 Welcome to, Is Your Website Holding Your Org Hostage? Set Your Site Free. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for a little more than 6 years, and prior to that I spent about a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California, where I was regularly the accidental techie, having to develop new websites and figure out how to make updates on websites, and often in the situation of having my organization's website being held hostage myself. So I've lived this situation and feel for any of you on the phone who are in it as well. Also joining us today we have Steve Murphy. I've listed him here as a nonprofit Web Building Pro because he really is. And after 25 years of working with two tech companies and software companies that he ran, he has decided to dedicate a lot of his time to giving back. And he's spent more than 2,500 hours dedicated to building and developing nonprofit websites pro bono. So we love people like Steve in our community for taking his time to give back, both in person and on events like this today. Also joining us is Kelly Antonucci who is the nonprofit outreach manager at N-Power in New York City. So we're really excited to have her joining us to share her expertise and where N-Power provides a wide variety of on-site and consulting services for nonprofits throughout the New York area. And they have programs that also extend nationwide. And we'll hear more about those later where you can access some support and community to get support for your programs. You'll also see Ali Bastikian in the chat, and she is with us from TechSoup as the Interactive Events and Video Producer. She'll be there to grab and flag any of your questions for follow-up. So if you have any issues or tech problems, feel free to ask her during the webinar. And as questions move you, go ahead and post them in the chat and she'll make sure that they're captured for our presenters. Looking at today's agenda, I'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup for those of you who may not be familiar with us. We'll have an opportunity to hear from you, our audience, about your experiences with websites and where you're at. This will help inform our presenters on what they'll talk about in the sections following. Steve and Kelly will talk about a zero-cost checklist and what to look for to know whether you are held hostage, and then talk about the life cycle of a website and how often you really should be forecasting, changing, and redesigning, or rebuilding. They'll give you some options for new websites, new web builders, and how to update some of the existing sites that you may be captured by. They'll talk about the Bill of Rights for websites, and give you some next steps. We'll also have some time for Q&A, and we'll highlight some products that are out there that may help you get out of being trapped if you are. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit, and we are working towards a day when every nonprofit, charity, library on the planet can access the technology, knowledge, and resources to meet their mission. We do this in a variety of ways. Since 1987, we've been doing this, and we are in more than 60 countries around the world. We do this in a variety of ways, including things like donation programs from Microsoft and Cisco, and a whole slew of other companies that partner with us to bring their technology to the nonprofit sector. And we also do it by having events like this where we offer trainings and informational events to help you make the best decisions for your organization. So with that I'd like to go ahead and have you participate. Tell us how often are you able to update your website content? Go ahead and click on one of these radio buttons on your screen. We have 130 some people in the room right now, and that number is sure to climb in the next few minutes. So we want to give just a moment for everyone to have the opportunity to participate in these couple of poll questions. It helps inform us, but it also helps inform you about where you are at and whether you are an outlier among other peers, or whether you are smack in the middle of nonprofits who are similar to you. So I'm going to give just a few more seconds for everyone to participate. So it looks like around 31% it's almost a dead heat between daily and weekly. So that's great that you have a lot of people are in here able to update their sites pretty regularly. And about 25% say monthly 8.7, 9.5, it keeps changing at me, are yearly, and 2.6 are never, and then a little less than 2% don't have a website. So if we add that up, boy my mask goes 35. So a little less than 40% say that they either can't do it more than monthly or never. And go ahead and click on this next one and then we'll get to the fun content of the day. When is the last time your organization went through a web design or redesign project? So in the comments while people are responding to this, you won't be able to read each other's comments, but when we see things come in that we think are useful or interesting, we'll try and share those back out. Dan comments, we have the ability to update our site if we want to pay each time. So that is definitely a little bit of a restriction. Cindy comments that they are in the process of redesigning right now. So we didn't include that as an option, so that's great to point out that some of you may be in it at the moment. Anna comments that she can update her website quarterly. Greg and Jennifer say that they are in the process but having a hard time coordinating with their web design company. Some are in the final stages. So lots of people are in it right now. So that's great that you are moving forward with web design projects. And hopefully today's webinar will help inform and give you some ideas of how to make that even smoother and improve the process for you. So let me show these results really quickly so we can all see. So around 30% of people say that their website was last designed or redesigned 3 to 5 years ago. 19%, 5 or more years ago. And 19 and almost 18% are either less than a year or in the past 1 to 2 years. So really helpful to see kind of the spread. And this is somewhat better than I was actually expecting based on some of the pre-survey registration. We thought we may have had a much bigger crowd of people that were stuck in the never or 5 or more year categories. So this is great. I'd like to go ahead and have our presenters join us on the line now so they can talk about what it means to be held hostage which some of you may personally feel deeply at different times in your organization with your site. And to tell us how to get out of that, to give us some tips on how to move away from that process. And into one that will be smoother and easier and more successful for you to communicate your services, your goals, and your mission more seamlessly to your audience. So welcome to the program. We are so glad to have you join us Kelly. Well thank you Becky. Good morning. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Kelly Antonucci here from N-Power. And both Steve and I are very excited to have this time with you and be able to share this information. So I'm going to go ahead and just jump right in and start getting as much information from Steve as we can. Steve, when you had first approached me about doing a webinar on this topic, I had kind of an aha moment and a good chuckle thinking about the name. How did you come up with the name? Are you being held hostage by your website? Yeah, the way I came up with the name, and I'm going to go back to the survey for just a quick second Kelly, before I answer that question directly. It appears I, much like Becky, thought there would be many people on this webinar that maybe are being restricted in terms of updating their content. It seems like many of the folks are able to do that. But I also see that many people have entertained a redesign in the last two to five years. And I'm sure many are thinking about doing the same. So I just want to share with those folks kind of toward the last third of what Kelly are going to talk about, we are going to share some very specific, four real specific topics that will help you as you go into those redesign phases to make sure that you are not held hostage. But to answer your question directly Kelly, in the last three and a half years I've been working with nonprofits to improve their web presence. And I've worked with about 30 nonprofits on web projects specifically. And I noticed that over 80% of those folks that I worked with felt like they were held hostage or at least handcuffed by their site. An example, kind of a classic example is a nonprofit in Miami whose mission it was to provide books to grade schools in Haiti. And their website was displaying errors on their donation page so that people could not donate. And the school year was coming up and they relied on those donations for books. And so they were truly handcuffed from actually completing one of their core missions by their website. And given the importance of websites to nonprofits and seeing how pervasive this problem seemed to be, I wondered how it could be avoided. Okay, wonderful. And hopefully we will have many tips to help nonprofits avoid this situation. What have you found to be some of the common signs that a nonprofit is being held hostage or handcuffed by their website? One of the first signs is that the content stale, and we've all seen examples of this. Kind of one common one would be that there's a recent news section on the website and the last post in that area or the last recent news might be a year and a half ago. And that leaves our visitors with that feeling that maybe no one's home and maybe an impression we don't want to leave. And another common one is that we look at a website and we just kind of think, gosh, that looks a little old or a little out of date. And most of the folks on this call know that websites are much like clothes or fashion. What looked good five years ago and was considered engaging really may not be the case today. And websites really do have a shelf life. They are not a fire and forget project. The research shows that most first donors visit an organization's website prior to donating to get a measure of the organization. And our websites, if they look out of date, it's sending the wrong message. The other two are common examples would be that the websites no longer telling the full story of the organization. Organizations change and our websites need to reflect or mirror that change. And lastly that the organization maybe is not supporting or the websites are not supporting the organization's needs. And a website, as most people know on this call, can help you recruit volunteers and it can help you keep your community updated. It can increase your donations. But I've seen organizations be handcuffed and the website has the opposite effect. An example is much like Dan just mentioned in the chat a while back. I worked with this nonprofit in Seattle who had to pay, just like Dan mentioned, had to pay the developer every time they needed this very simple change made to the website. And it got to the point they couldn't afford that. And so they stopped updating their current success stories, section of their website, they no longer updated their upcoming events calendar, and within a year they saw a 20% drop in donations. Wow, that is amazing really how this has an impact on the nonprofits. And I actually have the same experience as you. I have been speaking with a nonprofit in Massachusetts and the executive director had been going out and doing a lot of outreach to the community and speaking at events and talking about their programs. And people would come up to her afterwards very enthused and energized and want to learn more and learn how they can get involved. And they would ask how they could get more information. Could they go to her website? And she was basically mortified to have to say, no, I'm sorry, we don't have this information on our website. So it was really causing a challenge for their organization. Yeah, that's a great example of a website not telling the full story. And I'm just kind of thinking about this and wondering, do you have some type of a self-assessment tool that a nonprofit can use to see if they are being limited by their website? Yeah, one of the main goals for me for this webinar is to dispel the myth that you need a technical person to do updates to your site. So really this list, you should be able to at no cost to you be able to do the things on this list. As an example, you should be able to upload photos. You should be able to add them to a new webpage to talk about current events that you have or have had are coming up. You should be able to create a photo gallery of maybe the last fundraiser, the 10K run, or whatever. But the point is, is that you should expect that you can do all the things on this list. Whether you need to do them or not is another question, but you should expect that you could. Steve, I'm kind of curious because you said at no cost, how would a nonprofit be able to do these updates at no cost? Yeah, good question. What I say no cost, what I'm really speaking of is that a non-technical person, whether that's a member of the nonprofit staff or it's a volunteer that helps the nonprofit, should be able to do these updates. So you should not have to pay people to do them. These items sound fairly like you might need to be a technical expert or have a web programming experience. Are you sure that a non-technical person can do all of these things? Yeah, Kelly, one of these comes from is back in the day when websites were designed in the very early days, they were all designed in a programming language, HTML, CSS, and so on, and other languages. And in that day and age, you had to be a programmer to really update the site. But much like Microsoft Word has enabled us all to be able to do documents and be able to change fonts and add images and so on. There are tools in this day and age that allow non-technical people to be able to change content on a website. All right. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about, in your experience, how is it that nonprofits get into situations where they have lost control of their website and the ability to make these updates? Yeah, so I'm sure some of the people on this call can relate to these. These are my statistics from the 30 projects that I have worked on in the last 3.5 years. An example of the top two, some organizations experience both of the top two, a proprietary system or somebody's left. There's a nonprofit in Seattle that I worked with that used class fees online registration as their primary funding source for their entire organization. And their developer left. And the developer built the website in a proprietary way, and they were unable to take online registrations any longer. So that was a real problem. And when I speak of proprietary or closed, there could be a lot of definitions of those topics or of those words. But I'm using the words in this case to say, if it's proprietary or it's closed, it's requiring that a tech person is required to be able to do updates. And in this day and age, hopefully we can avoid that. Okay. I have to tell you that I hear kind of these same scenarios all the time where a nonprofit reaches out to us and they're telling us that they are unable to update their website. And one of the board members who is no longer there had a cousin who had a sister who was starting a web development company and they were looking for some clients to work with or somebody had a college intern that was able to do the work. And now that person is gone. And now they are basically in this situation where they are kind of stuck and tied to their current site. Yeah. And so that's such a common example that whether it's the developer or a key staff person, it's somebody who is knowledgeable about the website and how to update it. That person is no longer available. Maybe they've taken another job. Maybe they've moved on for whatever reason. And so because of that, that ability to update the website now is no longer within the organization's reach. And we're suggesting some ways coming up here that maybe can help them with that. Okay. So as many of the nonprofits that are typing in the chat we can see, if a nonprofit is handcuffed by their website, what can they do? How do they get unstuck? Yeah. The solution is simple or can be simple. The execution is a bit more of a challenge. But what I'm suggesting is that they should make sure that their website is built with a popular website builder tool. And in this day and age, the term website builder or CMS or content management system, they are all used interchangeably. So making sure that their website is built with a popular website builder tool is a big, big first step. Okay. Steve, I have to tell you, I feel like you just told me that the solution is to just go climb Everest and everything will be better. Are you saying that these nonprofits have to just throw out their current site and start over from scratch? Yeah. No, that sounds scary. And I certainly don't want to leave that impression, Kelly. No. What I'm suggesting is that, as we mentioned a few minutes ago, all websites have a shelf life. And therefore, just like clothes and fashion, they should change. And I can see from the survey that many, many of the folks on this call follow what is considered best practices, meaning that they recognize their website has a shelf life and they know that it needs to have a refresh or redesign. And some people say every best practices are one to three years. Some people say every two to five. But let's just say that somewhere in the period of one to five years, there should be a conscious planning cycle in place that says we are going to refresh our website. And that really becomes the ideal time to look into maybe if you are on a proprietary system or not on a popular CMS, moving to one. Okay. You definitely had me a little frightened there to begin with. But it sounds like these are all things that really every organization can incorporate and think about in their planning cycles. But I am very curious as to how much extra time would moving to a website builder or a CMS add to this planning cycle because I have to tell you that I just got off of the phone this morning with an executive director that has spent 12 months working on getting their current site up and running. And I cannot possibly go back to her and say that if she wanted to move to a CMS it would take two years to be able to do this. Right. And if that person is on this call and it has just taken 12 months to do it, they are going, oh my goodness, there is no way I can do that again. That was such a long and painful process. So what I am really suggesting is that probably that person that you were talking to, Kelly, that was maybe their first website, was that true? Yes, that is correct. So the idea that you take 12 months to build your first one is not maybe uncommon. There is so much work that goes into just getting the content put together and all of that work will not be thrown away. All that work is going to fold right into the refresh project. And then if you decide to move to convert to a CMS it would fold into that. So let me get specific. I have personally done several of these projects where I have taken a nonprofit from a proprietary website to a popular one using a popular website builder. And let's just say, and this wouldn't be uncommon, let's just say that you would plan two months to do a website refresh so that the fact that you already have a website and you are now going to do a refresh in that one to five year period, if it took two months to do that refresh it might take three months to convert to the CMS. So I am suggesting and it is not a bad estimate and it is going to vary on a case-by-case basis certainly, but I am suggesting that an estimate of about 33% addition to the project is not a bad estimate. Okay. Again, that sounds something that is very doable and I think most people can incorporate into their plan. But I just wanted to go back and talk about why this is so important to look at using a website builder or CMS. Yes. So just to review that key point so that you as an organization have control of your website and are not being held hostage for money reasons or for technical reasons you want to have your website built using a popular website building tool so that non-technical people, either people on your staff or volunteers can keep your website current which is probably very important to the image that you are projecting. Okay. And then I also heard you mention not just website builder but the importance of using a popular website builder. Can you explain that a little bit more why it is so important to choose a popular CMS or website builder? Sure. According to Wikipedia there are well over 100 CMSs or website builders available. So you want to pick a popular one because it is going to increase the chances, the probability that you can find a developer who can help you when it comes to the refresh stage or volunteer to help you keep your website current. And so if we think back that at least my experience has been 40% of the projects were handcuffed because a key person left it may not be a bad idea to just plan that key people are going to leave. And so you want to have a popular website builder so the probability of finding a replacement is much higher. Okay. It kind of seems like a no-brainer so I'm just curious, aren't all sites built with a website builder? It does seem like a no-brainer and the answer is no, they're not. And as of September of this month, or September of this year 2014 62% of websites are not built with a website builder or a CMS. So if there are folks on this webinar that don't have their website built in such a way, they should not feel badly because two-thirds of the worldwide websites would fall into that category. But those folks that have not had a website built with a website builder, that often tends to be one of the primary, if not the primary reason they are handcuffed. Wow. And I'm curious, what have you found to be some of the popular website builders or CMS systems that nonprofits are using? Yeah, and there could be great debate on this list. So there could be many others added here but this is not a bad list to start with as a begin point. Here are eight. Okay. And what would you say is the most popular? Yeah, so again based on statistics as of this month, for all websites that have as their foundation a website builder, WordPress dominates by 61% meaning that 61% of those sites were built using WordPress. Jumla about 8% and so on. But there are nearly a billion websites on the worldwide web. So even the ones toward the bottom that have a fraction of the percent, it still represents a very large number and they could be considered in the popular category. Okay. And I've seen a lot of the comments going back and forth on the chat and I've heard a lot of nonprofits that I speak with talking about Wix and I was here, WordPress come up. Do they all do the same thing or do they have different benefits or features? Yeah, so they don't all do the same thing. And it really depends on the goal of the organization and of course kind of website design 101 starts with what is the role that your website is meant to play for your organization? And if it's meant to play more of a brochure role, it's not a very dynamic role. It's simple. You don't plan to have lots of updates or lots of interaction and lots of features. Then the website building tools on the left are primarily drag and drop tools and are easy to use and quicker to learn and so on. The one if you have more high end requirements, the ones on the right while they require a bit more learning, they have a fair bit more capability. Let me give you an example. WordPress for instance has over 32,000 plugins, many of them free. Now what's a plugin? A plugin is something that can be added to a website that adds a feature or adds a function so it can make a website more powerful. So things like for instance you want to have a Facebook or Twitter comments mirrored on your website so that your website has a lot of activity and it's dynamic and so on. Or you want to go look for an event calendar. You'd find many event calendar plugins so you could find those kinds of things easily. So there you go Kelly. So this is a simplistic analysis but it's not a bad starting point again. Okay great. And it sounds like there's not one right answer. It really depends on what the nonprofit needs their website to do and what resources they have internally to be able to dedicate time to making the updates. I'm sure a lot of people on the call at this point are wondering what their sites are actually built with. And I wanted to see if you had any suggestions as to how they can find out what their current site is built with. Yeah there are tools on the internet that will help you evaluate what your website was built with. And here are some links or you can just Google what CMS is this and what will typically happen is there will be a place on the site that lets you type in or paste in your URL or how people get to your website and you paste in that link and it will go out and analyze the site and it will give you an idea whether your website was built with the website builder tool and if so which one. Okay so hopefully people will go after the presentation and just confirm what their site is built on. And if they find out that it is built using a CMS or website builder what can they do to get assistance with getting their website updated? Yeah so that would be the good news that they maybe didn't even know that it was built with a CMS and so they are probably in pretty good shape and so my suggestion is that they reach out and find a volunteer who will help them train their staff or train one of their volunteers to keep their website updated and to teach them how to use the tool. So in that example Kelly you had in the beginning where we have an intern who comes in for the summer and helps us get our content current and now the intern is left. Maybe we just need to teach another member of our staff how to do similar things and there are many, many volunteers available that know these CMSs that can help you. Okay great well it sounds like we may have just given the keys to Freedom to maybe about a third of the people on the call but based upon your statistics earlier we know that two thirds of the websites are not built using a CMS or a website builder and I just want to make sure that those people can actually convert to a CMS system. Yeah and so again as I mentioned I have done it personally. I know many developers who have done it many times to help a nonprofit convert to a CMS but for those in the call it might be a little nervous or just want to see what the size of the task might be. My suggestion is that they reach out and have a volunteer look at their site and give an estimate about what it would take to get there and then they should also recognize that they are going to need a developer, a technical person to help them with that and they probably are going to need somebody dedicated on their side to assist the developer with the content and so on. So very possible and you don't have to bite it off right now. You could reach out and just kind of find out how tough would it be and let somebody help you evaluate that. Okay well I think you have made a very compelling case for converting to a website builder or CMS but I just wanted to ask you this question. If nonprofits do go ahead and switch over could they still end up being handcuffed to their website or in a situation where they can't make updates? Yeah unfortunately the answer is yes. And many on this call indicated at the very beginnings that they are familiar with. They go through a refresh every year, every 3 or 4 or 5 years and so they are taking on that kind of a project. And it's the upfront preparation of that project that can really help you avoid being held hostage. I'll give you an example of a nonprofit in Seattle that I worked with last year who had a developer and there was problems with the developer and the developer got upset. The developer actually built their site on WordPress but then disabled the ability of non-technical people to be able to actually update it. So while we would say, hey the website was built using a very popular CMS, we think we kind of can do the happy dance in the end zone. That's not always the case. So let's talk about some things that that organization and maybe some on this call might be able to do. Okay so you have the Bill of Rights here and the first one is to own your own site. Can you clarify what you mean by own your own site? Doesn't everybody have the ownership of their website? Right. Yeah the answer is no, they don't always but they should. And with just a little preparation you can make sure that that's the case. So just in context, an organization most know this on this call should expect that they are going to pay for two things. They are going to pay for their domain name and their domain name is that thing that lets you type in and get to the website and maybe it's myorganization.org or it's whatever but there is typically a yearly fee for a domain name and the fee can range from 10 to 15 bucks but just in round terms. So there is a domain name fee. And then the second thing is that you need to have your website hosted by what's called a hosting company who has large banks of servers that are connected to the internet. And typically you are going to pay that company somewhere, it can vary dramatically but somewhere between 5 to 10 or 15 bucks a month is not uncommon. Now Kelly, one of the problems that I have seen with several nonprofits is that they got held hostage because the developer said to them, hey, you are very busy. You don't want to have to deal with this domain thing. There are some technical things involved there. You don't want to have to deal with setting up a web hosting company and deciding what plan you want and all that. I'll take care of all that for you. And then you can just pay me a monthly fee and you don't have to worry about it. And of course the problem with that is that if there becomes a fallout between the developer and the nonprofit, the nonprofit doesn't have the domain registered in their name because they didn't pay for it. They don't have the hosting service registered in their name because they didn't pay for it. And that developer can just pull the plug or shut it down. I have to ask you to share the story of the developer that was hosting the nonprofit's website in a rather unusual location. Yes, the very first nonprofit that I worked with, they found a developer who was in college and it was a young lady who wanted to make this a career. And she was very enthusiastic and really helpful and said to them, not only will I pay for your domain and your hosting, I'll actually take care of your hosting to the point that you won't have to pay anything. I'll actually host it on one of my servers. And what turned out was that she was living with her mother as she's going to college and the server was in her mother's bedroom and the nonprofit and she had a falling out and she literally went and unplugged the cable and lights out. That has to be my all-time favorite Steve Murphy story. Oh my gosh. Yeah, pretty dramatic. So don't take the easy way out. It can sound like it's easy, but make sure you own it. And then you also talked about owning your code. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means because I thought if you're using a website builder or a CMS there wasn't any code. Yeah, and this gets just a touch more technical, but I'm going to keep it very simple. Sometimes, not all the time, the developer needs to add some custom programming code to do something for the nonprofit's website, whether it's add a feature or to make it look a certain way or whatever. And one of the things that I'm suggesting is that you make very explicit up front in the contract or the letter of agreement is that any code developed by the developer for building the nonprofit's website is owned by the nonprofit, not owned by the developer. So oftentimes this is never even approached and what will happen is the developer assumes that they own the code. And again, we get into that if there's a fallout, they can pull the code which may start causing problems with the site or may actually take the site down. And that's not anything unusual. Most developers wouldn't balk if you asked to add that to the contract. They would not. And most developers would recognize that you knew what you were doing because you're asking for that. And so I got involved in a situation where this was not made explicit and the organization was left pursuing lawyers and no one wants to do that. No, definitely not. And then the third right you have is the ability to maintain content. So what are some things that the nonprofit's staff should be able to do and how can the nonprofit make sure to incentivize the developer to properly train their staff? I think it's important to take that same list that we have up here now that we showed before, but to take that same list and make it part of the original agreement or understanding. In other words, that the organization says, look, my expectation is when this project is done that a non-technical person on my staff can do these things. And then once that's set up front, now the expectation is set, and that the nonprofit whether it's the executive director or manager or whomever does not sign off on the project until they've actually seen a member of their staff be able to do most or all of these things. And of course, if there's a payment, there's no final payment until you've seen that, or if there's just sign off, you actually validate as a manager of the organization that this in fact, somebody non-technical can do it. And that would of course avoid the problem that I mentioned in the Seattle nonprofit where the developer went out of his way to make sure that only he could be, you know, he was required to do all updates and therefore they had to pay him. So this would avoid that situation. Okay. And then the last right that you have is about protecting your site. And again, that sounds something that's more geared towards a technical person. How complicated is protecting your site? Yeah, so the protecting your site can be kept quite simple. Just see that you have backups. See proof that you have backups being made on a regular scheduled basis and that you have access to those backups. And what I mean by that is that you have access to the folder where those backups are held. And you don't have to understand what's inside those files or what's inside the folder. You just need to have access to the folder because if something happens where you need to get another developer involved or your site gets hacked or whatever, the first thing that a developer would want to do is to have those backups so that we can reconstruct your site. Okay, wonderful. Because nobody wants to be in that situation where their site is hacked and it's a horrible, horrible feeling. It is a terrible feeling. And I worked with a nonprofit a couple of years ago in North Carolina that had that situation where they were paying their developer and they got tired of it. And so they stopped updating their site and their site got old and their site actually got hacked and they didn't have any backups. And they literally spent two and a half months, I helped them reconstruct their site from paper. Oh my gosh, wow. And had they had backups, we could have had it up in a day or two. Wow, that's really a critical thing. And as you said, we think of backing up all these other things, photos and documents. But really keeping us to make sure that your website is backed up as well. Yeah, we do. That's a great point. We think about in our organizations that our servers have to be backed up, or that our desktops have to be backed up, or laptops have to be backed up, but somehow the idea that our website should be backed up somehow gets missed. Yeah, well I think that the Bill of Rights is extremely helpful. I like to talk about all of these things. And I talked to nonprofits that call me about their website issues. And I just wanted to kind of quickly recap some of the things that we talked about during this session. So if you get off this call and you're energized and you want to really empower yourself in your organization to be able to update your website, just a quick run-through. So first thing is find out what your site is built with. We provided the links in the presentation. And then you also want to make sure is who actually owns your domain name and who is hosting it. We talked about reasons why you really need a reputable hosting site. If you're not on one currently, you definitely want to get on one as soon as possible. And then look at your current contract with the developer and ensure that you would own any customized code that was done for your website. Also confirm that you have backups. When is the most recent backup? And how often are they scheduled? Because again if you're hacked you don't want to be down for months and recreating your site from paper. And then Steve has created that zero-cost checklist. So definitely I think it's a great tool to go through and see how many of those things can you go ahead and do on that checklist because really you should be able to do all of them. And then identify an internal staff person that might be a good candidate for website training. I think Steve talked about the fact that really if you can create a Word document you can in a few hours of training learn how to make these updates to your website. Yeah, I think that's a great recap Kelly. And you have been asking the questions during this webinar. Let me turn the tables and I'll be at a softball question. I can imagine that there are some people on this webinar who are going, I feel like I'm at least handcuffed by my website, but you're starting to use terms like domain and hosting and CMS and I'm getting confused. Kelly what can they do to get help? Sure. Thanks Steve for an easy softball question at the end of our webinar. But I think you make a great point is that we did cover a lot and I don't think either one of us expected anyone attending today's session would come out of this now being a website expert. But hopefully you have learned enough to start asking kind of those key questions. And the thing that I would recommend is really to go ahead and speak with someone that is a website expert and can really help you assess where you are and how to get to a place where you can make regular updates. And of course the next obvious question is how can I speak with an expert? And there are many, many wonderful volunteers out there just like Steve that can help nonprofits with their website. And there are different ways to get connected to them. So there are organizations such as N-Power, that's where I work. We have a program called the Community Corps and we work to connect skilled technical volunteers like Steve with nonprofits that need assistance. It's free to join. It's very easy. You can post projects requesting assistance. And we have the link here and it will also be in the email that Becky sends out later. And one of the things that I would start with is a website review and assessment project because again it really kind of looks at where you are currently and then makes recommendations for you as to what are the next steps. And then we also have projects for website updates, website training, but there's a whole category there of website projects. And then there are also other volunteer organizations where you can post projects for requesting assistance. It's volunteer match and idealist. And Becky I think we are done and ready to turn it back to you. Great. Thank you so much for that, both of you. We have a lot of other resources available and we will get to Q&A in just a moment. So TechSoup and this will be included in the post event email. So in addition to the community core that Kelly just pointed you to, we have a lot of web building resources on TechSoup's site because we know that a lot of you are going it alone. Everything from a toolkit that has a lot of great resources on simple things you can do. We have these different articles and past webinars on tips on how to redesign, tips for creating sites. We have an RFP library which was something that a few people asked about. So an RFP is a request for proposals which is something that you may want to write up basically defining kind of the scope and the goals and what you want your site to do if you are looking at a whole new web project. This RFP library that we have has samples and examples and has a lot of great information in that. And then also one of the resources I want to make sure people are aware of is that we have a whole design and web building community forum where experts and consultants, people like Steve participate and answer questions and help recommend things. So for questions like how do you know which host you have for your website? Or can you recommend a good web host or a reputable one? Those are the kinds of questions that every day they are answering in the forums. In fact I just saw a post there on that yesterday. So great resources. And I also want to highlight really quickly just a few web building tools and donations through TechSoup. So we know that some were mentioned earlier like WordPress is free, Wix is free, WeBleah is free. There is a whole bunch. We also and some of those articles compare some of those tools in depth. So if you are looking for a whole new tool to use you can find resources to compare them. This list is specifically for tools that offer their services as donations to TechSoup users. And there is no fee to join TechSoup but there may be a small admin fee depending on the service you opt with. But GoDaddy, big reputable name for web hosting, but they also offer their web builder service. So it is a full-fledged CMS and hosting service that they are donating to nonprofits. And they just launched only a couple of weeks ago with us. So we are excited to have them. NetSuite offers a light content management system. Huddle is a content management system that also offers collaboration. So if you have staff in different places or branches it allows you to have online collaboration and project management tools. Wiki Spaces is a Wiki tool but that actually can work really well for a website tool depending on the type of site that you need and the type of content that you are looking to get out there and share. CitySoft is another content management system. If you are looking for a really big, complicated, multi-faceted site, SharePoint is a really great tool but that is not for the faint of heart. It is something you definitely would need some technical support and help on. For those of you who asked about e-commerce sites, Shopify is an e-commerce tool that is donated to organizations. So for those of you who have a storefront or sell gear or t-shirts, that is one to look into. And then the last two are for those of you who may have a website but you want to make a mobile-friendly website or have fundraising through a mobile site or text message. So those two are also available in our catalog. So check those out. And I'm going to jump into questions. We only have a few minutes left so I'm going to rush through some bigger topics that came in. Steve, do you recommend that people start with a request for proposals or an RFP when they go into this process? I think depending on the size of the project and the size of the organization, RFPs are very helpful. But I know many nonprofits where that's an intimidating project. And I've personally been involved in many where the nonprofit just reaches out and says, I just need help. I'd like to get my website refreshed or I need a brand new one or whatever. And as a volunteer, we just talk about it and we develop a game plan. And that can be just as effective. Great. A lot of questions came in asking about the average cost for websites. And I know that that's kind of a big question because there is no average. But especially if you're a smaller organization, how much do you think is really a reasonable budget for somebody to come into this and say, we need to put some money into it maybe, or maybe they can really do it all for free. So what's your opinion on cost? That is a very tough question. So I'll answer that in a very general way and with the expectation that there's a thousand exceptions. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 to 5,000 is not an unreasonable number for building a website. I've certainly seen them up into the 50,000 range for very complex ones. And I've also personally built with people with other volunteers websites that are quite involved at no charge. So I think reaching out to the volunteer community and kind of getting a feel if somebody could take that project on, you could expect that you could get one done at no charge. Great. And if you are looking for volunteers, I know that Kelly mentioned Idealist and you can also post in our community forums. N10 has 501 Tech Clubs where you can post and they're in different cities around the country where you can post that you're looking for some help and you may find volunteers. And I loved one of the ideas shared in the chat by a different participant we broadcast out that they connected with the local community colleges marketing program and the students actually built their organization a new website. So that's a great thought too on how to do these programs or do these upgrades without necessarily having the funds to do so. Go ahead, sorry. I was just going to say the one thing I would suggest is that please recognize that you're going to need to be involved pretty deeply. And so it requires an effort on your side even if it's a volunteer, even if you're engaging a volunteer. So just plan that it's going to require resources on your side, yours being the nonprofits. Right. And I think making sure that no matter who you work with that you're looking at that checklist and you're going over it with the volunteer, the developer, the company, the host to make sure that you can do those things after that volunteer decides to move on to a different project or moves away so that you aren't held hostage again. We are at just about the top of the hour. There's a lot of questions we didn't get to answer. So what we'll try to do is we will do a roundup of some of these questions in the form of a blog post that answers many of them. And we can follow up with a second email to you sometime next week hopefully with answers to many of your questions that we didn't have time for today. So I'm really sorry that we didn't. I want to just thank Steve and Kelly for taking the time to really share this expertise with us. And I think some of those checklists are really valuable to be able to walk away with and the links just to be able to figure out what you're hosted on now and how to get away from those things if you are held hostage. A couple of upcoming dates that are important. So for those of you who are interested in our Storymakers Contest, the deadline for submissions for that is tomorrow, the 26th of September. So if you've started that process make sure you complete it by end of day tomorrow so that you can be eligible for those $5,000 grand prizes. Then we'll have a webinar next Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific time or noon Eastern with Skype on Skyping out of the office, how to use that for business purposes. We will talk about engaging volunteers using Yammer and how to connect and collaborate with staff, volunteers, and board members on the 9th of October. And there are many more to come. You can access all of our webinars at that link on that slide that you will get in the post event email. Thank you again Steve and Kelly. Thanks to Allie for helping on the back end. And lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of this platform for our ability to present these webinars to you on a regular basis. We're using ReadyTalk 500 which is also available in TechSoup's catalog. When the screen closes, please take a moment to complete the post event survey to help us to continue to improve our webinar programming to best meet your needs. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.