 thumbs up, great. Well, welcome to Executive Directors Chat today. We call it ED Chat, looking forward to 2022. Is anybody looking forward to 2022? I know I am, I don't know about you, but I had some good times in 2021, but I'm looking forward to 2022. Today, you know it's all about you. In ED Chat, we wanna bring Executive Directors together to discuss how non-profit NGOs use technology, their knowledge, and connections to advance their mission. And I'm so excited today. I got some guest speakers today. But before I get to that, you all know that you are on mute. I would love if you would stay on mute. If you come on camera, that would be great because you know our loves in your faces. If you have a question, please use the reaction button to raise your hand and then you'll unmute yourself. Let us know who you are, where you're from and ask your questions or make your comments. But if you can, please be mindful to stay on mute. Thank you so much. So I want everybody, if you can, follow us. If you're not already, follow us on all of our social media form, follow us on TechSoup and invite other EDs to the conversation. 2022 is coming and I need feature speakers. So inbox me at ASymonds at TechSoup.org if you would like to be a feature speaker. And let us know today some of the topics that you want to hear in 2022. What do you want to know in 2022? I mean, are you behind in technology? What's new? Let us know in the chat room, give us some ideas. I think that's going to help our speakers today help you today. So I bought some people here with me from TechSoup because a lot of people do not know what's behind the curtain. I say TechSoup is like the Wizard of Oz. You do not know what's behind the curtain is making all these things happen. And so I bought some great people here with me today. I bought Gail. She is a Chief Business Development Officer. Wait, Gail and Steven Jackson. He's a senior content producer. Now they're going to tell you what they do because I'm reading these titles and you're going like, what is that? But they're going to tell you what they do in a moment. And then I bought Nick Van. He is the Director of Marketing. You've probably seen him on some webinars with me throughout the year, but they're going to introduce themselves in a moment. Today we are talking about technology and how it can make an impact on your donor relationship, your fundraising, your volunteers and so much more. So Gail, would you introduce yourself to everybody? And then I'll let you in, Nick. Sure, I'd be delighted to do it, Rita. Hi everybody, my name's Gail Carpentier. I've had the pleasure of being part of TechSoup since 2001 when we were just this little nonprofit serving the nine Bay Area counties. And they actually hired me to build the relationships between corporations and help them develop programs that would benefit all of you. So whether it's Cisco or Intuit or Microsoft or take your list of anybody that you see on the US website, those are probably relationships I've either personally developed or had a hand in developing. And I'm here mainly to learn from all of you because every single day I am listening for what's gonna help you make that next turn, see that next improvement. And so when we can talk about a lot of different ways that you can send me that information, but I just wanted to say hi and delighted to be here. Awesome, thank you, Steven. Wonderful, hi, my name is Steven Jackson. I am the senior content producer at TechSoup. I do a lot of different things in the marketing department, but generally I sort of have a hand in most content that you might see coming out of TechSoup that's not specifically like on the website or in an email. So what does that mean? I'm the editor-in-chief of the blog. I lead our video team. I create all sorts of content across all the TechSoup channels. And I am very glad to be here today for similar reasons to Gail because I want to hear from you as well. I'm constantly writing and creating content for you specifically. And so I want to be better informed about what your needs are, what you're interested in so I can continue to serve all of you folks with good educational and informative content. Thank you so much, Nick Finn, please. Hi everybody, my name is Nick Finn. I'm the director of marketing at TechSoup, but really what that means is more market communications is what I would call it. And I have to manage all the different channels where we communicate with TechSoup users about new additions to the catalog, pricing changes, new integrations, new products, products leaving the catalog, all of that good stuff. And as we talk about what's coming up in 2022, I have a couple of thoughts to share generally about what I see as the emerging trends for 2022 in nonprofits and specifically how we use technology and what kinds of technology, but then also looking forward to getting some feedback from you all. I have to say I love these Zoom meetings because you have everybody on screen and you see like this beautiful snapshot of the whole country, like in all of its diverse faces and it's super cool to see all of you here today. Thanks for coming. Yeah, I agree. And Alicia, thank you for joining us today. Alicia is from customer service and if you've called in to TechSoup, you may have spoken to Alicia. Alicia, would you introduce yourself to everybody? Yeah, I'm Alicia Studiam. If you call in like Aretha said, you're going to definitely probably talk to me. I'll be emailing you a lot and I can answer any questions you have about what our customer service team can and can't do and kind of about processes and kind of what happens when you're trying to obtain your software and if you maybe have an issue with attaining it or anything like that, I can answer all your questions. Awesome, thank you so much. So I wanted to go back to some of the topics that you said you want to hear. A lot of people say they still have problems getting in. Thank you. I'm so glad you guys pressed your way and got in. So what are some of the topics that you wanted to hear about? Okay, great. I see a little note in here. EDS are returning to a physical workplace at versus virtual environments. So who is returning to their physical workplace anytime soon or 2022? Feel free to unmute yourself. Actually use the raise your hand button just in case we talk over each other. Who's returning to the workplace and who is staying virtual? How's that working out for you? All right, don't be shy. Don't be shy. So in New Jersey, we're a contractor with the state of New Jersey providing peer support to families with kids with a variety of challenges. We're back in the office part time. And the challenge is the challenge is the confusion over direct directives from the governor about whether or not people have to be vaccinated. Oh, that's a big one. Any of my feature speakers want to chime in on that? I think that's kind of a common thing this part. Actually, I asked you the question, Aretha, because I'm trying to get a handle on this because that helps us figure out in a big scope, what kind of services are going to be most important? But go ahead, Nick. Yeah, I mean, I can't reconcile confusion sort of at the state government level over what the vaccination policy is or is not. I thought you had a magic wand. I was like, yeah. I think it probably speaks to the larger issue of technology as a communications device. And maybe we all could be doing better in terms of how we communicate with each other. And that includes people who run the government at various levels. But I have to say, I'm really glad you shared that because it's just interesting to hear from the real people and doing the real work right now like what are the challenges you're running into? So that's very interesting to hear. Yeah, so we're an organization, even if they straighten us out in court with the federal mandate, we're an organization with less than 100 employees and we're providing community mental health services. So we have, it's just very difficult because we're providing direct service and meeting with people. And the question is not only about the staff being vaccinated, it's also about the clients. So it's just a particular community based organizations, it's just a mess. And I know it's not a New Jersey problem, it's a national problem. Right. I see Sunrise, oh, Mahoney, raise your hand, thank you. Good job in the pronouncing it. So yeah, so my name is Sunrise, I'm Mahoney. I'm in the Pacific Northwest in the Portland area in Vancouver, Washington. We're an environmental nonprofit. For us, it's, we were remote, completely remote until I came back one day a week with an intern in July and now we're back four days a week because I hired new staff. And so felt like it was too difficult to train staff not being, or being remote. So until they're up to speed then we'll switch over probably to a hybrid. But again, that was a bit of a challenge. I think for us, the biggest challenge with being hybrid or remote is that we lose that brainstorming that time when we're together and we're interacting on maybe an impromptu way being that we are, we do a lot of work in the community. So that's been a challenge of just, you can do a Zoom meeting, but it's scheduled and then it's kind of, okay, now we're gonna schedule this time and it's more forced. And so that's probably been we miss out on the budget end of things, kind of the pro on this is that we find that we don't have as many hours. So we're really focusing on just doing the tasks at hand and, but then that doesn't build the organization as much and doesn't have that teamwork community feel to it. So those, I guess those are two of ours that we've dealt with. Thank you for sharing. Tom says that we started in the cloud and we're staying in the cloud. But there's a question here from Marwa. I hope I'm saying your name right. What steps have you all taken to create a work environment where differences are valued, encouraged and supported but online edition? That's an interesting question. You wanna unmute yourself and ask that, kind of give us a better idea or add on to that. Yeah, I can give you all context. So I think, I'm trying to recruit more for like social impact roles. And I've always kind of had this question around being able to be intentional with spending all of our times together where we're building something that can bring us all together because being on Zoom is notoriously hard to kind of gather everyone up but also doing it in a way that doesn't waste people's time. So I'm curious of how you all kind of found ways this past year to build on each other's differences and make a space that's very comfortable. This could be like an exercise that you have all kind of or I think someone kind of messaged me in implementing a podcast. How have you all kind of just built that space of differences and celebrated it along with it? Wow. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I see Trevor's hands raised and maybe he has something to add to that or a question as well. Yeah, I was the one that messaged about the podcast. We ended up creating a podcast called Donuts for Breakfast but it was with our team and then with a guest and it was just open on as conversations about controversial topics and coming at it from a point of learning. Not that I am right or you're wrong but just coming from a point of understanding differences and it's a half hour program. And so that's just been insanely enlightening for all of our team. I love that. I love that. So Julie, I see your hand raised. Yes, yes. He just mentioned about podcasts and I have a technical question because our team, we are going to be having podcasts that we're actually going to put on our website because we do deal with very controversial issues and we're trying to produce more happiness, peace and harmony in the world and there's a lot of division that we see. And so amen to that. So I'm wondering if you guys are aware of technologically what would be the best way to pursue our podcast, do the podcast and then put it up on the WordPress website. Well, that's interesting. I don't know if Steven or Nick has some comments about that but we have someone who actually messages me and she focused on podcasts for a nonprofit. So if that's something you'd be interesting to have her come and be one of the feature speaker, put a one in the chat room. And Steven and Nick, you have anything to add to that? And Julie, I see you. So in the coming months, we'll be putting out some educational written content about getting started with podcasts at your nonprofit. We don't currently have anything up right now but we're not blind to like the huge trend of podcasting that's obviously occurring. And so we're definitely looking into that and looking into ways that we can kind of provide some education around that. Likely in the new year, I would say that there are, just from my own personal knowledge, there are a ton of different podcasting platforms that you can look into that are relatively low cost and easy to use. And then there's basically two things that are occurring. The first one is you have a podcasting platform that's similar to publishing something on a WordPress site. So it's kind of your backend content management system and that's how you actually like upload it, you produce a podcast and you upload it to there. And then for something to get it indexed in something like Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, things like that, that's a matter of just connecting your podcast from your backend platform through an RSS feed to that index. So there's actually a very surprisingly low barrier to entry to getting a podcast onto the same platform that this American life is on, right? And they show up just the same. And then there's a matter of embedding different sorts of podcast players into a WordPress site. And while I haven't done that myself, I'm imagining there's a number of different plugins and pretty easy to use tools that can then embed a podcast once it's produced and found on one of these index feeds. Thank you for that, Stephen. Julius, I'm gonna come for you for a second, but Nick, I want you to read the question from Lauren Archer and then answer that and probably talk about some of the technology that you were gonna talk about. So Julius, thank you, Julius, and don't thank you for being so patient. No worries, no worries. This is really quick. This was about how we are creating an environment where people can have the hard conversations. And so one thing that we do with Tomorrow's Leaders NYC is that we specifically work with overage middle school and high school students. Each student has been held back at least two times. And just to give you a quick stat, 5,601 students in New York City as of 1819 were classified in that number just for middle school alone. And so what we instituted during the pandemic, we, as in me, was the mood meter. And so we used to just do the mood meter for students, right? Where you wanna give them language to talk about how they're feeling, what they're going through, those tough conversations. What I then put into staff meetings was the same exact thing. The first 15 minutes, how are you actually, if you're helping take care of my babies, I need to know how you are so that you can take care of them as you take care of yourself. And the catch there is that if they were having a horrid day, I might pull them out of being Zoom sessions or pull them out of the classroom because in that moment, they might need something different. And so having those conversations where we've kind of destigmatized the actual talk of emotions at work and brought them in to the space has actually been a saving force. It's actually one reason that one of the employees that said she was going to leave stayed was because she saw, she was like, you value the way I actually feel and you're not upset that I said I had a shitty day. And I'm like, but why would I be? If that's the honest answer in this moment, just like we give our students grace, I need to give you grace. And so mood meter, you can Google it, it works, I love it. I love that, thank you for sharing that, I love that. That is so cool. I think to build on that, I was a public educator for 10 years in San Francisco before I joined TechSoup when I was working at the high school special education level. And there's a lot of things that I feel like I brought from my work there to just working in a different environment. And in terms of how you would promote these inclusive and safe spaces for your coworkers and your other employees, I think that sort of mindset is absolutely dead on. And I think that there are other, that there's ways that that can look like a lot of different things too. It can look like understanding that some people are experiencing a great deal of pandemic and Zoom fatigue, that everybody is coming from oftentimes very different home lives, like your coworkers, you might not know a lot of personal things that are going on in their lives that are affecting their now workspace as well. So implementing practices like normalizing, being okay to be off camera some days and having that didn't have no stigma around that. I tell everybody who I manage that I have a whole kind of sort of spiel about that and saying like, be on camera if you can, but if you can't, you can tell me or if you don't wanna tell me, that's fine. I'm not gonna ask, right? And I think that's really important. And I think this was to Trevor and Julie's point too, the idea of tackling hard issues and things, creating a safe space to make mistakes and to learn from them, I think is also very important. So having like a general baseline, philosophy of tolerance and understanding and being sort of radical about that or other ways that you can promote that at your nonprofit and it's something that I at least tried to do personally here at TechSoup in my interact with my coworkers. So I really, really dug what everybody said around that. So thank you for that. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that, Steven and Julius. Nick, I want you to answer Lauren's question and then Gail, I see a question here for you. Kevin asked, could TechSoup look into discounting these other, these pod speeds and all these other stuff? Yeah, actually, I already responded to him and chat. Kevin, thank you. You know, one of the things that, because we're not all gonna be together other than this one hour, but if you have anything that you really desperately say, I kind of wish you guys could come up with some solution. There's two really fast ways to do it. You know, one of the advantages of having been here this long is you can just write me directly and it's Gail, G-A-Y-L-E at TechSoup.org. Or if you feel like publishing it because you want to let other people know about an interest, if you go to our forums, there is a section called the technology wish list. Thank you, Alicia for putting that up on chat. The technology wish list is a group that I moderate and so that's really where I will go to see any new trends. And oftentimes it's where I will enlist folks to help make a case of when I go back to a company to say it's not just a wish from a nonprofit, but here's why they need it. Here's what they're hoping to achieve. This is what the difference will be. And if I can get a lot of people to respond, it makes it a much more powerful way of pushing through with all of this. So the other one I did want to share with you guys and I'm not at Liberty to tell you the company though, in all candor, you would know the name, but we are looking at a substantial number of donated resources for the US that will help with podcasting. It'll be for microphones, for headsets, there may be other recording equipment coming through. That's still TBD, but look for that in 2022. And I'll be looking and monitoring the rest of the things as you guys put them in chat and they'll be added to my wish list immediately. So thank you guys for all the suggestions. Nice, nice. Okay, Nick Finn, we got to get to our newbie, Lauren, who's going to TechSoup. Do you want to read her question again? Yeah, I feel like the price is right. Lauren arch her, come on down. So Lauren's question is she's new to TechSoup and also a new executive director, building out all the systems from the ground up, interested in the best CRMs, bookkeeping, cloud-based systems like Flip Cause. Let me just start with welcome, Lauren. Welcome to the nonprofit sector, to TechSoup, to being an executive director. It's a whole lot of work. I just paid everyone on the call, we'll tell you, you'll love it, you'll hate it. It will be all the things for every day. But let me drill in specifically to like, what does TechSoup do with folks like you on this kind of question? So first of all, what TechSoup is, think of us as an intermediary. We sit between the technology industry and nonprofits. And in the US, it's 501C3s, but we do that globally as well around the world. And what we try to do is provide nonprofit access to technology that works, that you can afford and that helps you actually solve real-world problems, whether it's like a staffing issue or how to manage the money of the organization, how to do the communications, or maybe the technology is actually solving the problem that your mission is focused on. All those things are legit. So when you ask about CRMs and bookkeeping, I'll start with the bookkeeping piece of it because that is one of the first things that you really have to wrangle and have locked down and know what you're doing. And yeah, QuickBooks is by and far the preferred solution that nonprofits use from TechSoup. They're varying levels of it. Rather than go through all the details on QuickBooks, though, I would just encourage you to make sure that you have first signed up with TechSoup, gotten your nonprofit qualified with us. You have to go through a qualification process because the pricing and products we provide are specific to the nonprofit industry. And the reason that we can make these offers at a lower cost than the public market is because the companies who work with us know that we are just providing this to nonprofits. So we need folks to be able to submit the paperwork and be like, yes, I'm a 501C3 nonprofit in the United States and then we're good to go. Make sure that you've got that squared away. Yeah, you could grab QuickBooks as the first thing from the catalog, but building up from there CRM, there are a myriad of CRM options and it depends much more on what your specific need is. But I think that the overall thing that I just wanna say is like get qualified with TechSoup and then go into the catalog because that's where you will find all those different solutions that are available to you. And if you have trouble choosing between them or you need like life, human help, customer service is always available to talk with folks. But we also have a set of services at TechSoup which are different than just like software products or hardware products. Services is a more of a consultancy role that we play with nonprofits today. These are new to our catalog over the last three, four years or so. And these services are to help nonprofits sometimes figure out what they need, sometimes figure out how to manage what they have and then sometimes figure out how to solve a specific problem like a help desk ticket, for instance. So take a look at the catalog, start poking around in there. I think you'll find at the high level the things that you're really looking for. And now I wanna step up one level from Lauren's question to kind of a theme that I have already heard here, which is super interesting. We've started surveying nonprofits every six months or so to try to understand specifically how COVID and the changes in the world have impacted everybody. One of the things that has emerged clearly in the research is that there's intense interest in doing a better job with your website and with your overall digital communications tools, right? So the things that you use to speak to other people, whether it's your staff or people who use your services or maybe it's funders. And the pandemic has really introduced this strange hobbling of our communication because so much of it is in person. We all know that that when you're in a room with a human being speaking to each other, there's just so much more meaning transmitted back and forth quickly than there is even when you're on Zoom together. Zoom is better than nothing. But anybody, for instance, had a kid who maybe struggled with Zoom learning over the past year while they were trying to manage how to deal with school. Like you know that it just, it posits a real difficulty in communication in some ways. So I would say that in 2022, one of the general themes I have heard nonprofits talk about is like how do we get some new tools to do on the communications front? What should they be? And what challenge are they actually solving? And I'm not giving you solutions to those questions today, but I'm saying like as a general theme we've heard in the survey and as we move into 2022, that's been a central one that I've heard. Any, lots of questions in the chat room. Any questions for Nick or any of our guest speakers? See if there are any hands raised, I have to go back. Trevor, go ahead, Steven, yeah. Oh, I was just gonna say in addition to all of everything that Nick said, if you're looking for decision-making content and just some more educational content around what we do offer, checking out the TechSoup blog is what I definitely recommend that. We cover kind of a lot of these exact issues that Nick is talking about because we're reacting to you and you're in our community with content that we feel will be helpful in all of these ways. I would also say to check out webinars, obviously we're on a webinar right now, but there's tons of really great webinars that'll help you understand more about what we offer than how to use technology at your nonprofit. We did do a lot of work around providing kind of curated resources for nonprofits during COVID and obviously now we are into the new nether space of whatever kind of the world is at the moment. And so we're seeing a lot of, we're really trying to focus on this idea of digital resiliency for nonprofits. So there's a notion of what we learned and how we're communicating and operating differently as a result of the pandemic, but now we have all this technology, right? Or this is now the norm. So how can you build things that make you resilient for the next time something happens and it may not be a global pandemic, it could be a power outage at your space or any of the world's problems. So much of this technology can really help you be resilient to meet those challenges and not interrupt services to those that you provide services to. So I did put a great resource in the chat, nonprofit resources for digital resiliency. A lot of this is created for COVID but it certainly will ring through today. John, hi, you got your hand raised. I did, you know, just to follow up on what Steven was just talking about. I think it's one thing to get the tools. I think it's another thing to get the most out of the tools. So one of the things I think that's really important is that we understand how do we take a process and automate it using the tool? How do we move things so that that workflow kind of processing takes place? And I know for me it's a combination of first and foremost knowing what to do and then knowing what the right tool is to do it with and then being able to troubleshoot it to get it to really get the maximum out of it. Sometimes when you get this tool, it's really nice but you probably use it like at the 20% efficiency rate when there's like a whole lot of stuff. So if you all could in the future help us to think about how to get more out of the tools even tools like Office and those things and we know that Windows has changed so what does that mean and how do we take advantage of some of those changes? Zoom, everything is evolving. So if we can talk about that, that would be great. Yeah, great. More how-to videos. Yeah, so we're definitely working on serving up a lot more of that educational contents, big focus for us in the coming year. I'd also wanna point you folks to TechSoup's digital assessment tool which is a very cool and very exciting thing that we developed here that basically you can go through a series of, it's an interactive tool that'll give you kind of like a sort of like a digital readiness report card and you can sort of understand where your nonprofit is in like the spectrum of digital maturity and digital transformation. So what the tool does is that as you answer this question, the tool actually serves up educational content and resources and ideas for services and all that other things. And so that that are meant to match where you are in your sort of journey of digital transformation. So I think that's a great place to start but I certainly hear you and we will be definitely developing more of that type of educational content because you're right. The whole thing about cloud technology and software as a service and this whole sea change that's occurred in technology really like in the lab it's been building for a long time but the last like five years it's obviously in hyperdrive is that you no longer get a box of Microsoft Word and you kind of just learn how to use that. Everything is connected in your tech stack in this new ecosystem and there's all these integrations. So the baseline is getting the software and I think you're right about the 20% metric, right? But then all of this software is unimaginably powerful now. So using it is like now the next 80% that we're certainly working hard at TechSoup to make sure that we can bring everybody up to speed. Yeah, I wanna echo part of what Stephen said there and just add one additional thought about this Well, first of all, John, great question. Thank you. Yeah, that's exactly why we do these is because we wanna get asked those kinds of questions. TechSoup courses is one of the newer things at TechSoup where we are trying to do a better job of providing some kind of educational resources to help folks, as you say, go deeper into the things that you already have, figure out how to make them work at their full capacity and that is always the trick with modern softwares like if you use it at the 10% level of what it can actually do, are you getting the value out of it? Could you do tons more with this if you just knew how to do it? But where that also points us is something that I wanna highlight again as another overarching theme about where Tech is headed specifically for nonprofits and it's what Stephen just talked about. It's the cloud and we have to acknowledge that like more than ever in the face of the pandemic, it's absolutely clear that every nonprofit out there has to have a strategy to use cloud technology. I'm not saying you have to do every single thing you do in the cloud, but you've got to think about the security implications, the data backup implications, how do a distributed staff access the same information to work together? These are all big functions of having a cloud environment that's thought through. And we can spend a year of webinars together talking about that and we have frankly in the past and we'll continue to do that. But if we're talking about trends for 2022 and what's new, it's not even really new but make sure that you are thinking about that as you lead your nonprofit that cloud strategy is really important. And for the communications implications too. So we're all on the cloud right now. We're using cloud technology to meet like this in this unbelievable way, 108 people from across the country able to meet in one space and discuss all this. This is the cloud, right? So there's a lot of folks are already using it too. If you use Google Docs, if you use, I mean like so much of this is already occurring in the cloud. So I think there is like, it's not as much to, I think there's a barrier to entry that people feel is there that really kind of isn't. And it's just a matter of educating your staff and educating yourself on how to better use these technologies because while we did, we are, there's no question that nothing is the same as that in person spontaneous, brainstorming, you know, team building and like idea forming. But if this is where we are at, there are many new things that are possible with this type of technology available that aren't possible, you know, without it. So I think that's a good thing to think about. Very good. When we send out the survey, when you close this Zoom, the survey is gonna pop up and then we're also gonna send this video recording to you within 48 hours. Please fill out the survey and let us know some of the options that you were talking about on automation. And a lot of the things that you're putting in the chat room, please put it on our survey so that we can get it back to Gail who will make it happen. Gail, did you wanna add anything? Well, no, I mean, I've been monitoring the chat. So thank you guys for all the good advice and insights. And I have learned more about what's happening in the ticket dean and reservation space in the last two minutes that I've learned in the last month and a half. So thank you everybody for your contributions. I guess the other thing that I would ask to you guys, you know, how many of you feel like you have, maybe just to show with hands, how many of you feel like you understand what the resources are on TechSoup or can we give you some guidance on what may be here that you may not have noticed? And if you're silent, I'm gonna assume that your master's, there will be a test. No, there won't be a test, that'd be fine. But, you know, because, you know, I've, as I said, I've been doing this a while and I know there are lots of people that, you know, even just to go through and, you know, look at every company that's here, can take some time. And to answer Ellen Edmond's question, Zoho is actually in conversation with our validation services team. And I know that they are in negotiation as well at this time, but I'm not sure if precisely when that is going to be available, but it's looking very positive. So there's two distinct pathways you may have noticed. Uh-oh, we lost scale, we lost scale for a minute. Like we said, the cloud is imperfect. It's not perfect. Yeah. And the need for digital resiliency. That's perfect. Yes, Danielle, your hand is raised. Would you unmute yourself? Thank you. Sure. Okay, awesome. Thanks. I'm a no-glend. So, you know, this is very, very, so nice to talk to other people who are in thinking in this space because I have to make all these decisions on technology. I'm a rather tech savvy person, but I am already feeling overwhelmed in especially the policy arena. And I was just looking at these resources to help develop some of those policies because a lot of people are using, you know, their home computers and systems. And, you know, my fear is, you know, what happens when somebody gets sick or drops out. We had one person just like literally quit the same day this year. This was rather unusual for us in trying to deal with that remote desktop stuff. And that's where I really, this last, during the pandemic, we realized we were from desktops to laptops. And we don't have anybody, I'm literally four people, we didn't have anybody on staff, except for myself, to manage what that means security-wise and policy-wise and also like how to manage that remote piece. So, Microsoft is a beast. And this was really my first time going into, everybody's using these new PCs and connecting Dell and Microsoft. And that rabbit hole is confusing the way that they call things is confusing. Things don't always work. You don't know which level to do it. I think that I did meet with some TechSoup staff members. I don't know if it was Stevie or it was you or somebody else that was very helpful, but I still feel like this is, that's an area where like I know you guys offer the Microsoft classes. I'm gonna have to take that just because it's, Google's more intuitive. You're like, oh yeah, that's one plus one equals two, but Microsoft is definitely not like that. And then I looking into like PEO staff to help with some of that onboarding and technology support. I saw like a company called Ripley. I don't know if anybody's used that or know if that works to help with some, what does onboarding mean? Because it's also then plugging in all these other pieces of software. So then you sign up for a piece of software and then it says, okay, plug into this software and this software and this software. And then it goes down this folder thing like, oh, am I supposed to be using these other 10 apps to connect to this, to make this really work well? That is really a strategy issue, but it's also sort of like, but what do we choose? What's the best practices for especially small organizations like myself? I think if you are a multimillion dollar organization that you have your own tech staff, that's one thing, but when you don't and it's really you making those decisions and putting in those policies and trying to figure out what software to choose. I mean, that is where I feel like those small, medium organizations like ours really need some help. Like, what are the embedded apps with an apps with an apps with an apps? And then of course, Microsoft, which is, whoop. Wow. Let me, Danielle, I feel your pain. I really do. I hear you and it's certainly not the first time I've heard that and it won't be the last either. And, you know, I mean, yeah, we can't sugarcoat it. It is a very difficult process configuring some of this Microsoft stuff. We've tried the best we can to like, provide course materials and consulting help to like help folks sort it through. But yeah, I think we totally recognize that that's still a gap and like, if you need more help, I just please would invite you to keep engaging with us. We will continue trying to, you know, get you hooked up the way it goes. You know, again, for me, you're highlighting kind of the bigger thing about like, this is where the cloud is hard because integrations are the name of the game when you get to that, when you get to the cloud level. And, you know, that's really what the part of that revolution is, is that every, you know, HubSpot's building their integration with Salesforce. It integrates with Google and you can add QuickBooks on the side and like it makes logical sense in your mind. Of course, yeah, that's great. Listen, how do you do it? Right, that's where it becomes really tricky. And also every nonprofit has their own set of answers to should I use this or should I not use this and use that. Everybody is unique in that construct. So that's why I would just say there's no clear answer to your question. It is more a question of like just engaging a process with us. We do have resources to try to help you get through that. And, you know, I use both Microsoft and Google every day. They do have their own personalities as far as a UI or user experience design. And I don't even prefer one over the other. Google does some things better. Microsoft actually does some other things better and that's why I use both of them because I like to be able to pick and choose like what's best, but the good news is as you learn the stuff about integrations and how to format this stuff, you know, you will find every other nonprofit you have a relationship with running to you asking for your help to do it for them as well. But yeah, please do engage with us. We'll keep trying to help you best we can and I'm sorry that that process isn't easier. Thank you, Nairi. Thank you. I just quickly wanted to, and this is great. This is my first time being on these type of webinars and I've heard a lot about TechSoup and the offerings that you have for nonprofits. So thank you for all of those links that you have been putting in the chat. Now we all have homework. But I do want to respond to Mr. Jackson's comment about what are some of the barriers. I think the first one is fear, right? I remember being in college and that's when apples had just came out, right? So it was like arts and sciences was the IBM and then the teacher's college was all apples. And so when you were on, you know, you were used apples when you were doing these type of classes, of course. And then you were, you know, sciences, you were on the IBMs, you know, and we're kind of in that space again in terms of what you're comfortable with, what you're used to. So, you know, Microsoft, Dell, they kind of have taken it over and apples, you know, and the cloud is kind of like the New Age stuff, right? And so for a lot of us, particularly in New Orleans, our nonprofits are run by our seniors, our elders. And so getting folks to even accept these changes is another piece of it because that's not how it's normally done, you know. But I think the other barrier is also the issue of security, right? People are comfortable with the paper and the pen and at the really tough desktop, what that means. And then the lighter laptop and then the cloud, is it safe there? You know, and so overcoming fear and just the anxiety of things being secure is kind of that barrier that we all have to overcome. And then of course the knowledge base, right? Like because it is how do you put it all together? It's great tools, but you have to get comfortable pulling them out the toolbox, right? You know, actually applying them. So I don't know if there is no easy way to overcome fear or anxiety with security issues. But I would say if you all can kind of, you know, do more of this, but like, okay, if we're gonna review this particular resource webpage link because there's multiple things that you all have in it, you know, like this is the day that we're doing that. Non-profits get on this call where we're going over this page and these are TechSoup offerings, you know, baby steps for lack of a better word in terms of how we're kind of familiarizing ourselves with these tools. And of course the pandemic forced us to deal with everything all at once, which is why mental health is very important because no one wants to be overloaded and stressed out with a million different things at once. But this is where we are. And so applause for all of you all on this call who, you know, have graced that the way we have that we're even still looking for more opportunities to still learn and to help our, you know, nonprofits be successful. But I would just again, just offer if there's more baby step type offerings, I think that that will kind of help us bridge that those barriers. And thank you Ms. Gale for all of those wonderful resources that you put in together for us. Yeah, I'm going to interrupt your other hand. I'll read that. Guys, you know, like I said, I've been doing this a while. I want to let you know about 90% of the folks in the US database have budgets of one million or less. We know your pain. We understand it. You know, at one million, you're probably don't have a full-time IT person. In fact, Nairi, probably you were the actual person. One million, who's... One million, right? Or less, or less. I'm in the wrong room then. I'm in the wrong room. But, you know, nonprofits are powered by the person who said, oh, geez, the toner is out on the printer and you were putting the toner in and they go, oh, Nairi, you know this stuff. You can help us figure out a CRF Wi-Fi. And so, you know, that's why you have me and you have Steven and you have Nick because we have served on nonprofit boards. We've worked for tiny nonprofits. Takes you, it's no longer a tiny nonprofit, but you guys made that possible because, you know, coming to our door, you will allow us to serve the free-complanet, which I promise you when we were starting with 20 people, that was not anything we envisioned. So, you should all take a breath and say thank you to each other because it was your desire to go from one to 1.1 to 1.2 that gave us the power to do what we do. And so, we're a team in this. And so, we look forward to this. In fact, Aretha and I were just pinging each other back and forth that we need to do more basic TechSoup 101 narratives because we know you guys have so much on your plate. And if, you know, we're not telling you the 1.1 story, we need to do it more frequently. I know we get a little bored with it. You know, Nick takes naps, but it's fine. But it is something that, you know, we are dedicated to being there to help you. And please, you know, I just want to make one more gesture. Go to the forums. If you're registered, you can publish in the forums. Go to the technology wish list. Anytime you have something that you go, oh, I wish. That's what I need to hear from you guys. So thank you for sharing that with me and know that we're a team in this together. So, yeah. Yeah, you know, I want to add one thing that is interesting that came out of that. I mentioned the survey earlier in our conversation that we try to do twice a year. And, you know, because most nonprofits are much smaller organizations than like big corporations and businesses, one of the questions we ask is who makes the technology purchasing decisions at your nonprofit? You know, and we gave lots of options like it could be the executive director, maybe it's the IT administrator, is it an outside firm? Anyway, out of all of that, what we learned actually is, well, no surprise to those of you on this call, most nonprofits, it's the executive director making those decisions about, you know, what technology expenditure is gonna take place. But of the all the other options that folks had, the number two option was like the administrative person at the office or the office manager, right? Those are the two people who are making most of these decisions, which is just very interesting to know that because to your point, it's like sometimes we have a term for them, they're called accidental techies. They're people who intuitively seem to do a little bit better with technology and then suddenly you get promoted in your workplace to being like the chief technical officer even though that was never your job. Shelly, I know you are driving, but I saw you unmuted and I just know you're gonna call me now, I'm still driving, but every question is important. So if you wanna unmute yourself and ask a question, please do. Well, it's one of those, I'm starting, well, we've been in existence for five years. We're a bunch of truck drivers. So the fact that Microsoft and a lot of this stuff is based on the cloud allows us to be functional anywhere. And we're having problems with the integration and Microsoft, like Microsoft is the beast. And we have Google suites, but I hate it. I prefer Microsoft programs, it's just there's more that I can do. And it's like, where can I find the help? I mean, just the simple integration because we had GoDaddy. Nobody told me that GoDaddy would take over my Microsoft. It took, they had to delete all of our emails and de-branchize our website. And now I'm scared to try to integrate it back because I don't wanna mess anything up. I ended up just going ahead and buying out-of-pocket Microsoft emails just so we could have emails to function. And I'm digging and trying to find options, you know, a walk through, do this, do this, do this to try to put the two together, my donated licenses and merge what I already have into it. And do y'all, is there a podcast or something that talks about that? Shelley, we can help you with this for sure. I know you're driving right now, but we have your contact info. I'm just listening to what you're trying to accomplish. And I'm like, we have to help you. So we'll reach out to you after the webinar. I lost four years of emails when GoDaddy did that to me. And I'm just, I've got to get this back on track because everything we do is online. And yeah, disaster season's over with, but, you know, we're still working too, so. But I appreciate it, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, thank you. Thank you all for your questions. I think we gotta have a part two because I know there are, I really wanted to break you up in smaller rooms, but I know there are lots of questions and we will do this again. So yes, please fill out the survey. Let us know what topics you want to hear, things, questions you have that we didn't answer. Please put it on the survey. And thank you all for everything that you do. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Nice to meet you. Thank you. Thank you for reviewing. Thank you, everybody.