 So good morning or afternoon, depending on where you are at. I would love to talk about the world of technology and innovating virtual impact, a topic that has become central to community engagement efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Note throughout the presentation, there is going to be a series of QR codes. There's one on the bottom right. Hopefully you all know how to use it. Pull up your smartphone camera, pick up the URL, and it will access a number of different various resources and links. Here is a link to our success team. With that said, I do want to ultimately just talk about how I am not James. Generally, I am one of the other co-founders. So due to the Texas Blackout, he lost his electricity, literally two hours prior to this presentation. So I'm just here filling in. And then also, unfortunately, the majority of our team also does not have electricity too, as well. So I pray and I hope that everyone is going to stay warm and that have electricity very soon. I'm very fortunate to be here with you all, though, because I do have a lot of topics to discuss hopefully within the short time that I have. Give Pulse is a platform that enables everyone to engage, organize, and understand the impact of positive social change, and address wicked challenges. And be it coordinating volunteer management efforts to crowdfunding, to support in the COVID vaccination and symptom checking efforts. We're working with public health authorities to help ensure our partners can remain impactful during this time, but then also make sure that they're safe and enabling their community to be safe while serving the communities. In this presentation, I'll be sharing learnings from our community during the COVID-19 public health crisis. Our team has worked closely with partners spanning the public and private sectors to uncover new possibilities as the pandemic brought the need for change into stark relief. I will share the challenges we found that needed to be addressed, the innovations that we made to meet these needs, and how these innovations really continue to be central to the ongoing elements of any community engagement initiative. By the end of this session, I hope you'll understand the basics of virtual engagement and recognize the role of virtual engagement technology in continued and sustainable community success. I'll start talking briefly about the elements of community engagement that were particularly impacted by COVID-19, making it super clear that change was not just possible, but necessary. While there were far more challenges than we have time to go in detail today, we'll most likely fall into a few buckets that I will reference right now. The first challenge we recognized through our conversations with partners was the need to develop new opportunities to address community gaps in the midst of the pandemic. Many, even most of these opportunities had to be virtual in nature and have a remote option. But this was a huge, huge leap, if not a pivot for many organizations. When we surveyed our partners a couple hundred in this specific graph that you see here, last April, three quarters of respondents noted that they were struggling to transition opportunities to virtual and remote opportunities because all they're volunteering up to that point had been in person. And because they didn't have any interest in taking risks, all in-person experiences were pretty much canceled. To support the community, we had to determine what constitutes effective, virtual and remote opportunities and also determine how technology can facilitate and amplify these opportunities, so let alone existing ones not transferable to the virtual ecosystem. We had to make these changes to address the same needs as in-person direct service opportunities and possibly find new ways to address the new needs. In addition to finding new opportunities, many of our partners were wondering what role they could play in supporting community health externally and internally for themselves. This was particularly true for organizations with needs that had to be met, at least partially in person, such as medical or healthcare organizations. To meet this challenge, we would have to find ways that technology provide an infrastructure for everything from screening to testing to learn long-term vaccination and public health measures. Addressing many of these challenges involves incorporating technology. Physical distance makes technology a great way to facilitate interaction, engagement, and management in a way that also follows CDC and public health rules while also creating new opportunities. However, there remains a digital access gap for community members and organizations. In some cases, technology solutions may be overly difficult or complicated for some volunteers and clients that our partners serve. As you know, I pretty much struggled getting this presentation up and running because of some technical difficulties. The graph on the left shows partner responses when asked whether their volunteers had access to technology. Only a little over half of the responses indicated that they were confident that volunteers had access. On the right are responses when asked whether the clients that they serve had access to technology. Here, the number that answered yes dropped to just under 30%. One more, I'm just getting a request that you could bring the pace down. Sometimes, yeah, some people are just fast talkers, but that would be lovely if you could bring it down a teeny bit. Okay, okay, yeah. Just as long as we have time. You have all the time you want. Go for it. Be comfortable. All right, good. So in addition, using technology on a regular basis can lead to folks is getting completely zoomed out. Very similar to why TED talks usually are limited to 18 minutes. We all know that individuals that usually attend all Zoom meetings usually get zoomed out. So maintaining virtual engagement requires that you consider and address the challenges of engaging participants or of making sure that they're accountable for their work remotely. For more about how our partners address these challenges, you can access our webinar a few months ago on virtual engagement through the QR code on the top right. Now, based on these challenges and needs, our Git Pulse community pushed us to set about intertwining technology to really make a difference. What we found was that the innovations that best met the needs of this crisis provide the technical infrastructure for ongoing improvement and impact to support more remote and virtual workforce and community. If you scan the QR code to the right over there, you can access a program readiness survey to determine if you're ready for full virtual remote experiences. The first element was really figuring out ways to innovate and prioritize virtual and remote opportunities. To facilitate these opportunities, we made sure that these small tweaks and changes throughout our platform can make a large impact, specifically by adding web conferencing integrations to volunteer opportunities post on Git Pulse. We made it easy to efficient and efficiently for organizations to create experiences such as trainings, virtual mentoring, with the synchronization with whatever preferred platform that they chose. Here specifically, let's just say, gonna use Zoom, for example, integrating with a platform like Zoom allowed for synchronization between the two systems to speak to one another, therefore decreasing the work for volunteer managers and staff. To make this even more seamless, we made sure that it was also tied to calendar systems like Google Calendar. To help the volunteers who knew that they wanted to make a difference, but wanted to also make sure that we improve the algorithms so that way they could seek out these experiences through relevant filters that allow them to access public, virtual and remote opportunities. In short, we developed the infrastructure for listing and finding remote opportunities super easy so that way it allows anybody to actually seek out these opportunities in the comfort of their own hopes. We knew that virtual and remote opportunities might also require different formats than the traditional opportunities. From our work with the community, we decided that the most important needs were to essentially create a structure to support project-based and pro bono events that could help meet organizational needs. An infrastructure for project-based events with milestones allow organizations to thoroughly organize and set transparent goals and expectations. By developing the structure of project-based events, urgent needs and requirements can be structured and defined to show progress and updates every step of the way for small, medium, complicated projects, be it developing a website or even doing some complicated research. And now, instead of focusing simply on single-it's shift or one-day volunteer opportunities or even an ongoing shift, organizations can now create more flexible projects that define the requirements, milestones and measure progress so that way there's clarity from both parties, the organization, the volunteers and donors. During these difficult times, we also knew that resources are limited. Specifically calling the community to help rally critical resources and donations. Now, I can only imagine like during the pandemic, everyone was scrambling for toilet paper. I think in many instances, setting up donation drives or organizations where I could seek donations for good and resources, community members could then also request these needs, making curbside pickup or delivery options for food banks and volunteers super seamless. We also encourage partners to use our peer-to-peer fundraising, recurring donations, payroll, gift matching capabilities so that way local businesses can also donate directly to them as alternatives to normal fundraising methods such as events and galas. These virtual options can support more consistent and long-term funding needs. To access crowdfunding resources such as our goal calculator and other information, please feel free to use the QR code on the page. Last year, we also compiled a number of different case studies and examples of virtual opportunities on our blog accessible through the QR code here. It's also not lost in us that many organizations are still struggling to pivot. They're still struggling to figure out how to actually support virtual and remote opportunities. What we're here to say is that it's important to pivot and consider it being creative to accommodate the new normal being flexible and engaging for folks from anywhere. Now, by focusing on experiences that can be done virtually via video conferencing or let's just say the normal drive-by, remote experiences or maybe something that is more detailed that is clearly set, defined with expectations. As we mentioned in the previous slides, you can map all these experiences or create new ideas that we've beneficial to your organization and community. But it's also true that there's some experiences that can't be done remotely and that there's some that are still gonna have to require you to physically be in person. In addition to CDC guidelines and what public health authorities recommend, we also wanted to dedicate time to allow centers and organizations to know that their health is our priority too as well. So working with health authorities, we ensure that our platform on the web and natively via download iOS and Android apps, you can allow volunteers, donors, clients and the community to report their symptoms on the go and from the palm of their hand. That way centers, organizations and nonprofits are able to have health pulses of their community and to act fast when folks are sick and to decrease the risk when folks feel sick prior to volunteering. At the same time, we're very, very fortunate to collaborate with cities and municipalities and their health authorities to really schedule and coordinate via touchless experience through the QR code experience for medical and non-medical volunteers and professionals to simply focus on putting vaccine shots in people's arms. Doing this lays the foundation that I believe will benefit the nonprofit community when they too want to leverage the innovations we have built. We know that these steps are crucial to public health and that any engagement opportunities will work better in a safer community. For those hoping to put together your own symptom screening survey for staff, volunteers, donors and clients, or even learn more about the touchless management experience, feel free to reach out to us via the QR code. As we continue to collaborate with our partners, we saw these changes and structures facilitate long-term impact on our community and on the community engagement in general. The changes that we make now are in fact investments in sustainable change. Whether or not we are in times of crisis, these activities and innovations we've briefly touched on are here to stay and can only help your organization survive and thrive. Because of this, when we ask our partners whether they believe that their organization will continue to offer virtual and remote opportunities after the imminent threat of COVID is gone, only 12% indicated that they would return to only the opportunities of pre-COVID, while the others said that they would try to offer all or some of their opportunities. Now is the time to embrace technology, to support your day-to-day but also to adapt the changing desires of the remote workforce. If you want to scan the QR code here, you can take a survey, volunteering reality, looking past COVID, to share ongoing challenges and successes of engagement during COVID-19, as well as how we can best continue innovating to support our communities. I'll leave this slide up, but pretty much the most important is you should develop virtual and remote opportunities because it's here to stay. It is inevitable that doing things remotely is here to stay and investing in the necessary technical infrastructure for your CSS is a community success. To survive and thrive, you must pivot and embrace these shifts with technology. It's true, technology can't solve all problems, sometimes it causes problems, as you can tell, but in this situation, we believe it can streamline and facilitate relationships that really empower you and your community to address the challenges you all face.