter YTB 147. You do not have to be careful about capital letters. You should get a confirmation once you've done that, that you are agreeing to participate and cell phone charges may apply or something like that, you've probably seen that before. And once you've done that, if you'd like to participate, please just send a text message to that number with your first name. And I'll do that right now. And it should show up on the screen. Is everybody able to see that? Okay. So I always feel like that seems like magic. So I think that's just what to do. So if both people who share the same first name participate, awesome, you're going to get a, you know, more prominent billing award word cloud. So Richard, if you have a device that you can use, if you would go to polev.com forward slash YTB youth 147. And I'm going to give a quick demo of that. Let's see, in case someone wants to do that. So I'm going to just jump over here and put in YTB youth 147. And okay, it puts me in here and I'm going to put my name in again. So I was able to do that both through a browser or as a text message. So Richard is in another country and if that, so the 22333 may not be an international code. I don't know if it is or is not. I just don't know about that. So we see each of those who participated put in their names. Okay, so that was pretty easy. Let's try it one more time. Let's do a few quick tests on this. The next one we'll go to is to text the state or country that you are in. If you notice from the previous experience, if you were like where to put the first initial of your last name, which is a good idea, don't you if you use a dash instead of a space, it'll keep them connected or underscore or use like an initial cap. So I'm going to activate this one. All right. And so I'm going to put in New Jersey, but I'm not going to put a space in there. So I could put a state or I could put a dash and underscore or no space. I think it says that this one isn't activated yet. I just got a text that it says it's not active. Thank you. So let's activate. All right. All right. So now I'm going to send it in again. Thank you for the tips up on that. Let's see. Okay. So I'm the only one having a hard time. All right. So everybody else is getting it. All right. Florida, my goodness. So I'm going to guess that Audrey H is in Florida. Is that a good guess? All right. Yes. Okay. Awesome. So and Richard is in Jamaica. I don't know if he has a way to tell us that or I know Richard, you're on mute. You don't have to come off mute. If you do have a browser, you could go to polev.com forward slash YTV youth 147 and you can put your response. Yeah, on my internet. Okay. So if it's not working, okay. All right. So I'll check in with you later if you'd like to try this or maybe use it and what you're doing. Okay. So I go to last one. And this is, no, let's see. I'm going to activate this one. This is for your organization name. So whatever you'd like to put it, you could say myself. You could say the elephant sanctuary or something like that. Or, or you're here, of course, your own organization. I'm going to put in YTV. That's my organization. So I'm going to, now I'm going to put in YTV.org to make that one bigger. So we get two votes for it. Awesome. It's gigantic. Okay. So all right. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So, all right. So that's our cold open on a hot day. So I'm going to, you know, pull that down and put it aside for a moment. Move over there and come back over here. And I'm going to just boost this up. Is that coming through loud and clear and like larger than life letters and all that? Perfectly. Awesome. Okay. So, so three, at least three of things, probably four. It's hard to know everything that's going on. But TechSoup Connect is a new campaign or strategy or program that TechSoup, the organization, which I'm going to talk about a little bit, is launching like right now. We are one of the very first groups that are ourselves launching. And our name is TechSoup Connect for Time Bank and Organizations. But it's open to anyone who's interested. We're not going to be talking particularly about Time Banking. We're going to be talking about technology that any of us or new ideas that can be useful for non-profit organizations, or any community organization, anyone who likes the ideas can apply them. When I start talking a little bit more about TechSoup, the organizations that can register and take advantage of their offerings, the organizations that are eligible must be non-profit organizations, either NGOs, non-governmental, or not profit, or libraries, or schools. So, it's Gen 8 today. And the main purpose, as I've been saying, is to share information about, particularly about TechSoup, because it's such an awesome resource that I found that some of the applications that I use that are available through TechSoup, that the best, it's just the best, you know, opportunities to get them through TechSoup, particularly for pricing, training, services, and stuff like that. But we also want to share ideas in general for how anybody, particularly non-profit organizations, can apply technology in smart ways, however, and wherever, in whatever types of technologies they use to best fulfill their mission. And that is, in essence, the mission of TechSoup. So, we're scheduled for 75 minutes if we need it, and I broke it out into five 15-minute parts, and we saved a little time on the polly beats, and Michael Lewis worked. If anyone has questions, please either ask them in the chat or come off commute, or it's okay to interrupt. This is not an overly formal session. We want to be supportive and help anyone who has an interest in the territory that we're talking about. Yeah, is pool EV, is it just for pools, or is it have a wider range of things you can do with it? Yeah, let me show you a little bit about that. Good question. I'm going to jump over to the browser, and I'm going to log into my account. It is, I guess, primarily for getting audience response, or like if you're giving a presentation, let's see, am I logged into, I might, oh, I'm not logged into the right one. I've got three accounts, which sometimes drives me crazy. Let's see, I logged into the wrong one. So, this, yeah, this is the YTP youth one percent. Okay, so, I guess one of the main ways you work with this is through these functions called activities. So, say I want a new activity. The new activity, it could be a multiple choice question, and then here you can see the structure coming up. I could, I could put a title in here, and I, you know, like, if we're ordering pizza or ice cream, or pizza and ice cream, like, what kind of pizza, what kind of ice cream, I was using the word cloud. That's what we were practicing with. You could do Q&A. I haven't quite gotten the hang of the clickable image. I understand, I think, what it means, but I, I never quite got that one before the way I expected. You could have a survey, you could have open-ended questions, click on more, you could do donut charts, ice breakers, upvoting, leaderboards, spotlight, two by two matrix brainstorm. So, I think it's very useful if, if you're working with a group, maybe 15, 20, or maybe 100 people, and you wanted to get a sample, or not even more than a sample, you wanted to get everyone's reaction to something. This could be a very powerful way to accomplish that. It could also be a quick and a fun way to deal with a smaller group of people. And it's also, I think, kind of enjoyable just as a way to get audience participation, or whoever's in the group, to make it a little more fun. I don't mean fun and, like, fun and games, but just more engaging, like you, like people feel as though they're actively involved and they're not just passive listeners. They're influencing and contributing to something that's being decided. It could be something very serious. Yeah. Does that kind of answer your question, Richard? Is that? Yeah, it does. It seems like something I've used before, but this, it's like more advanced than the other apps I've used. Like I've seen like surveys open-ended questions. I've used pulled websites before, but this one is looking really good. Yeah. I mean, there certainly are, and we may even have the session on different survey tools, because there's Google Forms, there's Microsoft Forms, there's SurveyMonkey, and maybe they, depending on what your technology selections are, you might favor one or the other, or if you wanted to do something more advanced, you may have to use a different one. But you have a poll everywhere, and it could be integrated with, I think it's Keynote, Google Sheets, PowerPoint, so you can have slides that are driven by the interaction with the audience. Okay. Let me see. Let me go back to, yeah, I think I was on here. I just want to mention, okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about TechSoup and tell you a little bit about a story of how the organization that I am involved with is benefiting from some Microsoft technology. Liz is going to take us through what we're calling for the very first time to an international audience, like for learning minutes, which we want to give you some, you know, some short demonstrations of some tools that if you're not familiar or if you haven't tried using them, recently you might find it useful in there. You know, some things are fairly easy to pick up, and then of course you could learn more. And then at the end, have a little bit of an idea storm where we share some thoughts if you wish about some things that you have been using recently that you like a lot, and you just want to, you know, tell us that something we might like to try about a few that I'll start off with when we get to that point. Tell you a little bit about some future topics we're thinking about to have any discussion. And if, like I said, if we wrap up early, that's okay too. And the objective here is that when all said and done that we lead with, you know, maybe at least one new idea and new connection to somebody possibly or to tell us if you're interested in getting something to work. And it hasn't been working to see if someone else has an idea. So we could, you know, offline if people want some suggestions or something. We could do that. I'll have a web page that I'm going to set up to put some things on. I know a couple of people said at the last minute they can join us today. So I'm going to put some short summaries of each micro-learning minutes on that web page and I'll show it to you towards the end of our meeting. Okay, so the next thing I want to move into is to share a little bit of information about TechSoup and where there is. Okay, so I'm going to take this off. I'm going to take that off. This is our agenda. You can refer to that from the TechSoup Connect events page. I'm going back over to the, let's say, the home page for TechSoup. So if those of you were out of the call now, I know it's a small group right now. We have like 13 or more. I don't know what that happened to everybody, but now we're down to about five. So have you heard of TechSoup? I know that some of you have because I've mentioned it every now and then. Have you heard of it, Audrey, in Florida? Okay, great. So you may know everything. I'm going to tell you about this, so I'm not going to drag it out too much. There are new things that are made available through TechSoup. Obviously, this is their home page. If you have an account with them, you can log in. I'm logged in. And there are a variety of ways that you can benefit from TechSoup. There's a product catalog, which I'm going to just show you some points on for software and some hardware. There are services available, such as courses, digital marketing. If someone said they wanted to bring an organizational website up by the end of the month, and they had no idea how to do it, you can get some, you can pay, you know, a nominal for your, you know, at least a competitive rate that's likely discounted from retail prices for website development consulting. They have some free tools to, you know, some website auditing tools. And you can get referrals to consultants. There's community home, forums, library of articles, events, webinars, things other than what we're doing in resources, articles, blog, and webinars. So I'll just tell you a little bit about what, how I've found TechSoup. I've been at the places where I've worked and now, you know, with the organization I'm involved with now, over several years, probably 10 plus years with them. So you could see you can look up donors or company names alphabetically. And some of the ones that I've taken advantage of is Adobe for Adobe Creative Cloud. Let's come down here. Caravan Studios. That's a, they're a pretty cool company. I had one or two meetings with them. They have a, an app. I'm just clicking on here if you're curious about or if this is related to the type of community work you do. I don't know if this is in operation just in the United States or if it's international, but it's called range. It's a mobile app that locates the time and a place for pre-summer meals or serve for youth who might otherwise, if we're during the school year, getting a bunches at school cafeteria, what some options might be outside of when they're not at school during the summer. So that's super useful. Constant contact. That is an email marketing type of tool that some organizations use. Dashlane is a password manager, I believe. DocuSign, donor, perfect prop box. I've been using that. I didn't need to upgrade, but if I needed to upgrade to, I don't know the business level or whatever it's called. I would probably do it through TechSoup, Google Apps for Nonprofits, G Suite, in the future. We might talk about that as one of our agenda items. I also enrolled in that and have a, for my organization, a Google Apps for Nonprofits platform, YouTube, and so forth. I've purchased headsets through headsets.com through TechSoup. I'm curious about iFax, internet faxing, give a complaint, internet faxing, and to it, I've ordered that for organization accounting for business departments that I've worked in. Little green light, is it donor management software? Microsoft, of course, for Microsoft 365, or even if you're involved, if you're in a larger organization that has web servers or network servers that might need to run Windows operating system to get significant discounts there. I think back here at Cisco, I also ordered some hardware for the previous organization for network switches or access points for internal wireless coverage within the organization. There's quite a few. I'm curious about Otter AI. That is a, I think it's a voice or audio transcription service. So down the road, there's someone who finds it really helpful for their work. I'm curious to have, bring them on as a guest presenter. A couple of them that I have no idea what they are. I've used them question pro. I've ordered that in my prior organization. It's a very robust type of survey platform. I say hello to Eli van der Dijsen. He's the community manager and my coach and consultant. I think he is the cheerleader. Delighted to be here. Just wrapped up my own event. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to take just a short bit of time. Eli was helping me practice with some things a couple of hours ago. And then Eli, when we finished practicing, the internet went down in my paper. My goodness. So I was thinking that I, as long as cellular service was up, but we weren't sure that that that there might have been a car accident or the weather is a little threatening and there's construction going on. So it's very common for us to use to lose electrical power. And then when that goes down, of course, you're losing internet. We kept the electrical power and fortunately got it back shortly after that. Yeah, we're just taking a look down here through TechSoup services. I was on the edge of contacting them. And I still might with the needs that I have for some web stuff that I'm doing with the website because everybody's not available all the time. So I need for some backup. Wix is that's also a fallback that I, or not a fallback, but a go to that I recommended to some organizations, some nonprofit organizations for their websites. Zoom, of course. And yesterday I was running the Zoom call and I like to think I am aware of what I'm doing, but not always aware of what I'm doing. So I've got a standby computer. So this is strange. My standby computer is better than my primary main computer. So like, why don't I switch their roles like this? And then I, you know, I've got the cell phone. So I'm on a Zoom session with people in North Carolina. And I told some of you that right before my very eyes, my computer goes into a restart, which I thought I had it set so that it should never do that. And then it did it again. So I'm bringing up the other, and then the other problem I had, which of course, unless I draw your attention, well, no, notice it, is that today I finally had the blur working. So like for three months, this super simple thing of getting the blur working, it works on my, on my better newer computer, but on this one. So I'm in the, having a meeting with the North Carolina, he says, maybe just check that you've got all your updates. So it's like I'm getting my own medicine because I'm always telling my family or anybody, run your updates, you do your updates, your updates. So, and that was it. So I thought it was on automatic pilot, but it wasn't ran the update. And now I'm blurring. So, so that's pretty cool. One of the other things I wanted to show on the TechSoup part before we move on to our next session is the, let me see if it's the digital skills area and the courses. So since Eli's here, I'm just, you know, tell me if I'm saying this the right way. Digital skills is primarily with Microsoft and it's different than the courses. I mean, it's similar, but it's separate. I mean, there's like certifications you can earn and 101, 201, 301 levels. There's always a level of arbitrariness to it all. So I would say, yeah, so there's TechSoup courses is like the bucket for all kinds of online courses for nonprofits. And within it, there is the subset of the digital skills, which are really focused as you talked about on the Microsoft suite of services. That set is all 100% free for nonprofits. So that's, I think, the major distinction, whereas some of the other courses are free and some are paid. And so there's a bit of a mix within that. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's great. Great having you fill in some of the blanks for us. I appreciate that. So I simply want to make you aware of this. Like I said, before we move into I want to stay with our agenda. And so you can see here, you can explore this yourself under services, I think is where the TechSoup courses are. And you can expand. And you know, there's I think anywhere that I've worked, I would walk around and I would ask who is curious about Google Analytics, because I would just love, you know, to have that covered by somebody who wants to take that on. And you can see that there's, there are, there's trainings on specific applications. And there's also trainings on how to think about how to work with and set up an ecosystem or infrastructure for technology in your organization, such as, you know, organizing your remote team. That would be an example of that. And you grant writing actually, I'm applying for a grant at the end of this month. So I think maybe I'm going to look at this. I'm working with the grant writer, but this is pretty fantastic to know that this is here, particularly for those organizations who have enough staff that they can take on those roles. So I'm just going to let you just wanted to point you into the, you know, the ballpark, so to speak, and you can look at that. Over here, I had this page for these are the Microsoft Digital Skills Center, so I think I am put into that. And so you can see you can get training here on different levels and aspects of Excel, Office 365. There are some hybrid or combination areas, if you're interested in, for example, working with data management, and that will cross Excel and Power BI teams and more Power BI. And of course, what there's some courses in Spanish. And actually, if Richard is still on Richard, I'm not asking you to dialogue with me, but I know that there's one person in Jamaica who is Spanish speaking that we're interested. And maybe I'll ask a question about this person that, you know, as part of our community in, yeah, in Jamaica is from Venezuela. And what we want to know is if we, if there are technology training packages that can be downloaded onto a tablet or a laptop, because at this point in time, he does not have regular access to the internet. But some of us, if we could identify a training package, almost for anything, whether it's learning English for a Spanish speaking person, or whether it's learning Microsoft technology applications or any technology, Liz, I know you do training with people in other countries at times. So if there is some type of training package that can be downloaded to a computer, so that the individual is going to use it, can work with it without internet access, please send me a message or put something in the chat. Does that make sense what I'm asking? Okay, yes. There is actually a website or an app for children who does different subjects in school. So like for Spanish, you have like Spanish subjects, you can do know those documents that will help the the person or the child to learn more. But because he's from Venezuela, he's more into the the Creole that we have here in Jamaica and not any English. So he understands only Spanish and the Creole that we use here. So it's going to be hard. But for me, being like a basic Spanish student, I can help him on the basic level of Spanish, I can help him get English to a better level. And from there, I think you progress. Well, if it is of interest, I mean, the thought came to mind, because I see here is a course about Excel, which is fundamentally useful to anybody probably having spreadsheet skills. And it's it appears to me as though it's being presented in Spanish language. So for example, if there was something like that that could be downloaded to learn. Okay, so I don't want to take up any more time right now. Just wanted to mention that because I I'm learning from my own presentation here because I was not aware, not surprised, but happy to see that. Like I said, TechSoup is all the time coming out with new different more better other things. So that's part of the reason why I was interested in getting involved with TechSoup Connect, because it also definitely helps me with my learning. Okay, so we want to keep moving along and staying up with our schedule here. And it is a bit past I'm, I'm going to keep this short story to just about five minutes so that I don't cut into Liz's time here. What I want to bring up is a I'm going to I can share this let's see if I go over to I'm going to put a file in so can I do it super easily. I thought I could just pull up a file from my should I be able to do that pull up a file from my desk time. I could see that I have to go into one drive but so I don't want to take up time doing that. I thought someone did that on a previous meeting. All right, I'll send it out if anyone's interested. So my organization had the good fortune of receiving some donations from Microsoft last year. And what I'm showing you in this just coming through recently okay where you can you can you can see it. This this graph or this picture here really it's a couple of pictures. You're looking good. Okay, thank you. All right, so these are five Microsoft devices. Three of them I think are Microsoft Go. One is Microsoft Surface Pro X. Thank you. Thank you. Because they are down in Jamaica right now. This is a digital pen. And we sent them down to be used by YTD Jamaica. This is from a year ago. So maybe the community center is further along. We're waiting for the electricity in the internet. This is the exterior. It was a beautiful mural painted. Was that done by people you know? That was during a summer camp in 2018. Someone came down and everything you see there is on the help of the children like all of us went and did something. That's beautiful. That's just absolutely beautiful. So here's a little bit of a story here. I'm not going to go through everything but we became connected with a community organization in Ashford New Zealand and this is itself is extraordinary that our little tiny organization through some meetings and networking and sessions like this got acquainted with and I think Liz you were on that call it was on March 21st and we met who actually came white. I briefly become acquainted with her a year ago. She remembered each other and we had a follow-up meeting kind of like a focus group that she ran and then a couple weeks after that she asked if we would be interested in coming up with their sending ideas for a logo that they wanted to use for their community organization which is called I guess one of their words I'm not exactly sure if I'm using it the right way is called a trust. So it's the mid-cannabair trust something like I don't know a community foundation but one of their campaigns is you know continuous learning or keep learning and Richard who's out the session with us now collaborated with us. We had some ideas input from other people in Jamaica from one of our friends in Southbury, Connecticut. Definitely you know some very nice help with someone in New Jersey here. Richard did a fantastic job with coming up with the design so you could see this is one of those devices that that he was working on in the digital pen. This is a nice thank you that we got so it was it's really an extraordinary example of a collaboration that could occur with in the spirit of reciprocity where we're getting a donation we're doing something with it we're paying it forward we're collaborating and we're establishing you know high regard relationships across New Jersey, Connecticut, Jamaica and New Zealand and the next one is a picture of another person who works you know as part of YTV Jamaica you know a little bit more of the exterior so we we were asked this I think it was right before that's a picture of Richard over it's okay to show that Richard I think it's okay you pay permission to send it to us so you know the you know the person that I know is a training manager at Microsoft asked me I think it was it was the weekend before Memorial Day and I was telling her that yeah because Memorial Day was on the 31st it was right before that and I said I think I could have a story for you on June 8th well today is June 8th right and then she wrote back and she said you know the sooner the better and I said oh okay I'll get it to you right after Memorial Day and she didn't say anything and I said to her then I wrote back I said I think I can get it to you tomorrow because I was kind of feeling the vibration and then I said I'm going to get you something today and so Richard sent some things in and Taffery sent some things in and I just put together a rough cut version of this three page version I sent it to her she said really appreciate it I'm showing it to my boss tomorrow and I'm thinking wow so then that night I just spiffed it up a little bit and put some borders around things and try to make it look a little nicer and sent it to her she said wow this fantastic I love it let's see if they love it and then the next week they come back and said we have some super good news for you your story was picked we're going to have our writers and video team get together with you and schedule something to you know get this produced and they're going to put it on the Microsoft site so that's just spectacular and we're thrilled about that we're a nonprofit organization and we've used a variety of different technologies Adobe Creative Cloud Krita canva just a brainstorm and share ideas the next part of our agenda here I'm passing the baton to Liz Carmine's in Newburgh New York she is one of our guests here today I mean she's also part of YTB so it seems strange to say that Liz you're our guest I'll just try to give you a little more honor to say you're both in the inner circle and you're also like a guest with us so would you talk to us I rely on Liz a lot for marketing communication so I'm really super happy that she agreed to well thank you for inviting me to do this could you perhaps stop your screen share so that I could start mine okay so I'm going to just show two really quick things today I'm using kind of graphic design tools that are free to use online so this is Canva this is a tool that I have been using for several years and it's really great to make all different kinds of graphic designs you can make flyers and you know invitations brochures Instagram graphics today I'm going to show very quickly how you can use their templates to make a logo so this is a super user friendly program to use again it is free and then there is an upgradeable version but I find that a lot of the features are not completely necessary to upgrade in order to use and there's a ton that you can do for free so when you go into Canva you'll first make an account and so I'm already logged into my account and what I'm going to do is come up here and search Canva for a logo so I'm going to use their templates and now you can start from scratch if you want you could just create a design that's a square or a rectangle or whatever but I want to get started with a template that Canva offers to make a logo so I'll go ahead and click on this logo icon and it's going to open up some options for logos so if you're say starting a small business or you have a club or there's anything you want to do that you need to make a logo for this can be really helpful to give you a starting point to create your logo now of course you'll probably want to customize these with certain colors and you'll want to change the text maybe you'll want to change the font to match your brand but again it does give a really good starting point from where you can create a logo so here I just typed in logo and you can see a lot of unique different designs but I'm going to go a little bit more specific and I'm going to put coffee logo as if I wanted to make a logo for some sort of a coffee shop and you can see you can get really specific and it'll give you again these more specific options that are kind of related to a cafe or a coffee shop so I'm just going to go ahead and click on one that I like you can match this to your brand and styling and one thing to note is that when you go in here you'll be able to see if they're free if you hover over them in the corner and you'll also get to see if you have to pay to use any of them I don't see any that are not free right now which is great because if you don't want to pay for canva pro they have plenty of options but I do know if you like one of the pro templates they offer a 30 day free trial of canva pro so that you could always just get it to make your logo and then go ahead and cancel your subscription before you get charged so I have this little logo sample and I'm just going to go ahead and make some very minimal changes to make this kind of match my brand of my hypothetical coffee shop so I'm just going to change the text here to say Liz's coffee and you can see there's an effect on it so that it's making the font perfectly in this circle and I might I'm going to change this at the bottom to um established 2021 whatever you want to put there and so again I want to make this match my brand so maybe I want to go ahead and change the colors so I can click on this little icon and when I come up in the corner I can see all the different colors that are in this logo so I'm just going to choose some random colors that I want my logo to be maybe I'm doing like gray and I want to do pink I could search for pink and just use a color of pink that I like um you can also enter a specific color code if you do have brand colors but you can just kind of play around um if you're kind of starting from scratch with creating this brand and once you have this this is a really simple logo that I could use I could put it on my website I could put it in the I could put it in the corner of images if I ever want to just post on Instagram with my logo in the corner I could make stickers from it to offer in my coffee shop and and this can be just the starting point to create other logos as well so for example say I want to have um another version of my logo I could just make a duplicate page so all I did was click this little button here it duplicated it and now I can play around with this so maybe I want to make a black and white version of it for a sticker I can just go ahead and change the colors to um kind of offer these different options of my logo so um the other great thing about Canva is once you've started your logo you can always go back over to the templates here and continue playing with more options so maybe I decide this isn't my favorite um my favorite logo I can just keep going and keep the work I've already done and try out different options so we can see this one says it's pro so I'm not going to use this if I'm not subscribed I do subscribe to Canva Pro so I can use it but you'll want to stick with the free ones if you're doing something without a Canva Pro subscription until you can just play around and since I already started with the this original version and I put Liz's Coffee 2021 it automatically added my text into this logo so all I now have to do is maybe change the colors say I'm doing grays I could just make it match my brand and that would be my logo design so then once you're done with this and you're happy with it you can go ahead and just hit download and you can download it as a PNG now if you are subscribed to Canva or as a pro subscriber you can hit transparent background and it'll give you a PNG with again a transparent background um and so that way you can layer it over top of images and things like that without having this white square around it but um if not there's other ways that you can get that transparent background like there's some free tools online where you just upload your picture and it takes away the background so you could try doing something like that if you're not a pro subscriber and that's how really simply using Canva you could make a nice looking logo again the one other thing I might do if I have a brand kit is I might go in and change the font so if you just go up here at the top and once you click on a font you can see all the different things you can do with that font so I might pick a different font if I have a brand font that I'm using I can make it bigger smaller change the color um make it bold italicize and you can play around with some of these other effects to make this exactly what you need for your brand um that's great that's fantastic so this is go ahead Jerome what what what is animate what does that do oh so animate would make this into a um like a little video like a jiff or something like that so I could show you what that would do so if I go up here I click on this page um and I click on animate I can select what type of animation I want and it'll kind of give me and uh once I download it it'll be a video so this could be useful like maybe on my Instagram I want to post it uh or something like that um you can create different types of animations cool one other question um is there a way to add a font if you don't see the one you want there um not that I know of with Canva I've I but there are a ton of fonts um so there's and what you can do too if you're trying to discover what font you might want um one thing is I'll always kind of type what I'm looking for so if I'm just looking for like cursive I'll just type in cursive and it'll come up or you can kind of sort so if I just click on the the search bar handwriting corporate display heading so it'll give you kind of categories of fonts um that allow you to kind of narrow down your search of like maybe I want something that's kind of rounded I can just go through and try out all the rounded fonts um another thing you can do with Canva if you have pro is make a brand kit for yourself where you um set your colors and your fonts um and so if I had that I would see it right here I haven't done that yet because I don't have a a brand right now to add to my brand kit but this would make it any time I make a new document in Canva my colors would stay right there and it'd be really easy for me to access okay so that's Canva and I will just very quickly show Adobe Spark because Adobe Spark is just another program that's very similar to Canva but um I think it's just about personal preference I have way less experience with Adobe Spark just because I love Canva so much it's always my go-to but there are some great things about Adobe Spark so um with Adobe Spark you can just come in here and again kind of pick a template you could see I was already playing around but I'll show you um from the start what I would do so I I just want to make an Instagram graphic right now we're not really focusing on the logo right now we're just making a graphic um and of course with Adobe Spark you also do need to kind of come make an account log in and it's free and same as Canva you can upgrade to access some more pro features so when you open up an Instagram graphic template uh the great thing with these templates is that they make them automatically the size that you need um so this is the size that's optimized for Canva or for Instagram I'm sorry um so what I'm going to do is again start with a template and that's why these tools are so great because you don't have to be a graphic designer to create graphics they're giving you really nice looking templates that you can just tweak to make them fit your brand so I just went ahead and searched for coffee again kind of sticking with this coffee theme and also like this one um so I can once this creates a template same thing as Canva I can just go in and um change the the text and change the words but Adobe Spark has a couple different features that make it fun to um play around with the design so let me just go ahead and change this to Liz's and then we'll do coffee down here so you just have to double click on the text to edit it and then I'll just change the number 2021 so now I could definitely just keep it like this but of course I want to kind of play around with the colors so what I can do is just if I already know what color I want I just hit whatever I want and edit the color or if you click on this little colors icon um you can kind of play around with these samples that they have so this gives you color schemes that it will automatically convert your graphic to so you can just see maybe you don't really know what direction you want to go with the colors um and if I click on one and I like the colors but I just don't like the layout if I just hit shuffle it'll shuffle those colors um in that color scheme just changing it up until I am happy with it um so this is kind of a fun feature that I don't that Canva doesn't um really offer if you don't have a strong direction with your brand yet and maybe you just want to play around with some different color schemes this is a really great way to see different color schemes in action um and then you could always go and change different specific colors so maybe like all of it except for you want like one standout color I could just go ahead and um do that and make that stand out um in this little color scheme the other thing you could do is hit this design idea um and it'll give me variations that are kind of similar in design so these are you're seeing very simplistic options and so um if I click on one of these it will automatically convert my uh graphic into this other graphic theme so it takes the theme of this other graphic the font the colors and it converts my graphic into that um as closely as possible and sometimes it's not always the cleanest um transition but um this is just another fun way again to get ideas and play around um with the design and same thing as Canva you can um go ahead and add more text or anything else over here that's not something I really went into because this is just kind of like the crash course on if you're not like graphic designer at all and you just want to make something from a simple template um this is how you can do it use the template and customize it um to just serve the need that you have um for a logo or a graphic oh and the one other feature I will talk about is resizing so say I have this and I like it as my Instagram um post but I also want to do an Instagram story if I click on this it will try its absolute best to convert it into that other size and again I might need to move some things around maybe tweak it a little bit if I'm not happy with where it places um the the objects but this is a good way that it can save some some time to um just use one design and utilize it on all different platforms so um these are two tools that again I think it really is just personal preference and I've just really gravitated towards Canva but I think it's a great idea to find one that you really like if you're going to be doing designs and stick with it because there's a lot more um features that you can access once you get more comfortable with the um the platforms and let's both of them have mobile apps right yes yes so you can use both of them on a mobile app um with as far as I know pretty much the same features I have used Canva on the mobile app I have not used the Adobe Spark mobile app um so I'm not completely sure if all the features transfer over but I'm pretty sure that both of them do transfer over um and yeah Canva's actually very easy to use on the mobile app as well I tend to prefer the computer just because you can see it um bigger but the one perk I think to using the mobile app is because sometimes things look different on a bigger screen than they do on our phones so if I'm making a graphic on Canva for Instagram I will often download it and send it to myself on my phone first to look at it because sometimes like just the font sizing and things like that it's different and since we know most people are using Instagram on their phone you want to make sure it looks good on the phone and not blown up on a computer screen so that is definitely one perk to using the mobile app if you're making graphics for like again Facebook Instagram LinkedIn or whatever but if you're doing a brochure or a flyer I do find it a lot easier on the computer yeah or a tablet as well but yeah that's crash course well I liked it I mean I picked up to a site didn't expect to get this much out I mean I expected I would get the main idea but I'm definitely going to be better just from these you know five minute six minute overviews this is our micro learning minutes I think I think we're on fire thank you awesome all right I will stop my share okay I'm we're going into the last part here and trying to come up with a name for this so I call it something's idea storms I know that there were needs parades I was looking at things that he was sending me so I'm just going to you know to close out with some good energy and ideas I am working on a web page and probably not going to do a whole lot more than this we're going to put some video on it but the the things that we showed here it's being recorded so those outstanding you know short introductions of what you can do like almost you know on the spot without you know losing your stride on canva and it'll be spark we'll have them on here this page is not publicly available yet it's going to be on a site called the ytbresourcenet.org and TechSoup connect for tv o and it will have some of the information that we discuss during our sessions and we'll pull out some video clips of the demonstrations and examples so that people who were not able to join us today they'll be able to see them and I'm putting here some topics that we're considering for future TechSoup connect sessions you can see them listed here and what I meant by the technology storm I want to tell you like in a minute see if I could pull this off in roughly a minute a couple of things that I discovered recently in technology that are helping me to do better work I'm going to say well one is with zoom I just didn't realize that I was not on automatic updates and so once that was brought to my attention in a friendly way I'm now on the I've got the blur screen it's something that I wanted I also learned about the literalness of what the green screen is is maybe everybody but me knows what it is but I did literally know what a green screen is so I found out about that that you could actually buy one and I was trying to talk my family to let me buy one but I do not have an evidence agreement to get a green screen one of the other things that I came across let's see I'm going to come off the screen share for a second if I can do that so if I come off the screen share so you can see me now when I was having a meeting with Eli before I had these guys on all right right so you could see they're gaming headphones now what I'm wearing now are bone conduction headphones there you know you can see a little bit if I turn my head it's kind of like they're a reverse pair of glasses you know now the reason that that's personally important to me is that I was suffering hearing loss and ear damage over the past year and my doctor said don't put things in your ear don't put earbuds in don't stick pencils in don't use q-tips swabs so she suggested either that I wear you know headphones that come over the ear or my son had a pair of these they're aftershocks bone conduction and they're pretty comfortable and I like them the last thing I'm going to tell you about is text messaging it's a service that I think all of us are using with various providers whether it's a pharmacy or venice or product and we or pull everywhere where you send a code in and you're informed that you're using some of your service but what I wanted to do was use it in the reverse way where people could send things out I also wanted to send reminders out to people in my organization but I wanted them to send things back so one of our future sessions I'm going to show how that is done so that people can report information through the texting service and we run it through power beyond you can show the report based on what people text back that's reason texting those are okay last couple of minutes anybody interested in coming off microphone and telling us about something that they discovered recently or that they like it's kind of a small group but I just want to say yeah I'm ever since using adobe illustrator I started doing youtube tutorials and I was so amazed and all the different stuff stuff I learned like I remember the other day you told that told me that you wanted to make some put on some greeting cards or something like that and I went yeah and I started seeing all these sort of designs I made some and they're looking really good like you have these designs I made like paper cuts and I will so I'm planning to send you them within the week I'm not complete I'm not they're not finished yet but I'll definitely send you some I'm just happy that I got because graphic designing was something I had in the like it was a thing I wanted to do but I didn't have the devices so I really thank white eb for giving me that opportunity to to enjoy this um this this journey that you guys have put me on it really helped me a lot haven't been doing much during the past year due to corona and stuff kind of been down um this image right here is basically a freehand it's not even complete but I'm gonna perfect it and send it because uh it's not on the scale but yeah I'm really happy that I met you guys I'm really very thankful thank you. Same here absolutely this is when when it's just a great networking and and that's what we want to have happen with TechSoup connect that I mean what you're saying that is I think the spirit of TechSoup connect I want to show this design here I believe you see it on the screen share this is a design that Richard made I'm going to connect back with some of the things that Liz was telling us about why she likes canvas so much and and I've been hearing her tell me that for several months and I finally got it I'm the riptide has pulled me in design anything and what I did this week was as Richard said we we have an interest and and actually a demand and a request from some people for us to have some the people involved with our organization send out greeting cards you know some people are going through losses in their life and as a way to stay connected with them and we're combining that with our interest in graphics and I use Canva to print the postcards so I selected you know just a couple I mean I think I ordered 10 just to see how it worked with the envelopes and I should be receiving them within the next couple of days and that's going to be someone else who's working on the project will be writing some personal notes out in them you know handwritten notes putting addressing them and then mailing them out so and then we're going to do it's an opportunity to give recognition and visibility to the work that people are doing in our organization where we'll use some of the designs on our website we're creating logos for other organizations greeting cards and that's one aspect of what we're doing okay so we're in the closing one two or three minutes and is what I want to ask is maybe the final question I won't use any tool or poll just if you want to put it in the chat to say something did you like the format we used or this is our first time where we use this format of five 15 minute sessions so if it feels like it works and people thought it was okay we might try doing that again next time we have our upcoming meeting scheduled the next one is in August it's August 10th which is a Tuesday where that's what we thought we would work with for this first series and then the one after that is in October I think it's October 12th it's also Tuesday at the same time we made it at this time thinking that it would make it possible for those individuals who might be on staff at some community organizations that would be the end part of one of their work days during the week and they could possibly have the you know the time if they could convince the boss it's related to something that is their work responsibility last year pre-covid we were running some similar things like this it was called tech for good I would run the meetings in the evening at seven o'clock seven thirty at a public library or Microsoft community room and it was tough getting people to come out with the travel and the driving sometimes that would just be one person there so obviously with the virtual session and we're not restricted geographically of course we have a representative from Florida from Jamaica people from New York and there were a handful of people from Jersey just something came up at the last minute but how about giving me some feedback is did this work out okay do you think this is have we got a good format that we should continue with okay all right thank you Audrey I was I was hoping you would say exactly what you did so I really appreciate that I think we're going to continue with this I'm going to check with the people in New Jersey who couldn't make it if they if they want I could well now that we have the video I could I could say Liz is always our guest presenter so I could show her video because it's it's really like exactly the kind of thing we want to have in our microlearn minutes and want to do some on some other topics are there what we're going to be we are going to send out the recording what I want to do is we're going to edit it if there's any you know downtime you know to just clean it up a little bit I was came on like 15 or 20 minutes before I'm not sure everybody wants to hear me we're coming out for 20 minutes and we'll pull out the the good parts primarily that's Liz and maybe you know some good questions from Richard some points I made on or that Eli and I were making about TechSoup so and we'll make that available so Audrey HS will we'll make that available I'm going to get it myself this is not on my platform it's on the TechSoup platform so they're going to get it to me you know soon I don't know the day or so whenever Eli has a chance to pull it down either put it on a youtube or put it on a google drive and let me download it and one of our projects that we have with some people who are doing things with us is we're using some video editing programs on Adobe I guess that's Adobe Premiere Adobe Rush Adobe Spark does video I don't know if there's video editing Microsoft has a simple video editor that works if you need something real quick it's simple if you have just in here and we'll show that in one of our sessions as well but we'll get the the you know the highlights of today's session I would hope by the end of the month if not sooner okay so it's five oh one I want to close this out I want to stay on time I'm going to put my email in here if anybody doesn't know it if you have a question he thinks you can probably communicate in some way through a TechSoup connect if you liked it tell everybody you see and then we'll get some more people out for our next session in August if it seems like there's enough interest I can certainly run a set another session like if people like to have things either monthly or every other month quarterly and you don't have to come to all of them of course uh but whatever seems like we could get at least a handful of people if not a bit more that's kind of well determined how fruitful it is thank you everyone thank you Audrey Harold thank you Audrey Blake thank you Miss Carmine thank you Richard thank you Eli Anderson and thank my family for taking the dogs outside so that they didn't bark in the room but was doing the session on y'all have a good evening and look forward to hearing from everybody bye bye