 Thank you for joining us for Developing Mobile Apps from IDEA to Launch. This is a case study today that we will be discussing the Safe Night app that was created by TechSoup and Aid Matrix. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce our presenters. We are joined today. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I am the Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. I'll be the facilitator for today's webinar. We also have Anna Geiger who is the CTO of Caravan Studios which is a division of TechSoup. She will be presenting about the app process that we used in-house here at TechSoup. And then we also have Keith Bode who is the COO of Aid Matrix. And he will be talking about his contributions to developing this app as well. Hopefully this will allow you to come away with some great insights into the process or possible processes for developing your own app and understand a little bit about what it takes to put a real app together for your mobile audiences. You will see assisting with chat, Ali Bazdikian on the back end. So she will be grabbing your questions and saving them for us for the presentation Q&A. Today's agenda we will cover some introductions of both TechSoup and Caravan Studios, one of our divisions, as well as Aid Matrix. We'll take a little bit of time to pull you on what your needs are and what you're considering with mobile app development. And then we'll go into the meat of the program which we'll be talking about safe night and how the process and the app and the why of developing an app for nonprofits. And then we'll share some lessons learned and best practices and have time for Q&A. So who is TechSoup? TechSoup is a part of TechSoup Global and we are working toward today when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. What that means is we are a 501c3 nonprofit organization as well and so we are looking to serve other nonprofits and libraries with donated technology donations, technology products, and also provide the resources with how to use them once you have them. So today's event will largely talk about our own internal process for how we developed our mobile app in the hopes that that will provide some insight for any process that you might undertake at your organization. We launched a new website earlier this year so if you haven't visited us please join us at TechSoup.org to learn more about our work. I'd like to turn it over to Anna Yeager just to introduce a little bit about Caravan Studios which is a division of TechSoup to talk a little bit about the work that they do. Anna, welcome to the event. Thanks Becky. Hi, I'm Anna Yeager. And Caravan Studios, as Becky said, is a division of TechSoup Global. We started this project earlier this year to try some new things. And we are in the process of building about four or five different apps at the moment and some web-based products as well. And we really believe in working with community to design responses to their issues. So it's not just stuff coming out of our heads. It's not coming from the technical side. It's really coming from nonprofits. We work with them in sessions called Generators to get ideas about what are their most troubling problems right now. Not their technology problems, forget about technology, but what are the issues that keep them up at night? And we discuss these in sessions that we call Generators to look for opportunities for technical intervention. Then we go through our process here that will hopefully end in a solution and use of the software. And SafeNight, which we are talking about today, is in between the build and use phase right now on our slide. And AID Matrix has definitely been a huge partner. They are actually doing the building of this app for us. We are the nonprofit folks, and they are the technology folks. So I'll let Keith go ahead and introduce himself. Thank you. So AID Matrix is a nonprofit organization as well and a long-standing partner of TechSoups. And we are also huge TechSoup fans as I suppose most of you on the call are. The background for AID Matrix and the idea is that the for-profit world has developed these processes and technologies that really raise the standard of living of most of society. How can you take maybe those same technologies and processes and apply them to people who have been left behind or affected by a tragedy, whether that is a disaster or a personal tragedy? So we try to tap into those capabilities and those capacities and make them relevant to the social sector. And this was a great partnership for us because I think we were able to bring some capabilities from a technology side and the corporate side to then partner up with TechSoup who has such a, particularly in this area has such a strong intimate understanding of the community and the challenges there. And we found that the marrying of the two is a great team to take this project forward. Great. Thanks so much for that, Keith. So today's webinar is really intended to be a case study, not to be self-promotional on our own app. We don't want you to go and download our app and use it. It's really for us to just share how it works for us, give you some best practices, and to talk about how we really came up with the idea and how we implemented that into a solution that would really achieve some of the goals. So we'll talk a little bit about that in the process. But before we do so, I'd like to take a moment to pull you, our audience, to find out where your interests are in mobile app development. So let's first ask, do you use mobile apps on a smartphone? Feel free to click on your screen if you are a current app user, or if maybe you only read your email. Most people these days seem to be using apps to some degree. So we just want to gauge our audience's experience so far because that will help us tailor our presentation a bit to your needs. So I'm going to go ahead and skip to results here. It looks like the fair majority, 93% are using mobile apps on smartphones. And the next question is a bit more complicated. Does your organization run web or app-based projects? And if so, do you run those projects or develop those projects internally, or with external or third-party developers? So maybe you do just web projects like you work on your website internally or you have a third-party partner. Maybe you have worked on apps. Maybe you have not. Maybe you've done all of the above. So let us know in the results where you are on this spectrum, and whether it helps us to know whether or not you're primarily using third-party developers who are not part of your organization, contractors, or other companies to help you develop. So it looks like from the participants you can continue to respond. It looks like most folks are doing web-based development of some kind. About 65% are doing some type of web development, but about half doing in-house and half doing it with third-party developers. 11% are doing both web and app development which is great. And about 17% are none of the above. So maybe you are here just because you are interested in figuring out what kind of development you can do and what the process is, whether it is worth your time. So the next question is your organization planning to develop a mobile app? Are you just considering it? Are you looking for ideas of apps for nonprofits? It looks like so far we've got lots of considering it and yeses. And hopefully today you will get some insight into the decision processes around the app process to see if it is something you want to invest your time and money in for those of you who are considering it. So that's about 45% considering it and another almost 40% who are yes, definitely going to develop a mobile app. So thank you for taking part in those polls. That does help us understand who you are a bit more. We won't get into too much technical detail and we'll try to define things throughout the webinar but if you have questions or if there is terminology that we toss around that we forget to define, please let us know in the chat and we'll try to make sure that we convey that information to you. So with that I'd like to go ahead and hand it over to Anna Jaeger who is going to take us through some of the process of getting started with the mobile app and talk a little bit about what is safe night and we're going to use this as a case study to share that experience and hopefully some of the insights will be useful to you. So thank you. Welcome Anna. Thank you very much and thank you all for joining us today. So if you are at a nonprofit and you're planning on developing an app for social good, you really need to understand what is the goal. I'm sure you've heard about this for websites as well. What is the goal of your website? Well the same thing is true for an app but maybe even a bit more restrictive. You don't want people doing too much with an app. You don't want to be giving them lots of messages and lots of ways to take action. You really want to funnel them because you have such small amount of real estate and small amount of time to really capture their attention. So you really want to understand what is that the primary social benefit goal that you're trying to accomplish with your app. And we'll talk about what ours was in a moment. We encourage you to flesh out the idea and really engage the community. Get other people involved in the process as we have. We've learned that it's tremendously valuable. They come up with things that we hadn't even thought of. So we'll also talk about that. And then getting it built. Do you have folks in-house who have the capabilities or want to learn? Or do you want to work with a third-party development organization? And like our relationship with Aid Matrix, they are not a contractor for TechSoup Global in building this app. They are a partner in the development of this system. And they have really brought a lot of their own experience with fundraising and with infrastructure for nonprofits to the process. And together we make a whole unit, but individually we're not. It's not just TechSoup saying, hey, we need some contractors. So it's definitely important to think about what is that relationship with the developers like and the other parties who you're bringing into the mobile app experience. And then make sure not to forget, and we'll talk about this a little more too, but you need to have budget to maintain it once it's built. The budget can't just be for the initial development. You're going to learn things as you go. You're going to have to scope it down to get to the first deliverable. And then you're going to want to do more with it initially. And think about when the phones upgrade. Both Windows phones and androids and iPhones, they all upgrade quite frequently once or twice a year. So what is that going to do to your app? And when we've heard numerous occasions where folks have had their app out into the marketplace, and then a month or two later the platform versions, and suddenly this beautiful app doesn't work anymore and they don't have budget to maintain it. So we'll get to some more specific and explicit lessons that we've learned towards the end of the presentation. But right now we want to tell you a little bit about the app itself and what we are developing. Safe Night is a mobile service that allows the community to respond to the urgent needs for shelter. And what this means is when an individual is in urgent need of shelter, a qualified staff member at a domestic violence service organization can initiate a request for a hotel room funding. So the person who pushes out the request is from a nonprofit, from a qualified certified domestic violence agency. Both TechSoup and Aid Matrix have a long history of onboarding nonprofits and ensuring that they are who they say they are. And supporters who've downloaded the Safe Night app will then, once the organization has pushed out a request for help, the supporters will receive a notification that an individual is in need and then they'll have an opportunity to help cover the cost of the hotel room via the app. So again, the shelter is the one who does the screening just like they do now of the person who needs the help. They're the ones, the organization is the one who puts out the alert. And it's the donors who have the app installed who can say, yes, I'll help right now and will make a donation. And some people here at TechSoup and others are saying, why are we doing this project? It seems a little abstract and different from what we normally do, but here are just a few stats that really astound us. These are one in four women in the U.S. who will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. I believe all of these stats come from nnedv.org. That's the National Network to End Domestic Violence. And I won't read through all of the stats, but it's really just incredible. And one of the stats that really hit us was on one day in California alone, nearly 3,000 people found refuge in emergency shelters in transitional housing, but nearly 800 people didn't find the housing that they needed. 800 people on one day did not have a safe place to sleep. And so we really wanted to target that unmet need, and we were trying to determine how could we do that. Here's another just real-life example that really hit home for us. And we wanted to make sure that anybody who needed it could find refuge for the night. Our app is not going to end domestic violence, but it will really help people for one day get out of a bad and dangerous situation. Keith, do you want to jump in here and talk a little bit about the goals of SafeNight specifically? Absolutely. I think our main goal is to reduce the incident of domestic violence by basically enabling people and those that care for them to remove them out of the dangerous situation, whether that's the individual themselves calling a hotline because they need help, or often it's the case there's been police intervention and the police are actually having those relationships and are calling and trying to find capacity. And the shelters often, as Anna pointed out, are way too often full and there's not a safe place to put them. So ultimately that's what we're trying to do. There's a couple of enabling goals too though is what we're trying to do is generate new sources of support and capacity for the domestic violence sector coming at this a bit from an aid matrix standpoint where we believe there's capacity out there in the corporate world. Well, one of the places there's capacity in the same city where the shelter may be full there may be a hotel room that's about to go empty. Well, can't we bridge those two things in a room, a space that would have gone to waste? Can't we use some skilled nonprofit volunteers and some corporate connections to actually turn that empty wasted space into a safe place? At the same time domestic violence agencies like other folks are trying to diversify their donation sources. So can we use this tool as a way to reach unique donors, donors who will respond to that very immediate request who maybe may not be interested in writing a monthly check or an annual check but will respond to that immediate impulse. So as TechSoup and Aid Matrix part of what we're trying to do is bring in new friends and new funds, new sources of funds and ultimately more capacity so that we can get more women and those in their family placed in a safe situation for the evening. Part of the process and really one of the neat things TechSoup has done in the partnership has really enforced with us the importance of at the same time capturing as much of the relevant data as possible so that we can go back and serve those people even better as we go on and build the case even more strongly as we go on to convince others to help us and get involved and address these critical needs. Thanks Keith. This is Becky just chiming in because I think this is one example of a solution-based app that's working toward finding temporary smaller solutions with growing capacity of support from around the community and communities that could easily be, the idea for this could easily be transferred to a number of direct service organizations. So if you run a food bank and you need some money specifically to buy food if you run a bike service or a bicycle promotion organization to let people borrow bikes to commute to save on energy costs. You could have something that has a similar type of request system where you as an organization, as a direct service organization could put out the request that we need this today. Or if you're working with an inventory in a soup kitchen that you could have something that says we have a need for this donation. It will cost $30. You can make that donation and it will happen today. So I think that there are a lot of ways or an animal shelter if you serve communities where you need fosters for animals. So I could see that this kind of concept could be transferred to a variety of different mostly direct service organizations. And TechSoup is not a direct service organization that we work as a domestic violence shelter. But we convened with the generators that Anna mentioned earlier, we convened domestic violence organizations and shelters to help them determine what their biggest needs were and this was what has come out of it. So I think there are ways that this concept could be transferred to a variety of other organizations and types of services. So with that I'm going to go ahead and hand it back to Anna to talk a little bit more about the process and to give us some definitions before we launch into everything so that we're all on the same page. Great. Thanks Becky. Now I don't want to scare anybody with any of these so don't worry. You don't have to be able to consume every detail here. But app development is a lot like web development in that you can have a number of different processes from getting to the start, from the start to the finish. One of the most common ones in software development in general is waterfall where you do all the planning up front, then the requirements, then the design, then the development, then the testing, then the acceptance. And it's a tried and true practice. It works really well in general. We used it for the development of SafeNight. One of the downsides is it's not very conducive to learning along the way. So another process that we've touched on and we'll be using a lot more of now that we have the base product, but as we go forward we'll be using something more called agile development where you do small chunks of work. And at the end of each chunk of work you have something that's potentially shipable, a product. You have a new feature let's say, or you have some new content or you have something new that you can get in a small period of time. And each of the teams you work with, the development teams you work with can dictate how long that period of time is. Is it one week, two weeks, a month? But I really recommend this model in terms of it's really great for learning along the way. So if you do two weeks worth of work and you learn something new you can add that learning in and shift the direction of your app along the way. But you have to have a pretty good sense from the start of where you're going and a lot of flexibility and willingness to shift. So that requires some good organizational buy-in that what you start out doing might look very different from what you end up with. And that's okay as long as everybody is bought in. I'm not going to define all of these things right now, but these are just a few words that maybe later if you want to look them up, do some searches on them they might be helpful before you go on the journey of building an app. These are several things HTML I'm sure you've all heard of, but HTML5 is the latest version and CSS3, that's the style sheet. And they really enable app development and responsive web design for websites as well. So those are good things to know about. Keith, anything else you wanted to add in here before we move off these definitions? Just one thing around, there's the definition of native app which really talks about developing an application for use on a particular platform or device. And for a lot of our folks here who have worked with technology thinking about what computer or what web browser is going to see what you developed has not been much of an issue through much of your career. Those of you who are maybe further along in your career like I am will remember the days where we had to develop for specific operating systems and things to work on specific devices. But in this era of web development and most things being on the Internet rather than on your specific machine, we haven't had to think about it that as much. Now as you start, so those of you who have done a lot of web development as you move to the phone and developing apps for the phone, there's a lot more work about things working on a particular device and on a particular operating system. So doing a Windows phone version and an Android version and an iPhone version and not only that for specific operating systems for those applications and some nuances between different Android devices for example. So I believe that's a temporary situation that's affecting us for the next few years but it is something that those of you who are kind of moving from a web based view of the world to this mobile app piece is to really be having enough time and thoughtfulness around the fact that you are going to have to develop things for different kinds of devices. Excellent. Thank you. Great. So getting started with mobile app development. Here again are some terms that you will want to know about and we'll show you a few examples of them in the coming slides. But Keith has shown here on the right a version of the app flow. You can see it doesn't have any details about the fields that are in any of those screens but each of those boxes represents a screen and the arrows and the lines represent transitions to other screens. So from the home screen you have three options or three paths that you might go down. And then on the next slide here is an example of a wireframe where again there are no design elements, there is no color, there is no shape, there is not a lot of layout. But what these tell you is what fields and what functions should be on that screen. And remember when you are doing a mobile app you don't want to cram in too much. That is always my tendency. Let's do more. Oh we left out this bit. Oh this bit is critical. But it is not a lot of real estate. So you have to keep it simple and keep it large enough that people can see and don't have to be zooming in and out all the time. The next step that we did was design. So hopefully this has come up on your screen. And you can see this is the login screen for the Safe Night app. You can see there is the starry black background. And then there is a blue background as well to go around the main fields and the content. And then you have got the fields themselves and the buttons. So this gives once you get to the design, the UI design, user interface design that gives a lot more look and feel to the app. You will get a lot more people responding very positively once you get to this step. It is a much more shareable step. The wireframe example if I can go back to it, people in my experience start to get it when they see the wireframes which is great. But especially if they have some technical experience a lot of folks love wireframes. But a lot of folks who are not immersed in technology I think tend to respond a little bit better to design. You don't have to have the whole thing designed in an agile development process. You could design one or two screens and test it out with your community to see how people respond. In our design we had an initial logo and it was a dove that looked like it was sleeping and very peacefully. And when we showed it to people they thought it was either a dolphin waving or maybe a manatee. And we said, oh well that's not going to work. So we started all over and came up with a different logo. And those are the things that you learn in the design stuff. So don't forget to share those pieces back out with your community or with your advisors, people in your organization to get buy-in to make sure that you're on the right track. Now I'd like to talk just a little bit more about our partnering outside of TechSoup. We have been working a lot with domestic violence agencies in California for the past 13 years. We've done a variety of consulting with them. For the past three years we've had grants from the Blue Shield of California Foundation to support those organizations through the use of technology. So we help them identify what their technology needs were and help them acquire donations to meet those needs. And the idea for this app came out of all of those conversations, those years of conversations with domestic violence organizations. This idea did not come to us overnight. And initially we thought, well let's do a bedfinder app where shelters that are full can reach out to other shelters and say, do you have a bed that will meet my needs? Do you have a bed that will accommodate families? Do you have a bed that will accommodate somebody who needs assistance with getting off of drugs? And when we talked with the community they said, that's lovely but most of our shelters are full. We don't have capacity to share. So what we really need, we had talked about once the bedfinder app, once we get that piece in we'll escalate and we'll start looking for free hotel rooms. And they said skip the bedfinder part, go straight to the hotel room because that's what's going to increase our capacity. So after we had started, we had partnered with Aid Matrix already. We were talking, we were starting to develop the ideas around bedfinding. And the community said, no, that's not what we need. We shifted. We changed the focus of the app to be this more fundraising type of app, crowdsource fundraising for hotel rooms. And so as I mentioned Blue Shield of California Foundation had supported us for a number of years but when it came to the app we actually went to Microsoft and said we want to build this specific thing, will you help us? And they gave us a very generous grant to help explore and get the initial app off the ground. And as I said we had started partnering with Aid Matrix and really because they had such deep experience with fundraising. If you're not aware of it they have the Virtual Aid Drive which I believe is available as a donation through TechSoup. And so they were really familiar with how to process fundraising donations and how they had the infrastructure for accepting credit cards and working with donors. And they had a deep knowledge of developing infrastructure to meet the needs of nonprofits and they had the technical experience building apps. They partnered with Microsoft to build an app called HelpBridge which allows people to reach out for help in a disaster. Hey there was just an earthquake, I'm okay or I'm at this location and I need help. So we really looked for all of those things in Aid Matrix and that's what told us that they would be an excellent partner in this endeavor. And then once we started making some progress we went back to Blue Shield and then we went to Vodafone and said, you know what Microsoft has helped us in this way. Can you help us get a little bit further? And once we had the real solid idea they were willing to come on board and help us with some grants to make this a reality. I think it's terrific to know that a nonprofit especially if you're a smaller organization does not have to just go it alone and try to come up with an app idea and develop it and come up with all the funding themselves that if you work in coalition with organizations that do similar work that it's a great way to not only come up with an idea but also to kind of come up with funding sources to help you afford to build an app that can launch in different marketplaces. So I think that's a terrific piece of advice for people to look at not just their own organizational capacity but to look at their partners, to look at their friends, to look at their coalition of orgs that work on the same issue to see if there are ways that they can partner and work together to build something that will ultimately win solutions for them and for their communities. Thank you Becky. Keith, do you want to do this next slide in the video? Yeah, sure. And I think Becky's point is a good transition point. When we look at the background in terms of the fundraising engine was actually developed for an example Becky had before about people needing food for the food pantry or for the food bank. We have this web-based fundraising infrastructure called the Virtual Aid Drive and it actually started as the Virtual Food Drive and much the way Anna was describing, this was developed with the community and in fact was not even our original idea and its base concept. Our local food bank who we had done other, a significant amount of work with came to us with a sheet of paper and a list of grocery items on it. And a company had sent it out to their employees and people would fill out the grocery list and the amounts and then they would write their check and staple their check to the paper and turn the paper in. And the North Texas Food Bank came to us with that and said, could you put this on the computer? And our eyes got really big because we saw not only was that going to be applicable for them but it was going to be applicable for all kinds of food banks and not only would it be applicable for many, many food banks individually but as a network you could go to national employers and national groups of people and they could make their contributions and make a local impact as part of their national organization. And so the Virtual Aid Drive and Virtual Food Drive and Virtual Aid Drive was born. The same infrastructure is the fundraising infrastructure and underneath technology and processes and support systems that is supporting the SafeNight app now. And we actually believe over time that same story will be able to tell and that same value we are going to be able to tell as this becomes a national system. So through the combination of the back end system that we already had in place, the Virtual Aid Drive and the mobile app development, we have the whole interaction process from the point from where a shelter manager has a specific need. They need to put a person in a hotel room that night. They know about that person. They have the room secured. They know how much it will cost. They can go into the Virtual Aid Drive and put out a specific request for somebody to pay for that specific room. The Virtual Aid Drive then sends a notification out over to the mobile app and out to all those people who have agreed to hear requests from that specific shelter in that specific time frame how often they want to be asked and their phone gets pinged with that very specific request. And if they make that donation right then, then that money will be used to place that person in that room that evening and we have all of the tracking on the back end to make sure that those funds are used exactly the way that we've asked for them. Next we have sort of a video of the whole process. And this is from a technical standpoint that you can use if you develop in the .NET platform and then some other platforms you can use what's called an emulator. And that's basically a way to make your PC act like a phone to test your mobile apps. And so before we had the phone ready, the phone version of the software ready, we had it ready in a stage where we could put it on the emulator and we could start testing the application. So you can see the application sort of running in process here. One of the things we did with that early on was then to go make a movie. Because as Anna said, as much as you can be specific with people, provide them specific pictures and look and feel and such about the application, some people are abstract and like process flows and such, but many people are very concrete. And to the extent that you can give them a very specific picture of what you're doing, you can generate their ideas, their feedback, their support. Here you're seeing the shelter manager logging into the virtual a drive to make that request. See that donor information that make that request for that new room. But one particular trick of the trade I'll say is you can make this web-based movie of your app while it's still in process. And then you can actually, while you're not downloading the live app to your phone yet, you can download this little movie onto your phone. And then for example, when I was at lunch a couple of weeks ago and before the app was ready, but I still had the movie downloaded on my phone, I could sit at lunch and I could go to one of our supporters and just run the movie on my phone and they could see it actually running on a phone and it gave them a very specific idea of how this was going to work. So little movies like this and such can be helpful in being extremely concrete in your support. Here you can see the specific need of the donation, $54. We'll put a person in the room that night. They click on that they want to help. They put in their credit card information. There are other information that has already been stored in the app so they don't have to re-enter that. Here they put in their credit card information and it has all of the security. That information then flows back through our virtual A drive with all the donation capabilities working with all the credit card providers. It's a secure transaction and none of that credit card information is stored anywhere but we use VeriSign which is the PayPal people. It's one of the biggest gateways out there. And in a couple of clicks they've made an impact. They've changed somebody's situation that evening and really potentially saved them from a very dangerous situation in just a few clicks. So that's a little bit about the movie. Here you can see some other ways that you can give feedback and all of this. And actually those of you that have Windows phones and can download it on the store I know you put the link out there. You actually can see most of the same functionality yourself right now. And I think with that also it's also good to note you saw there we put our sponsors on there. One other tip I guess the way you're developing it too is to make sure you give your sponsors adequate promotional coverage for their contributions. Absolutely. And as you mentioned we also showed this to some of the financial supporters who have backed SafeNight and they loved it. Making this video, the work to make the video before the app was finished has been an incredible boon for us. So I encourage folks to take some time if you think it's going to take a little while even a few more weeks. Having a video like this has been incredible. I got to show it at our staff meeting and I was amazed to see how riveted people were by that video and the presentation. It really helped get people on board. And they started instantly I started getting emails from staff saying what about this? And that's incredible and I really like how you did that. So it was really wonderful that we had that video to be able to show it. A little bit more about engaging the community the way that we did it was we had, other than the work I had already talked about all those years of consulting, we pulled together an advisory board, folks who we felt could look at what we were doing and give us feedback. We could send them documents and get them to review it. It can be a big commitment so make sure that they are signed up for it. We probably tapped hours a couple of hours a month. We would have a meeting and we would have them review some documentation. Some months we wouldn't have anything, other months we would have several hours worth of work. So choose wisely. And then in a moment I will talk a little bit more about our pilot participants but that's our next step now that it is launched in the marketplace. We are going to start piloting it with a few shelters. Go ahead. So one of the things to think about is that step of launching your app in the marketplace and it does take time unlike publishing your own web-based project or something where you can just put it on your servers and it's out on the Internet for whomever you want to access. Apps these days have to go through certain marketplaces and sometimes get some rigorous approval before they are launched. Each app market is different and you have to allow some time for that and different strategies. For example, the Android Market, it's called Google Play these days, but the Android Marketplace is actually very easy to publish too. There is very little review with somewhat an open source based Marketplace. But then on the other end Extreme End is the Apple Marketplace which is much more stringent and Windows and Microsoft is somewhere in the middle of their folks review your app, they test it. If you have things like for where we had the – people are donating money then that raises a few flags. They want to make sure that you're processing that data correctly and you've got the right securities and such. So you have to allow for some of that. We recommend a strategy of going ahead and getting one good complete set of functionality out and in the queue with them as soon as possible. And then while you actually may have some other fixes that you're working on in play, getting some of the cosmetic things right just to get that process underway for review. But that can be – at the time this is usually at the end of your process, of your build process. So pressures can be high at that point. So definitely allow some time and date flexibility for those Marketplaces to approve and actually publish your software. Thanks Keith. Now on to our pilot. We are doing a small pilot starting with a couple of organizations in California. Then we'll expand the pilot to a few more organizations in California. And then we'll have a second pilot moving on to organizations in Texas. And then we expect to expand state by state nationally. And in each of those we expect to learn new things and discover new ways to improve the app. So we're just entering that phase now. We can report back a little bit more on later on how that goes. But you can see in the notes in this particular slide what some of the things were that we were looking for in our pilot organization. I know we want to leave plenty of time for questions. So I'll just quickly go over some of the lessons learned and some of the tips that we have for you. And we aren't by no means experts, but we're just talking from our own experience. But definitely the goal needs to be aligned with the goals of the organization. As I said before, keep it simple. And if you have personally identifying information in it, if you have people enter their names even, or any other information, make sure it's secure. And make sure it meets the standards. Don't just trust a developer, but make them explain, make them show you how it's secure. Have your content copy edited? Have a real marketing plan? And as we mentioned before, budget to maintain it when the phone's upgrades, not just when you want to add more features. Define the goal up front and how you want to achieve it. What is it that you want to do with this app? And be very clear on that. It doesn't mean it can't change, but start with a hypothesis and test that out. Engage your community and your target audience, because keep in mind our community here is the Domestic Violence Service Organization, but the target audience are the donors. So we have to make sure that they're both involved in the process. The advisory board I already mentioned, and trying not to make your app all things to all people. For instance, don't build a website in an app form. You can make your website mobile friendly, but don't build an app to replace your website. And for content apps, you could try getting your feet wet with something like App Maker. They're good for putting in content and media. And as Keith was just talking about, be aware of some of those platform restrictions. For instance, Apple, you're not allowed to do fundraising to nonprofits through their apps. You can get around that by putting in a link to a website, but your app has to be free then. You can't charge for it. And make sure to listen to your community feedback once you get it. So I think that's the end of our structured presentation. I want to do some questions, Becky. Terrific. Thank you so much, Anna. Those are some great tips. We have quite a few questions that have come in, so I'll go ahead and jump right in. And this is probably one that either of you could address. So Lynn was asking, saying that she's really interested in partnering with somebody to develop a mobile app. How do you find a company to partner with to develop it? How did you guys reach out? Were these people you already knew and had relationships with, were these prior funders? As Keith mentioned, we had already had a long-standing relationship with AID Matrix, and we were looking for a way to deepen that. So that's how we found them. There are other ways that we're also doing outreach. We're letting the community know what it is we want to do, and the things that we need, money, developers, other resources. And the community has helped us. And our community doesn't just include nonprofits, but it also includes folks like Vodafone Foundation of America and Microsoft and Blue Shield. So we've let them know, and they've also helped us find some other folks. We've also just been very open online. And people have come and found us wanting to volunteer. A lot of hackers want to learn, and so they might be willing to take on your app Pro Bono. Just keep in mind that it's a volunteer like anybody else, so you have to have experience managing volunteers. Great. So tap into those existing partners and coalitions and funders to see what you can find. So in terms of social benefit, NJ asked, do you recommend building one app to satisfy two focuses, like one to benefit your own organization, and one to also then benefit the community that organization serves? Or should those be broken into two different apps? Like should you try to fundraise for your own work, and also try to get people to donate directly to a direct service cost? Or is it best to have those broken out, do you think? I'll put that to Keith. Well, I would say to start with that the fundraising and the build are two different questions. I think typically you would say that you would build apps, separate apps towards each audience from the actual technology you build. As Anna was saying, you need to be pretty narrow cast in your apps to make sure that they accomplish the goals of that specific audience. From a fundraising perspective, it is often some projects are more attractive than others. So it may be easier, and I as a person who does a lot of fundraising for our stuff finds it often easier to bundle the ask. If I have a couple of projects and maybe one is not as attractive as the other, of course that direct service app is going to have often more attractiveness to a funder than maybe something that also helps you build donor intimacy and expand your donor base or something like that, or help you accomplish something operationally more effectively, those of you that work in large organizations. So from a funding standpoint, I would look at bundling them perhaps and how they fit under a common theme, but from a development standpoint I would err towards the eye of having discreet apps for the discreet audiences. Great, thanks Keith. We have a question that I think Anna might be able to address best from MJ asking, did you have or should we plan for legal costs for reviewing an app's legal consequences especially if we work with at-risk populations? So what kind of legal oversight had to happen, if any, for safe night? Yes, definitely have legal review. And that can often be whatever legal counsel you have set up now, whether you have a pro bono firm or if you're paying for it. I don't know, nonprofits have different situations. They don't necessarily have to have a lot of experience in mobile app technology, but having some is good. And having somebody who's willing to say, yes, I'm going to do the research to understand it. Because of the credit card processing, we had to make sure that that was in our terms and conditions. So we had to fill out special forms for our legal review to say what we were doing with the credit card information, if it was going to be stored, how it was going to work, what level of encryption we were using. And I'm happy to share that resource afterwards, the checklist that we used. It also included things like, does it have a confirmed step before the credit card is submitted? So the legal review is very important, especially when you have, like I said, personally identifying information, credit card or financial information, or if you have any sort of risky information like domestic violence agencies are very technophobic because people can often hack. And so they wanted to be assured that no information about the survivors would be available for hackers. So we made very specific choices about that, and we had legal review. So to piggyback on that, we had a couple of questions from Larry about how do you set up security on your app and what sort of privacy guidelines? So Keith, is that something that you might be able to tackle? I can start, maybe. So there's a couple of things. Transitioning from our last conversation is one of the things is just to make sure from a documentation standpoint and your terms and conditions you've addressed, how you're handling the information, then before we move into technical, maybe one of the logical steps is to think about how to minimize your risk at the same time, maybe maximize your value of having the app and things stored in the app. For example, one of the things we did as you saw in the movie there is that the general name and address information and things like that, we are storing on the app. And so we have to have security around that, but then we actually limited our risk and our technical challenge by not storing the actual credit card number and related information on the app, but more making that pass through and leveraging the gateways of the large technology companies like VeriSign for that. Now of course it does mean the user has to enter that credit card information each time. So we made a logical choice there of how we constructed the app to reduce the technical demand. Then the third thing I'll say is that to the extent that you can use, that you can use as much as possible predefined objects and kits, now we have a Microsoft bias that we work in several different platforms at Aid Matrix. We certainly are a significant Microsoft shop using the VB.Visual Studio and that background enables and helps ensure that you're doing things in a productive way and gives you access to objects and things like that to help with your security measures. That is something to think about for your app and some of the interplay sometimes with some web back ends is you will need a little bit of expense and some time around, sometimes some of that secure socket layer stuff. We use GeoTrust but there are several out there for some of those components. Great. Thanks Keith. I want to tackle a couple of quick questions hopefully so we can get through a few more before we round out at the top of the hour. So what software was used to create the video? Angela wants to know. That was Camtasia by TechSmith. Okay, great. And we also had a question asking if there are any other recommendations similar to App Maker because we were just told that App Maker is going to be taking itself offline. I haven't verified that but other suggestions of App Makers? I have used iBuild App, oh sorry Anna, but I've used it's just www.theletteri, then build, then app.com. I built a little e-book on it and had no technical knowledge was required for that very basic content. Yeah, and it really depends. Also another partner of ours, another nonprofit that focuses on schools, Digital Wish has an e-book builder that you can put a bunch of content and media in videos, that sort of thing and it'll make a very app-like experience for you. And then also on this slide there's also App Builder but you can search on it and look for similar things and give it a try. A lot of them will let you try to build it for free and will only charge you once they're going to submit it to the Marketplace on your behalf. Great, thanks. And just a note because somebody asked if the emulator was free and if it was made on Camtasia that is a purchased paid product. So it's not a free product out in the Marketplace. And the emulator is part of Visual Studio for those of you who work in Microsoft Visual Studio. Okay, and then we had a couple of people asking if there's a way to give feedback from the app itself and if there was a way to become a beta tester for the app, for the safe night specifically. Yes, in the app itself we have in the Contact Us screen, we have one that says Safe Night Feedback so that if you're in the app you can just put that and type a short message to us. Also to become a beta tester, email me and we can talk about it especially if you're in California or Texas. Great, and then I guess one quick question before we wrap up and then maybe it's not that quick but if you could give an estimate of how long it took to build this, how long has this process been for the actual app creation or how long has each phase been since it's an ongoing process? Keith, I'll let you weigh in some but I think each app is going to be different. This one has had lots of different starts like I said. We were going in one direction and then we changed direction and they're getting going and fundraising and all that. So we've been working I think it's about a year on the project, the development though. Keith, what would you say in terms of how many months of active development? Yeah, I would, to Anne's point we've built more than just an app with this program and of course we're both very passionate about it but it is a whole system that's involved getting a lot of different folks together. From a core development standpoint, typically you can get some material piece of functionality together in less than a quarter or shoot for a quarter including getting something released to the marketplace so 12, 13 weeks. Back to Anne's point about agile, a lot of times you have to do a little bit of larger development closer to a waterfall to get one chunk out but I would say try not to develop too long before getting something up for people to interact with. Great, and we will share contact info in the follow-up email as well as these resources. We are at the top of the hour so I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up but I guess the moral of the story is that if you're building a big project app like this one where it's a system it's going to take some considerable resources and time and fundraising efforts. It's not an app to just poke your friends on Facebook so think wisely about whether it's worth your time and resources of your organization to invest in this type of app development. We will have more resources available to you on mobile throughout the month of July so please check back with TechSoup and watch for more upcoming events on this topic. I'd like to quickly thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk who provides this platform for our youth to present these webinars to you. So thank you to them. I'd like to thank Keith and Anna for your terrific presentations. We will and also thank Allie for grabbing all those questions on the back end. If we did not get to your questions you are welcome to join us in our community forums at TechSoup.org slash community where you can continue the conversation and join discussions about mobile technologies. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific afternoon.