 Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup webinar, Create Dynamic Online Trainings. We are using ReadyTalk today, and all of your lines are muted, and we'll be using the chat for communication, so please feel free to enter your questions or comments into the chat. That will only go to the presenters, and please send us any questions or comments you have. We'll share out anything that's appropriate to share with the entire audience. If you do lose your connection, just go ahead and rejoin using the link in your confirmation email, or by phone, if you happen to be on our audio connection, you can recall the conference using that same number. If you happen to be disconnected or have to leave and cannot rejoin us, we will be recording this webinar, and we will send out the information for that recording in a follow-up email. Also, if you happen to be tweeting today, go ahead and use the hashtag TechSoup. Once again, we're talking about Creating Dynamic Online Trainings today, and let me take just a minute to tell you about your presenters. I'm Crystal Schimpf, and I'm a guest webinar producer at TechSoup, and I'm also a trainer at the Colorado State Library. With me today on the call, we have Janet Fouts, who is a social media coach and a senior partner at Tattoo Digital Media, and Kyle Andre, who is a research analyst at Idealware. Unfortunately, Laura Quinn was not able to join us today, but she will be available for some follow-up questions if there's anything we're not able to answer. Assisting with the chat today, we have Dawn Krause, Kevin Lowe, and Stephanie Gairding. So thank you for them for joining us today. Let's take a look at what we're going to talk about today. To start off, Janet will cover an overview of the basics of various types of online training and some tips for planning, preparing, and creating online training. Kyle and Laura will talk about how to use video and other interactive tools to engage your audience in online training. And I'm sorry, that will be just Kyle. We'll be talking about the videos and interactive tools to engage your audience in online training. And we will have a few spots for questions and answers from you, the audience. So please feel free to put those questions in the chat anytime, and we'll get to them as we are able to. And so to begin, let's just take a little poll and see what your experience is in creating online training. So take a look at these options. Let us know what most applies to you. And if you would like, go ahead and put into the chat maybe some of the specific types of online training you have created. I'll give you just a minute to do this. And if we see anything good in the chat, we'll make sure to share that out with everyone. I see mostly video trainings. I'm doing webinars for the genealogy community. That sounds interesting. Online training lessons about ILSs. I see flash tutorials, Captivate. Oh, some trainings for the Over 55 crowd. That looks interesting. I see lots of things coming into the chat here, teacher training, taking over continuing education. All of the docent tour training online, that sounds interesting. Online training for wildlife rehabilitation techniques. We have a real variety of topics coming in, and also types of training, an email campaign, various types in here. We'll go ahead and close down the poll. Looks like most people have had a chance to respond. And so we'll just close that down in 3, 2, 1, and take a look at this. And looks like most people have never created online training before, so this will hopefully provide a nice overview for those of you who have not created online training or who have only dabbled in online training, maybe a little bit here or there. And a few of you have created quite a bit of online training or create some from time to time. So it is nice to see we have a variety in the audience today. And hopefully what we provide for you will be helpful. And thank you for those of you who put your responses in the chat. I'm sorry we weren't able to get to all of them. All right, well we will go ahead and get started. And I'm going to hand it over in just a minute here to Janet to give us an overview of the types of online training. And she's going to give us some tips on planning and preparation as well. She brings expertise as a social media coach from her work at Tattoo Digital Media and also from presenting webinars and online trainings on a regular basis for profit and nonprofit organizations. So Janet, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks very much. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm excited that there are a lot of you who haven't done online training because this is going to be a really good primer. But if you're already experienced, I hope you're going to learn some things too. I'm going to go really fast because I don't have a lot of time. So if I skip over things, please remember that there is a Q&A session and we will also be answering questions in TechSoup's forums after this presentation. So I want to just gloss over real quickly what types of online training there are. And there are quite a few. There's email drip campaigns and then controlling access to content, videos, Google Hangouts, sharing PDFs, slides, things that you can email around, and webinars like this one. And I'm going to go into these a little bit more deeply as we continue. So your first question of course is, who is the market for this training? Is it for your staff? Is it for volunteers for the nonprofit? Maybe it's for potential donors to educate them on what you do and how you do it. If it's for staff, is it for internal staff or remote staff? Or are you doing it as a public service like you would be for the donors to give them more information about what you should do and why they should care? So there's a lot of different reasons. And each of those reasons is crucial to what your delivery platform is. If you're going to be delivering it on a really broad scale, then you need something that has a broader reach. You also want to think about what the skill level of the market is. If the market has a lot of, a very low knowledge of using social media or online media, then you have to control that. Maybe they're going to be email people. They may not be people that you can use high levels of technology with. So you want to make sure that you think very carefully about who the market is before you create your campaigns. Create for the market instead of creating content and then wondering why the market isn't using it. The first thing I wanted to just cover was email drip campaigns. This is the kind of thing that we do it with a tool called HubSpot that allows us to send out emails that are very specific to the interests of the group. And I can send out an email on a weekly or a daily or a monthly basis letting them know information that's in a specific channel of interest. And it allows me to control how that goes. People can opt in at any point in the cycle even if I've already sent out three or four or five lessons. When they join, they go back to the first lesson and they start the program at the beginning. It's a really great way to be able to deliver really great information without people having to jump into the middle or worse yet, you having to say, oh well you can't join now. We're not starting another session until next month. If you need to educate people as they drop in, this is great for volunteers or new staff so that you can kind of lead them along. I find that a lot of times people set up these trainings and then as someone new comes on to the organization, there's no process in place to make sure that they're included. And so people get dropped out. You want to be able to lead them through and be able to build something in advance that they can just be handed. And email is a really great way to do that. You've got to be organized. You should be organized for any kind of training so that you know what you're doing and what people want to get from this. And if they really don't have a high end of technology, then email is a really easy way to do this. One of the ways that I do that is by setting up WordPress classes for example. And I will walk people through how to set up WordPress and then okay now we're going to set up users, now we're going to do posts. I find it much more effective in giving people a whole huge portfolio of information. Sometimes it's just overwhelm. So starting a little small and dripping them information kind of leads them along and lets them learn a little more regularly. Once this is set up it's really low maintenance. Another one that's very similar which I also use is member access to content. I do this through WordPress because I love WordPress and it's easy to use. It's got lots of plugins that you can use to manage this. Works the same way as the email that you're controlling access. Today I'm going to release the first tutorial. Tomorrow I'm going to release the second one. This again keeps people from being inundated with information that they just can't all digest at once. If you need to feed them things slowly you can do that. Once they reach the end they can go back and access all of the content. But if you just dump it on them they may not absorb as much and they may be overwhelmed. Just like email, you've got to be organized to get it out. Once it's organized and done it's very low maintenance and easy to keep up. Video screen capture another one of my favorites. I call this chase the cursor because you know it's when you follow the cursor and say okay we're going to click here, we're going to click here, then do this, then do that. It's a very easy tutorial style. I create these for my clients when I'm doing consulting. If somebody has a problem with a particular platform I can go in in a few minutes give them a video and step by step say do this, do this, do this, and then do this. This is a really great tool because now once the client has it they can come back to it later and refresh because you know in a lot of coaching situations or technical situations you don't really remember it until you do it yourself. And then you go whoa what did she say? I don't really know what she said. I kind of remember things and then we have an email exchange much easier if I can just tell you how to work it then give you a demo that you keep as an archive. You could keep these in an archive on your intranet or on a website so that people can go back and access them. Somebody who does this really well for nonprofits besides me is John Hayden. If you want a link to some of his tutorials then just send me an email and I'll give you a link to John Hayden. If you don't know him already he does great stuff on Facebook, he's fabulous. So these kind of video tutorials are really useful. Make them short, make them quick, make sure that you're set up and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Once you do these tutorials you can share them as well. Moving on to PDFs and slides there's a couple of different ways. If you've got a step-by-step training that people can walk through very easily maybe it's 10 steps to do something right. If it's something you're going to share with your volunteers for example you might want to put it on Scribe. That's a resource for sharing PDFs or eBooks and people can go and get them and share them easily. You can make them paid or unpaid. SlideShare is another one of my favorites. My SlideShare account is slideshare.net and I'll put these slides up there later so you can see how it works. It's a great resource for learning and it's also a great resource for sharing a series of slides. You can also share videos. You can annotate your slides. Dropbox is another really great resource. Pretty much anybody can access Dropbox. You can use it as a repository for your video tutorials. You can share your PDFs. You can share eBooks there. A lot of things you can do through Dropbox to share information. So obviously webinars work very, very well. One of the things that I've found out about webinars is your first webinar you may not get a lot of people to it. If you build a regular system so that you have a weekly or a monthly webinar people begin to expect it. They begin to look forward to it and you build a following. So it's the repetition that's important about webinars. It's also really important to record them because quite frankly not everybody stays for the whole webinar. Again, if you inundate people with a lot of information and they want to go back and see what you said, a recording and this particular webinar is recorded, going back to it for reference is very, very valuable. So make sure that you give that to people that you're doing webinars for. I like go-to-meeting for webinars but I also like ReadyTalk. Both of them are really great platforms. Adobe Connect is another one that a lot of people use. There's a free resource called Join.me that's a good webinar platform as well. When you do webinars try to stay very focused on what your topic is and don't give people too broad a scope of information. It's better to do several webinars in small chunks than to try to cover all of social media in one webinar. Again, if people get overwhelmed they're just going to glaze over and they're not going to come back. So I've said get organized at least four times and it really is very key. Find out who your market is. What are their best delivery mediums? Then take that against what your best delivery medium is. If video isn't your thing don't do it. If text is your thing then maybe that's where you should go. If you don't have the tools or the skill set think about bringing other people in like what TechSoup did with this webinar. Who do you know? Who do you want to know? Who can help educate? And how can you bring that all together? Once you've got that all together outline the goals. And I like to do wire frames. I do them with mind mapping tools. I do a lot of whiteboarding. I fill in a lot of stuff and I see where things are going to go. And then I decide is this one off lesson? Is it a group of lessons? How will those be structured? How will they be delivered? And then I time them out so that I know what the delivery process and timing is going to be. Some recording tips. This is my favorite microphone. It's called the Blue Snowball. Blue Snowballs are really great because they have noise canceling features. If you are going to record a webinar or a video for example these microphones work really, really well. I recommend that people do one long take. If you are going to be doing a video for example maybe you are going to be doing a podcast do one long take and then edit it later. It's very common for people to chase the cursor videos and then they make a mistake and they go back and do the whole thing over again. This can take you forever. Teach yourself to break your cursor videos up. Pause periodically so that if you have to go back and edit it it's not going to be a big break in your delivery. So do it all in one long take with the intention that you may have to edit. Make sure that you test your mic and your video recording every time before you start and do the whole thing. If you do a whole long take and you find out at the end that your audio wasn't right or that your video wasn't recording the correct screen you are going to be really unhappy. So do a little quick test. Make sure everything looks good and then go ahead and do it. It's much better if you practice, practice, practice before you do a video if you are doing tutorials. You want to sound natural, conversational. You want to kind of explore with people and explain to them how things work. If you seem to be droning on and reading a script and this is how you do it it's not really something that I am going to be interested in participating in. I am not going to finish it. So make sure that it is interesting and lively. Do it in your natural voice. If you are not comfortable with that have somebody sitting a chair across from you that you can actually talk to so that you have got somebody that you are delivering to and that might help a little bit with the voice. Make sure that you are sizing for the delivery format as well. If you are going to be delivering it on blogs great. If you are going to be putting it on TV that is a little different video size. I don't really have time to get into that too much but I can help you with that if you want to email me or contact me through the forums. But you really want to think about again, how am I delivering this? What is the best format to deliver it in? Then you want to remember to market it. Now this may not always be the case if you are delivering it for staff or volunteers but even then there is some internal marketing. Hey everybody, we have got a great suite of videos. We just put them up. I would love your feedback. I would love to hear what you would add to it. What are we missing? So that kind of internal marketing, if it is something for potential donors or the public then using social media to market is really great. Make sure that if you are putting it on YouTube you have set up a good YouTube channel that is very clear and then leverage all your social media networks and your email networks to market this. If you don't market it and you don't get a bunch of hits in the first say few days it can kind of fade off of YouTube and people don't find it. So then you have got to send it to them again. Think about what your marketing program is going to be, how often you are going to have to market it to keep this going and make it really work for you. This is my connection information. If you have any questions please reach out to me. I am always available and I am very happy to do that. I will also be watching the TechSoup forums to see if there is anything that I can answer there as well. I am going to go ahead and try to look through the questions too. All right Janet, well thank you so much for this great valuable information. And you shared a lot of resources and links, places people can go either for tools or for examples. And we are collecting those links and we will be sharing them out. I just want to make sure everyone knows that we will be sending out a follow-up email which will include the recording of the webinar and the links and also the link to the forum where we will continue to have a discussion about this topic. So anything we are not able to get to today, we will end up in that follow-up email. And we do have a few minutes for questions right now and we have been getting some good ones in. So Janet, I will just ask you a few questions right now if you don't mind. Great. From one person they asked, what is the difference between an email drip campaign and emailing out an educational newsletter? Or is that the same thing? Oh that's a great question. So sending out the email newsletter unless you are archiving it on a website doesn't really allow people to drop in. If they haven't been in since the beginning of the newsletter, they may miss a lot of really good information. So you can archive that and let people dig through it. And with newsletters people tend to use that for more general broader information. But with training you want it to be very specific to a particular channel. Say you are training people on how to use a CMS. Then you are going to want to drip that information from here is how you sign up and set up your profile to more advanced things. And if someone is going to come in in the middle you want them to start at the beginning. So if they sign up and you have already sent out 5, a drip campaign will send them back to square one about setting up your profile. Great. And is there a particular service? You might have mentioned the name of an email service that does this. I use HubSpot which is really a content management system and it does a lot of different things. So one of the things that it does is allow you to send out these drip campaigns. I'm trying to think off the top of my head of a couple others and I'm drawing a blank. I think Blue Sky also has one. So that's another one. And a Weber can send out drip campaigns as well. Great. We had another question. What is a cursor video? That was something you had mentioned. I call the video tutorials where you follow the cursor from step to step to step, chase the cursor tutorials. And we have some people asking what are your favorite tools for editing audio and video or one or the other depending? Well for audio I really still like Audacity. I'm on a Mac and so that's easiest for me. I also use ScreenFlow. And ScreenFlow is the app that I use for all of my tutorials. It's really easy to edit. You can add a lot of effects. It's got a lot of tools in a really inexpensive package. And I just find it to be the best tool for me. And is that a free tool or is there a charge to it? I think it's $49 or $60. It's very inexpensive. And it's a one-time fee and then you get lifetime upgrades. And somebody asked, what do you think of sharing via Google Docs? I like sharing via Google Docs a lot. I have a couple of issues with it. One is that it seems Google goes down a lot and so then people lose access. I'm also running a lot more into people who can't access Google Docs because of firewall issues. So it depends on your organization. It seems that Dropbox has less resistance to that. But since I do work with some financial companies, they don't let you access Google Docs. And so it doesn't always work. Yes, something definitely to consider. And then here's another question. If you're doing a live webinar, are there any tools especially free that would allow small group discussions or partner talk? Join me is very good for that. Go-to-meeting is very inexpensive. Those are both ones that you can use. And you know what? Skype tools are pretty darn good these days. You can do screen share. You can have a good conversation. So if you don't have to record it, that's a really good option as well. And we've got some more people to go back to the cursor idea or these cursor videos. What tools do you use to create those? Or how are they made? I use ScreenFlow for that. It can capture my screen and it captures the entire screen and the audio at the same time. And then I can crop it later down to whatever size I need and publish automatically to YouTube. So it works really well. It allows me to do the zoom in and zoom out. Another really good tool is Camtasia. I like that a lot to be able to follow the cursor and I can decide if I'm going to highlight the cursor, am I going to put a circle of light around it, am I going to zoom in on it? Both of these tools will do basically the same thing. I look for TechSmith.com for Camtasia. And I don't have the URL in my head for ScreenFlow, but if you Google it you'll find it. Of course we're all interested in tools that we can use that are low or no cost always. Sometimes we do have to pay for them, but it's always nice to find things that are less expensive. Yeah, and I lean towards the low cost and inexpensive as well. And then we have one interesting question, wondering what your thoughts are on the Khan Academy approach to learning and training. And for those listening that maybe aren't familiar, that's K-H-A-N Academy, which is a series of trainings online that are freely available. So what are your thoughts on that? I think they're brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. There's so many things that you can learn out there. You know, you look at what they're doing, look at what Stanford is doing on iTunes. They're putting out entire, MIT is doing it too, putting out entire courses that you can go and take. There's so many learning opportunities. The one thing that I'd like to say that is a huge difference between, for example, Stanford or Harvard or MIT and Khan Academy is that Khan Academy is really hard to say and is much less produced. Don't worry so much about overproducing what you're trying to teach. People want to learn from an individual. It doesn't have to look like CNBC. Make it informative, make sure the sound is good and you're good to go. Great. Yeah, and I think that's very good advice. And also it's great that that question came up because of course there are many resources of trainings that are available out there to take advantage of. So we'll get those links into the follow-up email. And we're going to go ahead and move on at this point. Thank you Janet. And hopefully we'll have some time at the end to get back to some of these other questions. We have some more really excellent questions coming in. And just a reminder, if we don't get to all of the questions in the session today, we will send a follow-up email with a forum where those questions will be answered following the webinar. My pleasure. And I'll try to answer some of these questions in the chat. And if anybody wants to tweet me on Twitter, I'm Jay Fouts. Feel free to tweet me as well. Thank you. Thank you Janet. And so now we'll move on to hear Kyle talk a little bit about his experiences with online training at Idealware. Idealware is a nonprofit that provides resources so other nonprofits can make smart software decisions. Kyle produces a series of Ask Idealware videos and also produces live trainings. So he's going to share his experience on how you can make online training more dynamic with videos and interactive tools. Kyle? Hi, thanks. First, can everyone hear me? If people can't hear me, let me know. Okay, good. Thank you. My phone, the mute button doesn't have a light on it. All right, so basically what I'm going to do is just kind of look at what we at Idealware have done in the world of online training, which is a pretty good amount. And I think I'm going to start with sort of the easier, cheaper things and work up to the more complicated stuff. So the first step that we use, one of our most basic things is just videos. This is actually a screen capture of one of our Ask Idealware videos, which we've mentioned before. It's a series of videos that we do, really short guerrilla style videos which are just basic, straightforward, low production videos for the Internet. And here we have, basically the whole premise is I'm a person who works at Idealware and I'm going to answer a simple question. So here we have Andrea, our Director of Partnerships and Learning, who just in about a three minute video explained sort of the basics of getting liked on Facebook. This is a pretty good approach. It's sort of similar to things like previously mentioned like the Khan Academy, which it's just a very quick video. You can access it online. And really all you need to do this is just a camera and a little bit of basic editing software. We just use a flip camera on a tripod which is pretty cheap and gets a pretty good quality to it. And then really for editing software all you really need is something that can put titles in it. It doesn't have to be as fancy as we've used. But we just use Adobe Premiere Elements which is pretty cheap and pretty powerful for being a really low end system. And you can actually get that from TechSoup for I think about $15. So definitely on the low end as far as cost goes. Having these online videos is a good way to just answer simple questions or explain simple things. The nice thing about putting it on YouTube is you have your channel. So you have all of your videos in one place for people to look for. And if you see we've got the link at the bottom to the Ask Ideal Wear YouTube channel which has all the videos we've produced. And then sort of the next step up from videos as far as online training that we use is sort of the presenter-led training. This is kind of familiar. This is something like we're doing right now in ReadyTalk. These are the online conferencing tools. Here we use webinars, we do an hour and a half webinar almost every week. Some of them are free but most are paid. And it's a fairly, as we've mentioned before, it's sort of a very basic sort of very straightforward just class sort of setting. And you're always going to have a core group of people who will do it. But here we have different topics for different weeks and for different times. So we have a multitude of social media trainings and it's split up by topic like here's just a basic introduction to what social media is. And then maybe here's how you measure social media. As Janet mentioned, a live webinar is a pretty good way to just sort of have a little bit of back and forth and have some good, and that's through the chat or online. And it's just a pretty nice straightforward way to teach one thing. And you can do it in a series. So the next step beyond that is the recorded seminars. And these are basically what we do. These are just our webinars that we've presented. We record them every time. So people who have seen a webinar get that recording. But we also sell those recordings on our website for a discounted price. And that way people can, unlike a live webinar where here you have to take an hour, an hour and a half out of your work day to listen to it and watch it. This way you can see it on your own time. The only downside to this, the only downside to listening to it on your own time is that you don't get the ability to ask questions that have them answered. So you do miss out on that, but it's still a pretty good way of delivering educational content as needed or on demand as opposed to scheduling it out. So what we're going to do is stop for questions right now, just sort of on these lower end methods before we go into the bit more complicated methods. Great, Kyle. Oh, sorry, I've been kind of tracking the questions in the background. And I know that one that has come up is can you recommend some basic video editing software and preferably something that is free or a low cost? Yeah, we actually have an article about this on the Idealware website called The Few Good Tools for Video Editing. So what I've worked with in the past for video editing that's fairly low end. They're sort of the big three low end ones which are iTunes, Windows Movie Maker, and Adobe Premiere Elements. iTunes comes free with all Mac computers. And it's very easy to use and pretty straightforward. It's one of the stronger of those three tools. The only downside to it is you need to pay for a Mac which is more expensive. Right. And then with any Windows machines, any PCs, you get Windows Movie Maker which it's good if you're adding a few basic, if you're adding some titles or if you need to do some very simple editing. But I've found overall it's not quite as user friendly as iTunes or Adobe is. And it doesn't handle as many different types of video files. Right. And then the third one in that is Adobe Premiere Elements which I mentioned before. It's suspiciously similar to iMovie. It's fairly straightforward to use and it's very flexible as far as how you can publish it. You have a lot of different options for file size or what type of file. And that one for nonprofits you can get that for about $15 through TechSoup. Great. Those are great recommendations. And it is iMovie just to clarify. Yes, I think I said iTunes on accident at the beginning. So I'm glad Mark and a few other people caught me on that. Okay, that's quite all right. And some people are asking questions about the Capturing Live webinars and how that works. So wondering with the recorded webinar, once you record it, can participants stop and pause the webinar to return to the same point? Yes, with the recorded webinar like something from ReadyTalk, you do have – I can actually go back and see – you actually do have sort of a play bar at the back and it actually will show – every time it shows a different slide is what those green marks are. So that lets you – we publish these online. So you access this online. You can certainly do it in a recorded file format but we find it really easy to have it online. And you can go – you can let it load and you can go to various points and you have access to that as long as that exists on the Internet. Great. And just one last question before we continue on is between webinars which are generally a longer format, but is there a kind of ideal length for the video tutorials that you talked about creating? So with online video, shorter is better. And just sort of in video experience working in for-profit video production, my experience in the adage we go to is the proper length for a video is exactly as long as it needs to be and not a second more. In general with videos for YouTube, you want to stay under five minutes. After five minutes people are going to start getting bored and they're going to start clicking on a different video. So you want to make your point as quickly and as simply as possible. Great. That's excellent advice. So I think we'll hold the rest of the questions to the end at this point so you can keep going through your section. Cool. So sort of the next point that is much more tool-intensive than the others is screen sharing. So this is sort of getting into the cursor, follow the cursor sort of videos as Janet mentioned. We use Camtasia by TextMess, but as mentioned before there are other tools like Jing that let you record the screen. And we've mostly used this for demonstrating software and processes. So we've actually done a series where we actually did demonstrations of some donor management systems. And we used the screenshots and the video that we recorded during those demonstrations to put together a video overview. So it's a very similar sort of thing. This lets you see cursor movements and sort of follow through the process of actually using software. It doesn't have to be software, but because it's screen sharing anything on the computer this can actually be really helpful for tutorials especially. And the nice thing, when you're using a tool like Camtasia or Jing, they let you do some call-outs which is like this black bar on the screen there. This is something where you can in the software make it draw a little box or a circle or a check mark or things like that to call attention to certain sections of the screen. And sort of moving on from that, a little bit of step up is sort of an idea of an on-demand module. So this is kind of a cross between screen sharing and recorded seminars. And this is actually something I'm working on now. We're working on a series of about 10 minute long on-demand recordings of a course of training. So this is five, it's the same type, it's five one and a half hour long webinars that we've turned into 10 to 15 minute little sections. And we've been doing this just like screen sharing. We've been doing this in Camtasia. You can use similar tools as well. And this sort of lets us blend PowerPoint, including PowerPoint animations as well as video with sort of the ability to put in call-outs. So being able to add like a little scribble or a little check mark and other ways to draw attention to certain parts of it. And because this is shorter, again about 10 minutes long, this helps break an entire course of trainings into smaller chunks. So someone can do one or two a day instead of having to sit through an hour and a half or having to stop and start. This is a bit more similar to something you'd see as a training, usually in the for-profit world you see a lot of like employee orientation or things like that that follow this sort of section, this idea of having small modules that they can do as they have time to do it. Then this is the more resource and scale intensive version of these would be an interactive e-learning module. So there are actual, so e-learning tools like Particulate is the one specifically that we use. They let you take your PowerPoint presentation and turn it into a full e-learning module. The advantage of this is you have sort of the, you have sort of a table of contents along the side. So if someone had to stop partway through, they can skip around down through the list to a certain section. These also let you include things like quizzes, polls, or interactive modules. So like the screen that's displayed on this slide here, you can actually click on those blue buttons and it pulls in a call-out that shows more information. Again, this is fairly widely, this sort of technology is widely used in the for-profit sector for trainings. This is really good for processes. You know, a sandwich shop might have sort of a click the different parts to make the sandwich in order to teach someone how to make the product. It's certainly more involved and these are more expensive sort of tools than things we've talked about. So that's what Idealware has been doing in the world of online training. And I'd certainly love to hear some more questions right now. Great, Kyle. Well, we've been tracking some of these questions and there are a lot of good questions coming in and some are very specific to some of the tools you're talking about. Do you know of any good options for webinars or for phone, basically phone services and webinars that have toll-free options or that are maybe less expensive for both the webinar provider and for the participant? So in our direct experience we use ReadyTalk which does offer a toll-free line. It can be, it's certainly not very cheap for the nonprofit using it. I'm sure someone would want to argue with me on that. But it does allow a toll-free option. And as far as sort of the cheaper audio conferencing for the organization, we've done for our free webinars where we're not collecting any money. We use ReadyTalk just for the slides and then have people call in through free conference call which doesn't cost us any money but it is not toll-free. It's also not exactly the highest quality so you get what you pay for and you pay for nothing. So it's not the most user-friendly. It's certainly worth spending more to have that toll-free number which is if you can afford to do that it's much nicer for your constituents when they're calling into a webinar. Absolutely. So a bit of balancing there between free or something with a charge and the benefits you get out of that. Great. Well I also have a specific question here on what tools did you use or could you talk a little bit more about how you made those on-demand modules, the 10 to 15-minute on-demand modules. And I think that this is with regards to the video the slides, the animations and call-outs, how do you put those together? So for on-demand modules it takes three parts. First we have the slides themselves, the content which we make in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is actually really flexible if you know what you're doing. PowerPoint has a reputation for being overused or kind of abused but when done correctly the animation features allow you to add a lot more dimension. So actually on the lower right of this slide that's actually a screen capture of one of the animations we've done. It's actually a bunch of emails flying out from a computer. It definitely helps to have like a hand-drawn animation. So if you create the images yourself instead of using clipart or anything it improves the quality but you can certainly create more complicated animations in PowerPoint. The second part of this is audio. So for audio like Janet mentioned we use Audacity which is nice because it's free. It's a free open source download. It's fairly easy to use. It's pretty straightforward and it lets you just really quickly create mp3 or wave audio files. I tend to prefer mp3 just for size constraints. And then the third part is sort of bringing together the visual elements and the audio elements. So I specifically use Camtasia for this. You could also make it in a video editing software like Adobe Premiere Elements or iMovie or Windows Movie Maker anything that I mentioned before. Oh and Susan asked what the audio tool was and that's Audacity. It's a free download. And then as far as including video you can include video just like you would include a PowerPoint slide. You would make your video separately in your own video editing software and then import that into your project to edit. Great, thank you. That's a very thorough explanation of that so I'm sure that's very helpful. And at this point I'm actually going to see, I believe Janet is still on the line so we have some questions that perhaps either of you would be able to answer. And so first off, do you have a preference between hosting your materials on YouTube or on Vimeo or perhaps another tool that we aren't aware of? And Janet, if you're there I'll have you take this one first. I am. I think YouTube really has so much reach that it can't be beat. I love Vimeo. It's beautiful. It's pretty. It's a great place if you're not looking to broadcast to a large audience. But the reach on YouTube, you just can't beat it. It's easy to share. Their video quality now is as good as Vimeo's which wasn't always the case. So it really depends on who your market is. If you're going to do something really pretty put it on Vimeo. But it won't have the reach as YouTube so put it on both of them. I totally agree with Janet there. Vimeo is mostly used by video professionals. It's much more artistic. So if that is your target audience and you don't care about reach then Vimeo is fine. Vimeo has a few benefits over a basic YouTube account. Vimeo lets you have an unlimited length. It lets you have much longer videos. But if you get a nonprofit account for YouTube you get that same benefit. You can also include clickable calls to action. So like having in the middle of a video a link pop up to say click here to donate during a fundraising video which is a great advantage over Vimeo. YouTube also has another range of features. It has some video editing features so you can actually take the videos that you have in your YouTube channel and put them together to create one larger video. It lets you make sort of if there is like an edit you missed or I've had this problem where I let the video run too long after it ended YouTube will let you go in and trim that. And they just released a face blurring feature where you can actually blur out people's faces to provide anonymity. So there's a lot of advantages to go with YouTube over Vimeo. Great, sounds like YouTube is really expanding their options. So that's great to hear. And along those lines when you are posting things publicly on the web is there anything that you do with regards to copyrights or what type of permissions you are allowing people to protect your creations while still sharing them out? You know, gosh do you really need to protect your copyright? I do this for a living. And the more information that I can give out there the better it is for me. So unless it's really information that you want to keep proprietary put it out there. It's all going to come back to you and it's going to be much better than it will be if you just sit on it and limit who gets to see it. I think with YouTube lets you, when you post a video to YouTube that lets you choose either a YouTube copyright license or you can choose Creative Commons. I believe, I don't know the specific Creative Commons they use but it's one that lets people reuse your video as long as they provide attribution. I think the biggest issue with copyright isn't protecting your own information but in respecting the copyright of the content you are using. If you are making a video and you want to include music you have to make sure not to use copyrighted songs. So basically if you heard it on a radio or it's a popular song you can't use it in your video on YouTube without permission. YouTube will actually remove your video if it contains copyrighted material. So it's very important to respect other people's copyrights more than it is to protect your own. I'm really glad you brought that up because that's something that people do all the time. Another thing is grabbing images off the web to use in your videos. You have to be really careful when you do that because if those images are copy protected or they are Creative Commons and they want attribution you need to honor that and be careful about copyright. Very good points there. Very good points to not just think about our own copyright but the copyright of other creative works that are out there and different ways to think about that. So very good. We have time for just one more question and I'm seeing several people asking about ways to track specifically employees but there might be other volunteers or other reasons why you may want to track who is watching your online training so that you can give them due credit for having done the work. So do you have any recommendations for that? So I guess sort of in a broad scope, ideally we also provide reports which are PDF files that visitors on a website in order to access that they are free but you have to register with your name and email. That's one way we use to track that as far as live webinars or even the recorded ones that we sell, those also require because there is a payment stage they require going through a registration step and we can also and then your conferencing tool like ReadyTalk will have registration in there. I can't think of a way to check exactly who is watching say like a YouTube video or something that doesn't require registration. You can certainly track through an analytics tool how many people have seen it but I can't think of a legal way to know who exactly was. One of the things that I do with the videos that I control that I release through a paid system is I release them through a membership only website so that I have access to who gets into that content and then I host the videos on Amazon and restrict the viewing and sharing of that content to just those pages. That's really the best way to lock it down if that's what you need to do. That said, I don't do that very often. It's more important to get your information out especially if you're looking at just like a basic free video than it is to – there's much more benefit to that than putting up that wall of registration. Absolutely. And I know that what maybe we'll do is take this question offline to the forum and out of the webinar and see if we can get – if you have any more to say we can add to that. I know one of the kind of side topics here is for those people who are dealing with learning management systems for their employees. So there may be a little bit more there. Just a reminder because we are just about out of time that we will be sending out a follow-up email that will have a recording of this webinar and also a link to the forum where we will be addressing all the questions that we did not have time to get to during this hour-long session today. So I just would like to thank everyone for coming today. I'd like to thank Janet and Kyle for presenting based on their experience. And also thank Dawn and Kevin and Stephanie who have been assisting with the chat as that's been quite busy. I'd also like to remind you that we have the TechSoup website where you can find the forum, blog, information about products, donations, and our newsletters. You can sign up for our newsletters there. And just a reminder that TechSoup is a nonprofit 501c3 organization that provides technology and tech resources to nonprofits. And we also would just like to thank our webinar sponsor today, ReadyTalk for providing us this platform. And thank you all for joining us. I'd like to remind you to please fill out a brief survey that will pop up at the end of this. It will help us continue to provide excellent webinars on the information that you need. And again, look out for that email with the recording and links. Thank you all, and have a good day. Thanks, everybody.