 Thank you very much for being here with us today for this TechSoupConnect Texas roundtable. We are ready to get started. Just want to give you a quick legal disclaimer here. And basically, please don't sue me or anybody else on the call today, because we're going to be sharing a lot of good general information and experiences, but every nonprofit is unique. And you would want to apply what you learned today in different ways, according to each unique organization's unique circumstances. For example, information that worked really well for the cat society might backfire over at the dog society, right? And so if you want to be sure that you're taking and applying this information in the right way for your organization, be sure to engage a professional to help you make sure that you fine-tuned it. So we have a good-sized group today. And by good, we're a size where we can actually get to know each other a little bit. And so what I'd like us to do is take 40 seconds or less. Please don't make me pull the hook out on you so we can actually introduce ourselves to each other. And so we're just going to give our name, our organization, and our roles. And I'll go ahead and get us started, and then we will do the pass the baton method. I'll call on somebody then they'll call on somebody else until we've all done our introductions. I'm Sean Hale. My day job is as the founder leader of Sean Hale Consulting. We are an organization that serves nonprofits with their accounting and finance needs. And we're a team of nine. We help a bunch of great nonprofits here in Texas and outside of Texas. And that's what I do. So I'm going to call on... Let's go with Eric. Hi, everybody. Eric Zarco, the VP of Development for Roundtable Technology and a contributor to the Texas community. Roundtable is a managed service company that exclusively works with non-profit posts. I'm going to pass the baton to Reggie. Good morning, everyone. My name is Reggie Chauvet. I'm with Wisco out of Fort-au-Prince, Haiti. We are an IT company. And lately, I've been doing that for a long time. And lately, I've been trying to find how I can help foundations and NGOs set up or improve their current technology infrastructure. So I'm just here to learn about what we guys are doing and see how I can get into the nonprofit sector just to help out, not very looking forward to making money, but just help them improve the way they work and make a bigger impact on the people they're trying to help in Haiti. Thank you. Let's see. I pass the baton to James. Hello. My name is James Orenstein. I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area in the United States in the process of trying to form a startup non-profit for developing community solar projects. And I guess, on my name, Suchita, that's pronounced right, is next. Or if not, maybe Andy Kellum. Thank you, James. Andy Kellum with Mobile Loaves and Fishes. I'm the IT director, just doing my part. As our mission and vision is to empower communities into a lifestyle of service with the homeless, you can find out more about us at mls.org. I guess I will pass the saw and see. We saw Carlos and She-Dragon. Then Suchita, if she comes back. Let's see. Carlos. Thank you, Andy. I'm Carlos Becerril from Mexico City. Right now, I'm for two months from this year. My organization is called Creative with a K and double T. And it's based on arts education. So one of my biggest projects is to create an after-school program, non-for-profit of art education for children nine to 12 years old. And I'm going to pass it to Suchita. Okay. Suchita, we can't hear you. Can you? There we go. Sorry. Hi, I'm Suchita Jarevala. I'm the director of operations and space for art. We are a non-profit organization in San Diego who support the arts and artists. In particular, we provide affordable studio space and housing to artists here. And as an extension, one of our programs is arts education programming and doing arts events, free arts events in the community. Yeah. Thank you for having me here. Thank you, Suchita. And She-Dragon, it's your turn. Hi. I'm not with any particular organization that I am an artist volunteer. And some of the organizations I volunteer with are not as well funded or run. And I'm just trying to find better ways to help. Okay. Great. Thank you for joining us. We have a neat group today. I heard two or three different arts organizations, two IT organizations. We have the U.S. Haiti and Mexico represented. And there are probably a couple of other things I didn't quite pick up on. Anyway, great, great diversity of the group today. Thank you all for introducing yourselves. The way I'm going to run this today is just to get the ball rolling, I have a few handful of items that I want to share with you. Some technology that has made my job better and that I know remembering on my 20 years as a non-profit employee would have made our non-profit work a whole lot better. And so there's certainly things that I recommend that you check out and that I recommend pretty much everyone check out for just to add any small mid-sized nonprofits. And my big favorite for this year is 10 more more organizations, including nonprofits have been adopting it over the last few years. It has a ton of free features. And I've been using it so much for free the past two years that about a month ago, I finally got the paid version. And so professionally, I'm using it to do things like design and print my business cards. Two-sided bleed, I think it was 20 bucks for me to get a whole box of business cards, which was money well spent for just to be so easy to go in and do a nice looking business card. There are lots of great graphics and starter logos on there. I'll show you some of the stuff that's built into Canva here in just a second. I have a great library of stock photos, which you'll see if you look at my blog, for example, you'll see those all over the place on there. And to give you a sense of how easy it is to you, I have a colleague who is very low tech, but I've seen her over and over again use Canva to make beautiful graphics. So I'll give you a couple of examples of just what kind of beautiful graphics you can create inside of this free tool. I have a side gig called Philancer Force. It's a website that we makes it easy for nonprofits to find the right consultant. And the graphics that you're looking at, those were built for free, just using the tools that are there to pull beautiful images together. And yeah, it makes it really easy to put together a professional look that five, 10 years ago, you would have had to pay somebody a lot of money and they would have needed to have a lot of training to be able to put something together like that. But now with a little bit of time and they just make it about as easy as it can be to make you look and your organization look really good. Here's one that we put together to promote. We did a presentation for TechSoup last year, so it made it really easy. And I see a Tsuchita dropped in there, Canva offers, Canva free for nonprofits. I didn't know that. Tsuchita, thank you for sharing that. That's great. And for those of you who aren't familiar with TechSoup, which is a umbrella organization hosting us today, TechSoup is awesome for getting massive discounts on really good software and online applications. And now I know that Canva is on there. So that means that you can up the stuff I just showed you, it's free, but the upgrade gets you more good stock photos. And Tsuchita probably knows a bunch of other cool things that come along with the Canva Pro. So I have a couple of other favorites that I want to share and then I want to open it up so that each of us can start sharing things and we can also start crowdsourcing questions. But I want to put a couple more out there just to wet your appetite and hopefully help you if you didn't come to the table with something that some technology thing that's been awesome for you already. Maybe this will help jar your memory and go, Oh yeah, this has been cool. I want to share it with the group or that you want to add on because I didn't know something important like Tsuchita who let us know they can the pros available on TechSoup. So scheduling meetings is really tedious work. And so in the past year I've started using Calendly and it's probably saving me 20 to 30 minutes per week of tedious boring work that I'd rather not have where emailing back and forth with people, are you available on Thursday? How about Friday? What time on Monday are you available? And that's just that's not good time. That's not serving our missions to have a bunch of emails go back and forth. And so with Calendly, a lot of you may have run into it or something like it where somebody sends you a link and says, click on this and pick a time on my calendar. And that's basically what it does. And folks, if it's if all it's doing is saving me 20 minutes per week, that adds up to 1000 minutes per year, which is more than 16 hours. That's two full days of work that I was losing in those stupid email exchanges that weren't necessary. And so there's a free basic version and it's really convenient to use. It's easy to set up and you tell it when you want it to look at your calendar and show it as possibly being available. And so for mine, I have I tell it my default is a 30 minute meeting and only to look at one to five o'clock. And then it looks in my Google calendar and it'll also sync without look. It looks at my Google calendar and it says, okay, these times are blocked and it also gives me a 15 minute buffer. And if it shows the person, all right, these are the available times. And then that person can pick a time that's good for them. And it automatically pushes it on to both of our calendars. So it's a great time saver. And those 10, 20 minutes a week, it adds up over the course of the year. It's not just about I didn't like sending those emails back and forth. It's also about that time is used better for other things. And that's what you to dropped in there. Does it sync with Google calendar? Yeah, I use it with Google calendar. And it also syncs with outlook. So definitely check it out. Once you have it set up, it's cool. The free version is good. The buy a version, if you do a lot of meetings, especially with people outside of your organization, it's awesome for meetings inside your organization, you can live inside of Google calendar and just share your calendars. But it's those people who are outside the organization, we have to have lunch with or that vendor you need to have a meeting with or maybe you're interacting with a beneficiary of your programs. And this saves so much time. The other thing that's been really good for me this past year is hello sign, because really we're in the 21st century and signing contracts on paper is time consuming, especially with so many of us working virtually. And so printing it out and putting an ink signature on there and scanning it again and sending it to the over person. So much time gets wasted doing that, folks. And hello sign, it's similar to docu sign, which I assume most of you have seen before it just automates the whole contract signing process. It's all online. Hello sign, I like it better because you can actually use it three times a month for free, which is enough for most small nonprofits, right? Where you might only use it once or twice a month because, hey, you want to have an offer letter for a new employee or something like that. And but if you do go at the buy a version, it's also much more affordable than docu sign. The signatures are legally binding and it's easy to use. And so it's just a really good one to have in your toolkit. So I do have some other things that I could pull out of my hat, but I'd like I know you all have neat things to share with the group. And so who wants to go first? Who has a tech tool that has been awesome for them and their organization that they want to share? I'll go first. I use Jitsi, J-I-T as in Tom, S is in Sam, I and it is an online meeting space. It is open source. You can share and it has chat. It has all sorts of stuff. And the best thing is if the host has to leave, you can continue the conversation. So is it kind of zoom then or how would it be different from zoom since we're all it is like zoom, except like I said, if the host leaves, you can continue to stay on there. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Who else has a tech tip that's helped them and their organization out? You can go. So we use for marketing, buffer and repost have been both of them have been really helpful to do social media marketing and scheduling in advance. There is an annual subscription. I don't remember the cost, but it pays for itself. You're marketing a lot. So that's what I'm marketing. It's been helpful. Is that kind of like Hootsuite, where you just sit down on Monday and you program out all of your social media posts for two weeks? Yes, exactly. That's buffer and repost is when you repost from Instagram, you can use that just copy links from Instagram and repost and then schedule it in buffer. That's so nice. Yeah, with any of those, do you know if it's possible to set it up where it's also you can tag people in advance or is that still a manual? Buffer, buffer, you can tag in advance too. Oh, wow. So we do that. And Sean, I did want to clarify. Canva probe was done. You yourself, please. And are you on central time? Yes, central. So let me just go ahead and set my calendar to central high. I'm on open flow. From the 14th on work? Yeah, on Friday. Okay. Sean, you should be able to mute her. I should be, but I'm not the owner. Is there anything in between there? Eric, would you mind sending some emails and caps to Eli? Get in in the helps. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Marilyn, please mute yourself. Can I am on Friday central time? Yes. Okay. Marilyn. Can I am central time? I'll have a meeting with the Keeper Guide for today conversation. I had her, I know her personally, but I don't have her phone number. I'll have that company demo with him and then we'll go from there. I'll make sure that he's aware that's in it. You know, Marilyn, yeah, they'll help you with any stuff that you need all the way. Yeah. Okay. Any other, is there any other anything for me, before we get on with the phone today? No, that's perfect. I appreciate your help. That'll be good. We'll get, we'll not have had more quickly. Yeah. I will send you, I did get over a counter in my session from your email shortly. Okay. Then I'll also send an interruption email with all of Chris's information that I didn't need anything before meeting with him. Gone. I send you can. I'm not the host. I'm good. Oh, you can't blame it. It'll ask you if you're on the phone. Yeah, I don't have the key. Yeah, I don't know why. We're open. Hold on to one Friday. No, no, no. Really? Thank you so much. Somebody from TechSoup here is here. Did you hear the haste roar? Okay. You too. Bye. And yeah, they're not. Carolyn, Carolyn, please mute yourself. Thank you. All right, folks. Sorry about that interruption. I just wanted to add that for Canva Pro, it's not on TechSoup. You have to, when you create an account in Canva, you have to send them your 501c3 letter, and then they come back and they give you the opportunity to sign up for free. Oh, okay. That's very good to know. Thank you. Yeah. I don't know why they don't do that through TechSoup. It's that would save them a lot of work, save you a lot of work too, but still totally worth it if you are. Make a one-time setup, and then it sleeps the light in a sense. Okay. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I love that. And I'm going to have to check out Buffer now, because I'd love to get all my social media set up in one fell swoop, especially since I tag people all the time. Great. Who else has a cool tech tip to share that's been helpful in your nonprofit or in your personal use, but it would also be good for a nonprofit. I have another one. It's called Unsplash, and they have both stock photos, and then they also have photos that professional photographers post, and it's free to use as long as you credit them. You don't necessarily have to, depending on how you use it, but it's free to use. And some of the photos are amazing, and they have a great search function on it. Thank you for mentioning that one, She-Dragon. And actually, normally, I find more stuff that I like on Canva, but this week, there was something that I need, and it was not coming up on COVID. Also, I said, all right, let me go look at Unsplash. And bang, there it was. And so, I love it as a complimentary tool to end or your first tool, just depending on which kind of aesthetics and tool you like using. So thank you for putting that on the table for us. Who else has a tech tool that's been helpful to them? I've been hearing more and more nonprofits talking about how they are leveraging AI, and the two particular AI tools that they're using is adult, E-A-L, hyphen B, and it's an AI art generator. So, for example, I could speak into Dolly and say, give me a photo of Sean Gale in a hot dog costume. And it would do its best to provide you a couple of different samples of what that would look like. The second AI tool is Jasper. It's been around for a while, but that is an AI content writer. And at Roundtable, we've been experimenting with AI on helping us write some white papers and blogs and whatnot. So it seems like in certain circles, the AI tools are really starting to be spoken about, tables, and meters. That's great. I want to dig into those a little bit more, Eric. With Jasper, what do you have to feed into it to get a good article out of it? Is it just like fixing stuff for you like Grammarly, or are you telling it like any of that last night's baseball game, and it writes an awesome article? From my interpretation, I'm not a user. From my interpretation of what I'm hearing is the more that music, the more it adopts your personnel. So it starts to build those profiles. And I don't think I could go into Jasper right now and say, hey, tell me about last night's Monday. Football game is probably not going to do that. But if I start speaking into it about football, and about my dying, and about the words that I use, maybe four Monday night football games from now, I could go in and say, give me a blog about last night's game. And it's going to know exactly what I'm looking for. Very cool. And with dolly, is that free? Or is that discounted to nonprofits? Or what might somebody spend if they needed lots of pictures of me in different hot dog costumes? The one that I'm using is free. And it's an app that I just downloaded from the Play Store. And I'm using that as an experiment with my personal life. Very cool. Personal green verge. Nice. Thank you. And folks, Eli is now with us. He is our awesome representative from TechSoup. He's the one who makes all the stuff work and is a deep found of knowledge also. And so he's also giving us a special value add by because he knows all the tech stuff. So he's dropping things into the chat, like the link to Jasper and the link to dolly and stuff like that. Thank you, Eli, for being here. Thank you for setting Eric up as our host. So if we have any more technical issues, somebody can sit in that role in case you need to roll along. But we're happy to have you here as long as you can be with us. Is there anything you need to tell us on behalf of TechSoup today, Eli? No, actually, I can rest off of the committee, but I'll record the session and make sure everyone has this available to the maptons. Thank you. Thank you. We have a question in the chat box from Andy, project management and inventory application suggestions. I don't know if that's a combo or a set. I know about project management individually, but people pipe up what do we have for project management and or inventory? And yeah, Andy clarified as separate. What's your list? So let's start with product management. Do you have a favorite project management tool? I'll tell you mine. I'm a big fan of Asana, Andy. It's the basic versions also free granted. It's the only one that I'm really familiar with. I've dabbled a tiny bit with a couple of others. Carlos, sorry, you need to roll. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us. And it looks like Brenda dropped into the box at Lassian Tools as a project management tool. And so thank you for sharing that, Brenda. And the trick might be to play with the couples. I'm glad Andy looks like you in the demo phase with Asana and Sean Ramsey, who I know does work for y'all. He uses it all the time. And so he could be another resource for you on that. You can get really far with Asana, but you know that some organizations, especially if they have a certain level of complexity, they will need it starts to become a bigger difference with the project management tools. Eric, I got to think over at Roundtable, y'all use something because you're juggling like a thousand tickets a day, right? Yeah. And it's siloed, but from the Asana perspective, we really dig that we have the ability to collaborate with our clients inside of Asana. Nice. So they can see where our project is and add their comments and stuff like that. If they're wondering, I reported my internet down five minutes ago. Why isn't it working yet? It's, oh, we don't use it as a ticketing system. It's more of the strategic road mapping out from the ticketing system that's undestunded. Well, if I'm a strategic road mapping, that's where we can assign different tasks and rock updates. Cool. Cool. James asked, does Asana offer get charts in the free version or paid? I cannot answer that. Does anybody know? Yeah. A quick Google search, I'll be able to resolve that for you, James. I'm sorry. I can't speak to that directly. Anything other, any other contributions or ushions about project management software before we talk about inventory applications? Okay. If something comes to you later, drop it in the box. How about inventory application suggestions? What do y'all inventory? Brenda uses Excel spreadsheets. Okay. Andy, I don't have a specific requirement. Was it Andy who asked that question? Yeah, I think it was. And Reggie's recommending QuickBooks. I've used QuickBooks for inferred light inventory before. Andy, yeah. And I think building on what Reggie said, I would start with what kind of software you're already using for your accounting function because that has to tie in so much with inventory, unless it's some kind of inventory that really, you're not having to use to tie it all to accounting, which would be unusual. You just want to get those economies of scale of having the tools integrated. And so if y'all are still on QuickBooks, then I'll look at what's popular in QuickBooks. If you're, and I have a vague recollection that y'all switched over maybe to NetSweeter Sage, which case you would want to look at what ties into those because that would, for me, would be the main driver as what plays well with your existing accounting tools. Assuming that you're at the point where you've out, where spreadsheets are starting to become clunky and cumbersome, and I would thank for mobile loaves and fishes that you've probably reached that stage, at least for some kinds of inventory that you would have to do. Who else has things to add about inventory? Okay. Who wants to toss another question, crowdsource a question, or share with us a cool tool that's been helping you out? Oh, Carolyn has an interesting addition there in the chat, Project Management for Grants, instrumental without the A at the end. And there's a link in the chat. Yeah, and that's the neat thing about there, like so many project management applications out there that a lot of they are, they're very good for different kinds of scenarios and applications. So I love having one that's very narrowly applied and probably going to be fine-tuned for nonprofits in that specific area, and perhaps adaptable to other areas as well. All right. If nobody has other stuff they want to toss out there, I can share a couple more tips that have been helpful to me. Okay. I'm going to screen share again and give you one or two more. So these are things I've presented on before. I don't recognize anybody from last year's on here this time, except maybe Carolyn or Eric. One of my favorite tools that I use all the live long day is Lume. And it wasn't necessarily designed as a process documentation tool, but I'm somebody who's spent their whole career in nonprofit administration. So process documentation is critical. Whenever you have staff transitions or whenever you just like your payroll person needs to take a vacation or needs to be able to take sick time, because payroll has to happen. And so Lume, there's a free version of it. There's a buy up version also, but the free tool is great for test driving. You can get a lot of mileage out of it. And the basic idea is that you can create a video of whatever's on your screen while you are speaking over it. And so it's capturing your voice and it's capturing your screen at the same time. And what that lets you do for process documentation, the old school way of doing this is that we would have to take out a whole day to process what might be a 30 minute, to document what might be a 30 minute process, right? Click over here on the left and then click here on the right. And it's going to have this drop down and like you're writing a bunch of stuff and you're taking a bunch of screenshots and it's long and tedious. And so documentation just wouldn't happen even for critical processes inside of too many nonprofits. With this, whoever is in charge of that process, they don't even need to set aside a lot of special time for this. If they're going to run payroll or whatever it is anyway, they can just set Lume to run while and then talk to themselves while they are running payroll. Here's a standard payroll and I click here and I click here and then I do this and then bang, it's done. When they're done recording whatever they're documenting, they just hit stop on this little app that's on your computer. It automatically sends the video up to the cloud and it automatically generates the unique URL. And so then all you have to do is copy and paste that URL into your process menu and show your process manual ends up being a bunch of links not a thousand pages of screenshots that are going to be stale next week. And so this is just a massive time saver. It's also good for other things like Eric, I imagine you may have run into this or you're Reggie where your client has an issue with I clicked where you told me and nothing's happening or this side or the other. And it's awesome for communicating with IT people. And so rather than two people talking about two different things because they can't actually see the screen, if you're having an IT problem you can record it while you're doing it and like you told me to click this and you told me to click this and then I get this error message. Hit stop, send the video and then they can yeah, then the IT people like know exactly what you're talking about. They know exactly what you did and they can tell you oh yeah, it was the this other button or oh yeah, there's a real error there and we need to help with that. Does that make sense? Have y'all and it says anybody else used limb? Feel free to chime in the chat box or in your just turn on the audio also and I'm going to share a little blog. I love Loom so much. I wrote a blog about it a few months ago and so I encourage you to check it out because it's a lifesaver when it comes to turnover. Turnovers killing a lot of organizations and they just stumble for months afterwards have helped come to a number of clients who didn't have good processes documented for their back office and it ends up costing thousands and thousands of dollars more to recreate their processes and we need to be able to take vacations. You're a payroll person, you're an administrative assistant, all your people do those critical processes. They need to be able to take vacation and they can't if you don't have it documented. What else do we have folks? I got stuff I can present them but I know y'all know stuff. All right, I'm going to share something else with you. All right, so there's my slideshow again hopefully and what else do I have for you from last year? Folks, Divya is one of my favorites and I especially, they're technically a credit card company and I like that part of it but I really love them for their expense report tool and this is especially once you get beyond one or two employees in your nonprofit, expense reporting can start to be a real pain in the butt because ideally the old school way of doing it and the way a lot of us are still doing it is the person has a credit card they need to keep track of their receipts, right? And they need to write on them, okay this coffee was with so and so on this date for this purpose and there for some of us that comes natural and we're just hardwired to be that person who loves keeping great receipts and keeping that well documented. Most people are not like that and so you have this very unpleasant experience in the nonprofit at the end of the month when it's time to pay the credit card and to get the credit card data into the bookkeeping and that person who had the credit card wasn't keeping good track of their receipts and they lost half of them and they didn't write down what half of them were and so the cool thing about Divya with their free expense report tool and I'll emphasize free which makes it a lot better than things like Expensify is that person who has been losing their receipts they don't need to worry about that anymore instead all they need to do if they're going out to coffee or if they go to Home Depot to buy something or whatever they pull out their smartphone they open up the app they take a photo of whatever it is they take another 30 seconds to code it hit send it goes up into the cloud where your bookkeeping your bookkeeper your account can access that information and it's all documented there and so they have the photo they have they know what it was for and that person can that person who loses receipts can now lose their receipt because they did their due diligence 60 seconds after they made the purchase it's all done so this can alleviate a lot of pain in your organization it can save time for your organization the credit card tool is really cool too it because you can have unlimited cards virtual cards and real cards I love virtual cards because I don't know about you but like our default for a lot of nonprofits is that you'll have 20 different recurring expenses on one card but then something happens and that that card gets stolen or that card gets some scam ends up happening and needs to get canceled or whatever and you're having to go and update now 20 or 30 recurring expenses and half a day can go in that if you have a virtual card a unique virtual card for each of those if something bad happens to that card you're only having to pick update one account not 20 or 30 but it also makes it easy to hand out virtual the real cards if you have a volunteer you want to send them to the grocery store to go pick up some supplies great give them a card send them on their way you can go into Divina in 30 seconds you can take that budget on that card from zero to 100 or whatever you want it to be you can update that budget they can make the purchase they come back and you go back into the system and you close down the budget so that card is no longer it'll no longer run charges until you turn it back on again and you put a budget on it so it's a really good way to make a lot of things move easily and smoothly for your organization that used to require I think a lot more juggling and have a lot more just heartache and unpleasantness around them you can fine tune the controls around those cards really well you can even import the data into net suite and quick book the credit card data so you're not having to rekey that every month and the other thing that really impressed me with Divi was the way that during the pandemic they responded to the payroll protection program but so many banks really failed nonprofits and businesses by not moving quickly to on this awesome program that helped organizations keep their doors open and Divi was there and they worked with a bank partner to make it work and help people keep their doors open so I love that they're also just a great community partner James dropped something in the their expense report for use with my existing bank clean energy okay yeah if you're if you some banks do have built-in expense report tools and some other credit cards are dabbling with this and so if you have a good tool already James tell us how has that worked out for you to have an electronic expense report tool instead of the shoebox full of paper receipts no I'm asking for one I don't have one oh I would check out I would start with Divi's good or if your bank has one but it's what there's a free one built into Divi that's great before that I used Expensify which is a good tool too but you have to pay for it question on that my existing credit card with Divi through an expense report you can still keep your existing credit card but they will issue you new credit cards and the thing that makes it the thing that makes it really nice and smooth to use that it's all integrated and so it just saves time administratively to not have to reenter that that data okay yeah which I know if you have a credit card that's giving you 2% back a 3% back going down to 1% might be a sacrifice and you'll have to judge for yourself is the convene the time save worth the change having that all on a single system under one roof and if you save enough time it definitely is the other thing I would add folks if any of you do want to check out Divi I actually know a really friendly low pressure sales person over there and they will buy you lunch I kid you not if you take a 30 minute demo with them they're not going to twist your arm but they will give you money to buy yourself lunch on a Divi card on a virtual Divi card so you can actually get into the system and play with it and see oh this is how it works I like it I don't like it this was worthwhile I didn't like it but at least I bought myself a couple of pizzas so if you want to do that let me know I'll drop my email address into the chat and I'm happy to introduce you their friendly low pressure sales person so you can see if it's a good match for you okay let me end this screen sharing and Eric shared that they're using tally I've heard tally I haven't used it before is that an that's an expense reporting tool Eric yeah yeah it's something that I use frequently on my phone and I don't know what the back end system looks like but from an end user it's very my cottage receipts pdfs stole my notes how does that compare to you versus the old paper system something the good old days I we still have conversations with nonprofits that have their passwords on a posting notes and they have their login credential written on a piece of paper on Excel so my mind is whenever there's an app for it it's better than a manual process and it doesn't matter what it is CRM system upspots it was worse there's so many different flavors after password managers as long as there's something expense reports as long as it's not here notes taken photos and scanned up and all that stuff okay and your user experience has that been a good to be able to have that convenience or do you miss the paper yeah I I the shell oxalo receipts it's all I do not miss paper at all okay good there's a friend of mine Mickey has to go thanks for joining us so yeah there's a colleague of mine who you know has almost three years ago now her and this is a good-sized organization like a couple hundred employees here but nonprofit here in Austin and her boss comes back from a conference and says hey we're going to Divi and she's oh my god like this sounds cool but like why are you dropping this on our laps and there was all kinds of protests and people saying the sky was gonna fall and because people were used to the systems that they were using and in an organization that size you have a certain number of people who they're not friends with technology in a 200 person organization you have some people who like it's like oil and water they do not play well with any kind of technology but the boss guy said they have to do it and so they did it and two months later even the people who were screaming the loudest about we can't do this they came to her and they said oh my gosh this is awesome please don't ever take it away from us and so that and I don't think that's unique to Divi I think that is something that is about getting the right technology into people's hands and making their lives and their jobs more joyful and letting them put their energy into serving the mission I hit the target on that one Sean with all the different ad in software but it does come back like you'll have some people that love Macs and some people that love Windows and some people that love the flavor that they have used for the past triple years but at the end of the day if there is something there that's cheap or free for a non-profit to help streamline processes free up time so they can focus more on their mission that's what we're all here for Excellent I couldn't agree more Carolyn just dropped something in the chat box Carolyn would you mind walking us through that for folks who don't have easy access to their chat Yes I really got Austin has grown incredibly and so there are new exchanges on your for phone numbers whole new period so I have a new phone number and so of course I went through over 160 platforms I had to update them all the only platform that I had any trouble with given security etc was Dropbox and I wrangled with them for quite a while while I'm worried because I had over really over a decade of documents in prior work project document just I was sweating bullets I was so afraid and I couldn't get in and they wouldn't let me get in because my phone number had changed and they had two factor authentication enabled so they kept arguing with me so eventually it took about three weeks I eventually did get them to unlock my Dropbox account and then I was frustrated with them that I said I'm going to close my pay I've been paying now for years and years so I set a deadline and I removed all the files but because there's so many of them I had to zip them so they all came down as zips so I got them all onto my desktop and then I uploaded them into Microsoft OneDrive because I really am a Microsoft user so I eventually I didn't need to get into them for a while but then last week I had to get into them because I had this is a great thing about the cloud I had a non-profit that came to me and said we can't find any of the documents from that time you worked with us a couple years ago and basically that represented half a million dollars with the prospects that they had lost all the information so I had that file so basically I tried to get Microsoft to open the zip files you couldn't do it so I found this Breezip and actually it integrates with Microsoft really well and it immediately did the job and then I started reading about the capabilities and it can repair of files that are damaged and all that I now have that icon I was so grateful I just was beyond grateful to get that because I have photographs going back for years I had family documents up in there so I am in OneDrive and PCMag has rated OneDrive as the top cloud platform at present so I wanted to be there and but just to caveat didn't you know going from drop bucks over to OneDrive they didn't other zip mechanisms were not in sync but Breezip did it and I am just a raving fanatic fan and I just wanted to say if you ever have a trouble like that going from one cloud service to another cloud service consider Breezip there I'm an advertisement now but you can say three weeks three weeks absolutely sweating bullets it's like literally just crush it now I'm a major fundraiser so you're looking at millions of dollars of information back in there the non-profit that I was working with bless their hearts here really small and they were so grateful they were just oh my god thank you so much they work a lot with volunteers and I had said okay when I'm done with you two years ago be sure and right click and download this whole file and somehow they just never did it they never did it so anyway I was able to give it to them and now they're back on track well that's nice that you were able to be the superhero on that I love this story Carol I can't believe that you were like the first person to go to Dropbox who had ever had to change their phone number oh we know that was bizarre and then they started asking me for a lot of personal information that I was uncomfortable giving with them and photographs of documentation and the thing is they actually were tied to my bank account because I was getting automatic payments every month and I'm an independent contractor so I had them attached to my bank and I said I want you basic I was trying to be nice but it was hard I need to disconnect you from my bank because this is like scaring me you won't let me in but you can sure get to my money what's going on I think it was the failure just so you know with Dropbox they have Zendesk at Dropbox.com okay so you get the Zendesk team at first and they try and rebuff you and make you do all this stuff and jump through I understand the security but I'm just telling you that it was too much especially given how many years I have been paying so just I like I use Google Drive and I use of course what now OneDrive have is my real archives nice at PC Mag 2022 PC Mag top cloud services you'll see OneDrive is the top I wonder if there's another moral in the story here too and granted I need to figure out a way to do this better for myself but I do regular backups of my stuff on to it's been Google Drive I think I'm going to switch over to OneDrive because it's a long story but the point being is having I have all my critical stuff in two places at all times so that even if one of them fails like either on my laptop or it's in the cloud and it is it's a piece of time out of my week to do that but it's the peace of mind and not having if I got I lost access to my data for three weeks some bad things might happen depending I actually is similarly I back up my immediate files that I'm using which is folders are so into Google Drive because I have Gmail and my WordPress is tied to Gmail so I could use Google Drive and I have a lot of space in there so that's day to day but these were archives say a year back and it was only having to go through that for this nonprofit that I discovered that they weren't as user friendly over at Dropbox as I had hoped considering I was a paying customer and really loyal and I had cheered information and sign up links but that it really was bad I do admit I did contact the Better Business Bureau about that and they wrote me back and thanked me for telling them good good good yeah how the how do other folks I'd love to hear from our to IT people on the call but from everybody else how are you handling these kinds of scenarios in terms of guiding your clients to having these systems where they can have the stuff backed up where they can reasonably get to their archives stuff in a reasonable amount of time and where they're not running into the nightmares that I'm worried about or the nightmare that Carolyn experienced can give us a little guidance or at least share some experience on that I'll share from my perspective just as in protecting the organization right now we're in Google Workspace and in Dropbox and I have major concerns with that so we are in the process of migrating to one drive for that extra layer of security and then integrating that with Azure in tune so we have a little more insight on what devices are doing when they leave our network and then also if something should happen to where data is compromised or where equipment gets stolen and we are able to secure those devices and back them up but I think in any case or any IT physical backup it's going to be your best bet in any scenario so that's what we're relying on heavily it's just backing up locally because in Google Drive is is great to an extent Dropbox is great to an extent just as Carolyn mentioned I've been in a position before not with this organization another where ransom infiltrated through Dropbox and almost corrupted the entire server system so I know first hand that Dropbox is not user friendly and will not help you recover your data so it's not something I suggest anybody as far as a business rely on as far as secure backing up data it's not something that I would vouch for at all this is really good information Andy thank you Yeah, absolutely so you're doing you have I imagine with an organization the size of mobile loves and fishes like you're backing up on to a server on site in addition to cloud storage yeah that's exactly right and that's because data is in so many different places I think we like to think the cloud is secured but these are just servers in another place being managed by someone else so keep in mind we're all human and we air so it's probable to happen we hope that it doesn't but it's possible that it could and the only way that you can protect yourself is knowing I can physically go to in this place retrieve what we have and get us back in production even if that's maybe a week or two behind it's a lot better than being completely out everything excellent yeah that would that's an organization of your complexity and where you have people living on site right if you lost your stuff if you were out for 24-48 hours I imagine bad things would start to cascade really quickly for sure first being that I would be looking for a gel yeah yeah hopefully it doesn't come to that right oh literally not I can't take the risk to zero but hopefully you're keeping it low enough that the bad people are going and hunting somewhere else for sure great can I make a suggestion when it comes to privacy and security check out Proton Mail they are based out of Switzerland so they follow EU and Switzerland privacy laws they are free for individuals they have a pricing thing for business you can have your own domain name they have calendar VPN and they just created a drive and it I've been using them for a few years now and it is fantastic this is an alternative to Google's yeah yeah interesting how would you say the user inside I'm hearing you say it's more secure what would you say the user experience is comparing the two they the email part is great the other things they've just started in the last year or two so they have some catching up to do but they will help you integrate your calendars and all of that stuff they have a VPN that can bounce you can choose where it bounces and it's oh and they also now have double ended encryption so you your mail is encrypted and if you want to the other side is also encrypted and they have to have a code in order to open it interesting as could you repeat the name of the app please she dragon proton mail there we are and excellent excellent thank you she dragon and other comments on this topic that Carolyn was kind enough to get us turned on the whole Dropbox and storage and everything Eric what I'm enjoying the most is conversations we're having today 2022 that are much different than the conversations a similar route or panel would have in 2020 that we're all embracing that we need the layers there is not one silver bullet out there you might have one drive this net but if your end users do not have 2FA that's a vulnerability and so it just continues to evolve because the threat continues to evolve and it's great Scott put in a really good comment that Dropbox and one drive is not a backup it's just copying files so you need something on top of that to be backing up that so it's all part of a resiliency plan there's some nonprofits that could lose their data for 3 weeks and be okay some nonprofits can't afford one out and so that's the type of conversations that teams like this and internal leadership teams got to talk with the IT folks what's our plan what's our methodology and so it's just great to hear these conversations that's I that's a great observation yeah like I didn't hear Carolyn say I'm done with two-factor authentication it instead was but this is a pain in the butt but it's because of Dropbox protocols not because 2FA is not worth it when this group thing is a good backup policy like how often should you back up on a non-cloud service let's hear from our IT experts I'm actually gonna ask Scott to chime in Scott Morakawa to Scott has these daily strategy conversations directly with the in my own personal opinion it's it goes down to speed or recovery of what would happen if Luzada was compromised how quick would you make and then there's an expense for it too Scott could you jump in a little bit make no he says he needs one sack oh okay thanks early enough in my suggestion sorry I'm sorry what was the question I've been talking it just struck me maybe you've never backed up anything it's all on google rights they're insane go ahead something that I say to a lot of our in the clouds to our non-profit that we get engaged in and engage with to cheat that is I asked them when's the last time you tested it when is the last time you had a fire drill yep we got some bags wrong how many people these are if the employees as non-profits have been around for decades and they have never tested the backup they have never had a fire drill Scott the question was how often should somebody back up so backups and a minimum daily I would recommend but part of that is dependent on your recovery time objectives I know some places they back up every two to three hours because they want to make sure they have that versioning available it was mentioned google drive is a great tool one drive is a great tool because it saves your data to the cloud but google and microsoft have redundancy in place so that if one of their data centers goes down your data is still available but they do not back up your data and so if any of your data say is synced to your laptop and it gets corrupted that corrupted data will sync to their cloud environment it doesn't protect against it and so you want to have a backup solution that backs up the cloud data and so things like there's tools like battle sass and cloud ally that back up cloud data specifically and protect it against the corruption and malware and whatnot so Scott is there with somebody's backing up three times a day that's not a manual process anymore right that's got to be automated and so are there tools that you would recommend tools that are going to be inexpensive and or free but awesome and reliable for nonprofits we use data sass and cloud ally to back up our clients depending on the situation both of those are fairly inexpensive and it just depends on what you're comfortable with sometimes people care about the company that's behind the tool and so they're both fairly inexpensive but they do a great job it's all automated because it is all in the cloud and so it's seamless to the end users it's just managing what is and is not getting backed up on the back end thank you thank you this is all very good are there other other topics that we want to cover imagine we want to get where I'm seeing some folks drop off and imagine we want to wrap up here before a whole lot longer so people can get lunch and whatnot are there any other hot topics things that anybody wants to share or one last question that you want to put out to this group to cloud source so then I'm going to share one more thing that I know will give us an excuse to interact and this is one of my standing recommendations from past years that's managed IT and most of the nonprofits that are small and even some of the medium-sized nonprofits that I've run into they can't afford strong IT talent on staff it's just expensive to have that and even if you do have a full-time person they're a generalist and so they're having to be a jack of all trades in a sea where you really need a lot of different specialties and with managed IT where you have a firm that's in charge of IT for your organization then you can get high quality IT and a group of experts somebody who knows security because that's what they do all day long is just security and somebody who knows hardware and so they can make sure that you so you can be confident that you're getting the most out of your machines and that they're you're selecting the right new computers when you need to that kind of thing with most nonprofits we end up having an accidental IT person and if you're in a small or mid-sized nonprofit even you might even be that person if you're on this call and the tricky thing is that's going to make it hard for you to do your day job even if you are super smart and pretty well up on IT and definitely smarter than most better more informed and more up to date on IT than other people in your organization that's going to hurt your ability to do your day job and what happens when you have a deadline for the job that's on your job description and to people's computers go down or something like that you're having to stop your project for the mission and sort out other things for other members of your team not that you resented or anything else like that but it just makes it hard for you to do your job and frankly you can't be an expert in all that and also do your job and so most nonprofits they we don't notice that staff are losing let's say 10 minutes an A to these IT things on average less small that's not a big deal but that adds up that could have to a thousand dollars a year easily even for some of your folks who aren't all that well paid and it's a whole lot better a managed IT can pay for itself with the staff productivity that isn't lost anymore not to mention the peace of mind and especially with all the risk out there having somebody out there who has as their full-time job making sure that you have the barn doors closed and that you have the biggest walls built around your nonprofit so that the criminals aren't getting your stuff and that you have it backed up so that even if they do get your stuff they had a secret copy in there also they've also checked to make sure that they can restore and get you back to work in 24 hours so you don't have the embarrassment and the downtime in that having to pay a hundred thousand dollars to get your data back and so I'm a big believer in managed IT does anybody else want to speak to that their experience with managed IT or I know we have some people who do IT for a living so speak up on that also Sean the first that was a great slide thank you that it was like yeah but the first point on that deck that when you can put that back up there that there is a perception that's slowly going away that managed IT is something that doesn't work well with on staff IT for employees that are in a technical department that through the years especially the past three years we've seen an incredible uptake on co-managed relationships that you have nonprofits that have a team of three protect people and they have tabled hiring a fourth or maybe during the pandemic they had to go from three three down to one so we have seen an incredible uptake and co-managed relationships a we are constantly leaned on to provide increased economies of scale and scale and we touched on that so that was my commentary just on that first point that we have just it's good for all in boards the board of directors are ending but they're they are anticipating having different conversations about managed security and because they're working for companies that have adopted a more proactive point of cybersecurity posture which normally does increase the spend so it's not a surprise anymore yeah I liked that a lot thank you Eric yeah that whole and you still need somebody even in the smallest nonprofit you still need somebody on staff whose job it is to do the IT right because that the as IT people I need somebody to interact with the computers down or all that kind of stuff so other yeah in the liaison what does that look like then for let's say the organization that might have two or three IT staff already what kind of stuff are they asking roundtable to do that would be a value add that they're not able to do already depending on what state compliance depending on how noisy the environment is quieting the chaos looking at helping change the mindset of IT instead of it being spend that's being an investment and working with our strategy team to to help road math and sometimes reduce expenses too cool other and and there's one other constant is especially in the managed space the past three years have not been friendly to our competitor landscape and some of our competitors came out of the pandemic stronger in some of our competitors unfortunately had to go get danger so so we're still in conversations we still have conversations with non-profits that they're managed IT company very disappeared and so there's a lot of different things but the one point that I wanted to drive home it's managed is now Excellent thank you Eric anybody else have questions or comments about managed IT before we wrap it up today going once going twice all right folks thank you all for joining us here today thank you for your contributions to the conversation I know I've learned some stuff and gotten to meet some new colleagues and she dragging us met some new people yeah thank you all for your contributions and the questions also have been very good for stimulating our minds and getting good ideas out there TechSoupConnex has a bunch of neat offerings both the Texas chapter and other chapters around the world so please do keep an eye on your email and or go to our website so that you can see what's coming down the pipeline there's always a neat new presentation that it'll be coming and thank you to Eric for being the chair of our TechSoupConnex chapter for Texas and for bringing along Scott who's very informed about a number of IT things so thank you also Bye folks