 Welcome to Tech 101, Tactical Technology Planning. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I will be your host for today's webinar. I'll give a brief introduction of myself. My name again is Becky, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for about 6 years, and prior to that worked as an accidental techie. It was never my actual role to be in technology at 3 small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California for 10 years before I came to TechSoup. So I've been in the position of trying to develop technology plans or cobble together technology solutions for small organizations that didn't have any dedicated IT staff. Our presenter expert today is Andrea Berry, who is the Director of Partnerships and Learning at IdealWare. And she runs their events and webinar and learning training resources there as well as developing partnerships and strategic relationships for the organization. And they are also a nonprofit that many of you may be familiar with. And if you're not, you should definitely acquaint yourself with their wonderful content and resources that they make available to help organizations make the best decisions about technology. You'll also see Ali Bestikian in the chat. She's here from TechSoup as one of our interactive events and video producers. And she'll be there to grab your questions and help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. A quick look at today's agenda. We'll do an introduction of TechSoup. Then we'll take a moment to get your feedback where you're at already with technology planning. Do you already have a plan? Then we'll talk about technology planning. Think about technology at your organization and how to approach tech planning. Andrea, we'll talk about auditing your current state of technology and how to get started with creating a plan. We'll have time for Q&A at the end. But as I said, when questions come to you, feel free to chat them in that window because we will have opportunities throughout the webinar to raise those up to her. So who is TechSoup if you are not already familiar with us? We're a 501c3 nonprofit that is working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, foundation, church, social benefit organization, however many ways I can say it, can access the technology donations and resources to know how to use them to better meet their mission. We've been around since 1987 and we have served more than 210,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. If you are joining us from outside the US, you may want to visit techsoupglobal.org and you can find out about donations available for technology in your local country. We have a variety of new services that we're consistently trying to add to our catalog including making consulting services available to you at either donated or discounted rates, new products and programs like the newest operating system, Windows 8.1, and the tools that you may use every day in your organization like Ubiquitous, QuickBooks 2014, all of these can be found at techsoup.org along with a variety of resources on how to use them including things like webinars like this today and articles, blog posts, and more. So to get us on to the topic at hand, go ahead and click on your screen. Do you already have a technology plan? Let us know if you do and if you're actually using it and implementing it on a regular basis or whether maybe there's one that you've heard exists but it might live in a filing cabinet or closet but you've never seen it, some mythical being. Let us know if maybe you've started the process but you haven't been able to implement it because maybe you haven't completed it or it's outdated at this point. Maybe you don't have a technology plan and this is the reason you're here joining us today and you really want to get started. And what's a technology plan? So if you're really not familiar with what would all be entailed, feel free to click that one. And this will help inform our guest today, Andrea Berry, on what our audience looks like so we can customize and tailor a little bit of what we cover best to meet your needs from actual participants. Feel free to keep clicking on that screen. It looks like around 46% have not yet started a technology plan and adding that up with the 10% that said, what's a technology plan? That's a good sizable chunk of our audience that hasn't stepped over that line to begin with the process. And that is the case of many organizations where your time is dedicated to meeting your mission and providing your programs and it's hard to dedicate that time to prioritizing a plan for your technology. So with that I'd like to go ahead and welcome to the line Andrea Berry from Idealware and invite her to introduce herself a little bit more and to get us started on the topic. So thank you so much for joining us today Andrea. We're glad to have you. Becky, thank you so much for inviting Idealware to participate in this seminar today. I'm really excited to be talking with all of you about tactical technology planning. It is a topic very near and dear to my heart and to Idealware. So I've worked for many years in the fundraising and communications world and have spent a lot of time working in organizations that really had no technology plan, no technology vision. And as a fundraiser was often asked, can you raise enough money so that we can buy new computers for everybody? And I would have to sit back as Becky mentioned kind of that accidental techie and say, why? What's the case? What's the reason that we want these? And in a lot of times we found that people didn't, I found that people just didn't have an answer. And my executive director or my board just felt like it was time. And that's really one of the big things that we're going to talk about today. How do you realize and make that transition from oh, this just feels like a good idea to actually doing something that makes a lot of sense, that's really appropriate for your organization at the time that your organization is ready to make that transition? Certainly in addition to TechSoup, Idealware can truly help. A little bit about us. So we are a nonprofit organization ourselves just like TechSoup. We're based in Portland, Maine, so the other side of the country, but we really work nationally and a bit internationally to help nonprofits make smart technology decisions. You can kind of think about us similarly to consumers' reports in the type of model that we do. We do in-depth research in all different areas of nonprofit tech. Everything from social media to accounting systems and kind of all the worlds in between. And then we package that information to what we hope are easy to understand yet not dumbed down different types of resources. We have hundreds of free articles on our website, so just www.idealware.org. Clicking on that articles tab or looking at what the latest articles are, pretty much any type of question you might have, you can click there. Lots of our articles are also posted on the TechSoup website as well. We also put out somewhere around one to three major reports or workbooks each month as well kind of in addition to all of our articles which will be much more in-depth, often apples-to-apples comparisons of particular software tools like our new release on comparing content management systems. Or workbooks, we're putting the final touches on a workbook that asks the question, are you ready for the cloud? So we're really interested in kind of giving you the resources to help you make some really tough technology decisions. We also have a pretty robust training program. That's definitely near and dear to my heart as that's what I run here at Idealware. We put on weekly individual trainings. We put on about once a month a free training for the community. And additionally, we put out longer form courses including a program starting in June looking at all the different elements of data management for your program. But enough about Idealware overall, let's talk about what we're going to go over today. Today we're going to start off with a little discussion about what we actually mean by technology planning and specifically how does strategic technology planning compare to what we're really talking about today which is tactical technology planning. We'll spend a little bit of time talking about how you consider or kind of think about tech at your organization. Then we'll explore some simple, very cursory steps for auditing your current technology. And we'll close out the class today talking about how you can begin creating an action plan for getting things done in your tactical tech plan. Throughout the presentation I will mention software packages here or there. And Becky and Allie have graciously agreed to let you guys know which of those products that I do mention are offered in the TechSoup catalog. So that's definitely something to pay attention to. And if at any time you have any questions, please do just type them into the chat box that will come to the three of us who are here as presenters and they'll be queued up and I'll stop periodically and call for questions. All right, but let's jump in. So what do we actually mean by technology planning? To me, technology planning, it sits in the same bucket as your strategic planning. It's something that kind of defines the vision and the direction for your organization and just like you might have a fundraising plan or a marketing plan, the technology plan, it's going to tell you what's coming up next, what are the priorities, and importantly, what are not the priorities for the year. It is really essential for you to be able to have a plan that allows you to know where you're going to spend your money, where you're going to spend your time, and gives you that additional permission to say where you're not going to spend your money and where you're not going to put your time. Because especially in this world of technology, I mean there's constant needs. Here at Idealware, if we had infinite money, we'd probably replace all our computers. And every year we'd all have tablets and we'd have a fancy new phone system and we'd have the most sophisticated of donor management system. There's always something that you can spend money on so understanding what is important and what is less important for your organization, that's what the plan can deliver for you. And I'll tell you when you have board members who get excited about technology, if you're fortunate enough to have board members who get excited about technology, if you have an executive director, if you're not the executive director but you have an executive director who really sees things and really wants to have them for the organization, comes up with big ideas as to how you could be using Google Glass right now for your organization. Having a plan that's going to help to guide where technology fits into programs, where technology fits into your everyday infrastructure, is going to be extremely helpful. Now importantly, there are two different types of technology planning that we're going to address today. And really we're going to focus on the second, the tactical. But what you most often hear about in our opinion is strategic technology planning. This is really, the questions under here are really kind of encapsulating the differences. The strategic technology planning is really at the mission level. It's longer term project, larger projects, projects that have direct connection to how you want to be seen as an organization, what are the mission projects that you want to be putting together over the next few years. It's asking questions like the second one, how can technology help us do our work better? And it's looking longer term. Now that's a really important thing for you to be thinking about, but here at Ideal where we talk to a lot of organizations across the country saying, so can we see your strategic technology plan? And people kind of look at us like we're a little bit out of our minds because it takes a lot of work and you need to be pretty well set up in terms of having the time, the energy, and the commitment to do that type of long term planning. Lots of us don't have formal strategic plans. So it's very difficult for us to say, all right, this strategic technology plan that's supposed to be connected to the overall organization strategic plan is somehow our priority over kind of the everyday things that we're doing on a regular basis. But that to me is really where tactical technology planning comes in. The tactical plays that other side. It's looking at the things that are going to help improve effectiveness and efficiency on a day to day basis. And it's really looking at what are your technology priorities for the next six months through the next year. It's based on a model. We can look at a kind of comparison to a house. So if we're thinking about strategic technology planning, that may be you saying, wow, we really want to redo our kitchen. It's going to raise the value of our house. It's going to make the way that we cook more streamlined. It's just going to feel better. It's going to look better. Wouldn't this be wonderful? But it's really hard to prioritize repairing your kitchen when you have much more tactical problems that you have to deal with like your basement is completely under water. And that to me is where the tactical comes in. It's much more reactionary and it is much more dealing with kind of the fire drills. What are the things, what are the problems that are happening right now? What are the major bang for the buck projects that you can do that can improve where you are, what you're doing, how you're doing it, and allow you to be more effective towards your mission in the short term and in the immediate? Now again, I just want to remind everybody, send in your questions. I'm happy to answer them. We're going to go through this next section which is kind of thinking about technology at your organization, and then I'll stop for questions. So please do continue to send them in. All right, so we want to think about technology at our organization, and this is really again that difference between the strategic and the tactical. At strategic technology planning we're thinking about technology compared to your mission. Technology is going to help you accomplish your mission. It's going to improve the way you work at that kind of overarching level. For tactical technology planning, we're really thinking more kind of that infrastructure, the organizational day-to-day level. And in order to do that, you want to recognize that not all technology is the same. It doesn't all have the same value. It doesn't all have the same impact on your organization. And to help you kind of rationalize and understand that we've come up with our technology pyramid here, where the kind of foundational pieces of technology that help everybody do what they need to do on a regular basis is your functional and secure infrastructure. So here we're talking backup software. We're talking actually having computers for your staff members. We're talking about having an office platform or some type of productivity platform that you can use to actually write documents, use Excel in spreadsheets, all of those different kinds of things. Your email would fall into this functional, secure infrastructure category. Once that's under control, then you want to start thinking about data management. This is all the different types of data management, so not just your fundraising database, your constituent management system, but if you're a library, that's your library management system. If you're a museum, that's how are you managing your resources and your collections. This is where data analysis also starts to come into the puzzle. Then we start to move into communications. Website and email, neither of them are dead. They're alive and well, and they're things that you should really be focusing on. And in our opinion here at Idealware, focusing on before you start to think about social media. So websites and email, these are the regular way that you communicate to your constituents in a broadcast email sense. And website is really your presence and kind of who you are and where you are online. And then social media comes into play. And so often I've worked as a volunteer as a board member with other organizations where I hear something on NPR and it will sound so amazing about the way that a similar organization is using social media in this really creative way. And I'll come to the executive director and I'll say, oh my gosh, we have to do this thing. It's so amazing. It's only going to take you 15 hours every week because we get really excited about those kind of things. But those kind of shiny objects, those flashy social media pieces, again, you need to have the technology base to be able to make something like that happen. Now this is not the true case with every single organization. Obviously there are some organizations that completely live in social media. So I'm not saying that those are organizations that are somehow set up incorrectly, but in the kind of traditional or this standard nonprofit sense, we really do want to put some priority on getting a functional and secure infrastructure because you can't do any of these other things if your computers aren't actually working, if you don't have a functional phone system, those kind of things. And then we're going to move up from there. You need to think about how technology is going to help people do their job on a day-to-day basis. And that's really the core of the tactical tech planning. What do people need to get their job done? What are the absolute core essentials for them to be able to be effective at what they do and to be super efficient? So kind of increasing efficiency is a real core element to this kind of tactical technology planning. You want to think about who's going to help you to figure all this out? For a lot of you, you'll find that that's just you, but I really want to encourage you to try and pull some additional people in. They don't all have to be staff members at your organization. You can pull in volunteers, you can pull in board members, but finding people who are doing technology related tasks at your organization and pulling them in to have them talk about why technology is important to them. And even if they won't be on a technology committee, hearing from them what's really essential, doing some kind of survey about what are the essential technology elements for everyone to do their job. For me, it's PowerPoint. For other people at my organization, they never touch PowerPoint ever. So it's going to differ between individuals within your organization. So understanding kind of what people need is important. Now there's lots of strategic technology planning consultants out there. There are very few tactical technology planning consultants out there. Overall, you do want to ask yourself, all right, so how big of an endeavor are we going to move through in this process? And do we need a consultant? They can be really helpful to add a number of different things. They can help you with technology expertise that you may not have. They have a breath of experience with other organizations, so they can kind of bring that wider knowledge. They can help you make things happen even though you may not have the time. And then really importantly, a consultant can be super helpful if you either don't have enough time and you need somebody to help, or if there's challenges around conversations about technology that are happening at your organization. Bringing in somebody who doesn't have to play politics, bringing in somebody who doesn't have any kind of background history that they have to work against or with can be a really valuable element. If none of this is helpful, then you probably don't need a consultant. But if some of these do sound helpful, it's maybe worthwhile figuring out if somebody can help you to create this plan and to really assess what's going on at your organization. What are your technology needs? If that question alone, what are your technology needs, makes you put you into cold sweat, then you probably want to think about finding a consultant to help you out. All right, I want to stop here and see if we have any questions before we move on. Becky, anything come up in the chat? Becky Sure. Well, we had a couple of people that commented into us about their kind of particular needs and trying to find solutions to them. And I think you alluded to some of these issues, and these aren't necessarily questions we can answer or answer for you. But there are scenarios that I imagine many people are having similar issues in their organization. So like Janet for example said, we have three servers that are more than 10 years old and not enough funding to replace them. So what would be some of our options? Like would a technology plan help them figure out how to either replace those, or maybe move into cloud storage, provide them with those options? Becky You know, those are the kinds of questions that absolutely you should be asking. It's really appropriate for this kind of tactical technology planning process. That to me would be a high need that you want to try and figure out how to prioritize that. And so what you want to do is to create an action plan where you're going to say, okay, so how are we going to evaluate what's out there? What are the resources? Just like Becky said, do we want to keep those servers in house? Do we want to go out to the cloud? And what are the pros and cons there? Then you want to figure out what's the budget? So what are you aspiring to actually spend? And then how do you parse that out over time? You want to create what's called a replacement cycle where you're going to figure out, okay, so this is our kind of wide need. And obviously we may not have the money to do it all right now based on what you put into the chat. So how can you parse it out so that you're doing some piece in the first year, some piece in the second year, some piece in the third year to kind of strategically pace things in an effective way for your budgeting? So it's kind of you're in exactly the right place to begin the process. We're going to go through in a second what it would mean to audit your current technology. And it sounds like you've probably already done that and highlighted the main project. For the rest of you actually, that's a perfect intro for us to go through this next section. Now we're going to walk through our technology pyramid essentially from the bottom up. And what I want you to be thinking about is, okay, what are my core needs here? And now this is not going to be comprehensive. So please don't, if you don't hear what your challenges are mentioned here, don't think that they're not issues that you need to address. But essentially we're going to walk step by step through that pyramid to realize, okay, so what are some of the core questions we want to ask at this level, at this level, at this level, etc. So what you want to do is figure out what are your issues? It's kind of a full-on survey of, all right, so what are the technology needs in each one of these areas? What do you know about the best practices in these areas? And that's a big area where both TechSoup's resources and IdeAware's resources can help. We both really specialize in talking about, all right, so what are people doing really well here? And what should you be aspiring to? In a realistic sense, and not in a, you know, you're a multi-billion-dollar nonprofit sense. So as a small nonprofit, as a medium size nonprofit, what's truly best practice for your size? And you're going to collect that list. What I might do is actually print out the pyramid or write down those four steps. And for each one of those four steps and these questions I'm going to ask you, write down, you know, this is a strength for us or this is a weakness, a weak point, and here is my weak point. These are the big areas that we really need to think about. So let's go through them step by step. The first one is your hardware. You know, how old are your computers? Are they so old that you wake up every morning and you go to work and you wonder when you push that on button if it's actually going to turn on? That's really not a good place to be. You want to make sure that you're thoughtful about, you know, kind of having computers that are going to work. Do you need desktops? Do some of your staff need laptops? You know, where do tablets or other types of mobile devices fit in to your technology puzzle? Everybody through this process should go through this kind of evaluation. What do you have at your disposal? How old is it? And how effective is it? Is it working for you? Then you want to think about your phones. Are your phones working? Are they really hard to hear? Can you change when somebody leaves the organization? Can you actually change the voicemail or change the menu? If you can't, that's probably a high priority. You know, so are your phones functional? If they are, then you're probably all set. Phones don't need to be changed out all the time. But if your phones aren't functional, then potentially that's something you want to consider. Then we want to think about printers. Do you have just one printer for the organization? Is that adequate? Can you print in color? Can you only print in black and white? Are you spending tons of money because everybody has their own desktop in-jet and everybody's going through ink like crazy? What is your printing policy? All of those kinds of questions you can run through when it comes to printers. If you find that printers are your biggest problem, then you're in pretty good shape because these are kind of quick fixes. In some other cases, they may not be as much. Then we want to move towards networking. Networking and backup in particular. So how is your organization networked? Can people share files? Do you have a common file share? How are you connected to the Internet? Do you have a fast enough connection to the Internet? How are you backing up your files? I find that file backup and file sharing are two of the biggest, most consistent areas that organizations are struggling. You need to be backing up your files, and your files should not be backed up and then left at the office. I was just speaking with somebody yesterday from a city in Iowa who had a major nonprofit building burned down just a few weeks ago. And tons of the nonprofits that were centered in this building had paper files, and then they backed those up on the computers by having electronic records, but nothing was backed up anywhere else. And they lost all of the information for their organization. So being really thoughtful about the backup piece that can be transformational for your organization. That's not very sexy, but it's really important. Once you've gone past your hardware, there are other pieces in infrastructure. In particular, word processing, email, calendaring, here's backup again just because I want to really make sure you do it. How do all of these things fit into your organization? Are you using the Microsoft Office suite? Are you using a Google suite of tools? And kind of what are the pros and cons here? What is the priority? Are you using Windows platforms that are no longer supported? What is going on at your organization? Asking those questions can be key. And again, I just want to underline backup is a huge thing that you can work on. So backing up to the cloud, trying to make that a priority, backing up would be for me kind of a number one piece. I really value using cloud backup as a way to kind of create a redundant process for your organization. So if you're like this community in Iowa that lost a lot of nonprofits because they lost all of their files and all their information, if those were backed up into the cloud, they could have reconstructed and pulled all that back together. After you've done infrastructure, you've gotten through the stuff that people need to do on a day-to-day basis that kind of core element to actually getting your job done. Then we want to think about data management. Does your constituent management actually work for you? Do you have a CRM or some kind of online integrated system? Are you looking for a donor management system? Do you need more member or client or case management? What are the things that are really necessary for your organization? How is that going to be prioritized? For a lot of us, we have something that works okay. Certainly, don't get distracted by the mirage of the perfect system. There is definitely no perfect system out there, but making sure that you can understand who your community members are, that you can understand what their history is with you as an organization, and being able to understand kind of when they've donated and why, all of that's going to be really important. It shouldn't make you want to tear your hair out. Clearly, these are complicated systems so they can be frustrating, but you should be able to get the information that you want without having to call the vendor to create a report for you. But remember, that's not your only area of data. You also want to think about your finances. So these are three really solid accounting systems. Do you have a finance system? Do you have an accounting system that will let you do your bookkeeping in-house? Making sure that you have something that's going to help you to do that is going to be really, truly essential. And then, is there other data? So again, I mentioned in the intro, are there library collections that you need to manage? Is there other constituent data? Are you big enough in terms of your volunteer needs to need a volunteer management system? What do other people who are like you, or other organizations who are like you, what do they do? Asking those kind of questions, looking at, you know, I used to work in a library so I draw back to those examples a lot, you know, looking at other libraries in your community and seeing how they are managing their inventory. That's going to give you a lot of insight into what some of the best practices might be for your organization. Once you've gone through the data piece of the pyramid, then we want to start thinking about communications. And your website is going to be the first place to start. You know, is your website polished, professional, and easy to update? It is definitely important that you have a website that you can update yourself. That would be having a content management system and understanding what it means to be able to use that as well. So a lot of the times you'll find in your technology plan that you want to focus on training processes more potentially than getting a new system. That you may have something that should be really easy to use or it should be able to be very powerful, but you don't have enough knowledge within your organization to make that actually work. So trying to think about, you know, is it actually a technology issue or is it a technology training issue that might be the key part of your process? After you go through websites you want to think about, you know, are you using your email effectively? And this is really, we're not talking about your personal email. I'm talking about broadcast email. So can you send emails to your entire list using a broadcast email tool? You should not be sending emails to more than say 30 people at a time using your own personal email. You need to get what's called a broadcast email tool. Tools like constant contact, vertical response, MailChimp, all of those are really high quality tools that can be quite effective for you. Understanding, again, not only if you have the right technology but do you have the right best practices is another important question to be asking yourself, especially in the communications world. You know, am I really using email to the most effective end for my organization? Thinking critically about how you're going through a process and what your strategy is for being the most effective is going to help you to maximize the energy that you put into any one of these particular tools. And then, and only then do you want to get to the point where you're going to be looking at social media. That's not to say that social media shouldn't be part of your communications planning or process at all ever. That certainly you should be using social media. But when you're thinking about kind of short term, high priority technology needs, I want you to make sure that all those other levels of the pyramid don't have something that's screaming for help before you decide you're going to spend a ton of your technology improvement time using social media. Social media can be hugely impactful for an organization. But again, if you don't have functional computers spending a huge amount of time on social media, it may not be the best use of your very limited energy and time. All right, so that was our super quick run-through of all different areas of that technology pyramid. So now I want us to spend a little bit of time or spend like maybe 10 more minutes or so talking through the different elements of technology planning. And then I'll open up the floor to questions, which I see there's a whole bunch of questions coming in. So please do continue to send in your questions. Specific questions are okay. So if you have a very specific technology need, do send that in. That's totally fine. We may not be able to get to it right now, but we will try. So, okay, that was a whole bunch of different areas that I ran through in like 8 minutes. It's a lot. It can be overwhelming, but don't panic. It's okay to have a whole list of projects. And frankly, that's the point of doing this process. It's to come up, you know, do that audit and to come up with a big potentially overwhelming list of projects because we all have them. We probably have 6 or 7 projects here at Idealware that we would really love to do. But now this is when the technology planning part comes in. We did the technology audit. We need to plan now of those 6 or 7 or 15 or 20 projects that seem like a priority or like they can make a big difference. We need to figure out which ones are the most important for your organization. For me, I really encourage you to prioritize based on this pyramid. Pick out one or two things that start fairly close to the bottom as a good place to start. And when we're saying start, I mean maybe the next 6 months or so. That doesn't mean that something that's at one of these two top levels of the pyramid don't ever get to come into play, but let's start with something that's either in the infrastructure or the data management section, unless those are perfect at your organization in which case you can move up. Again, not to say that in the next 6 months, the second half of this year, you won't look to some of these more communications-based programs and also not to say that your communications staff or communications, the people who are playing communications roles at your organization, won't be doing some of those projects anyway. But when we're talking about allocating our restricted technology money and our restricted technology time, our kind of narrow technology time and money, we really want to focus on things that are going to have the biggest bank for the muck. And most of them are going to come down here. Additional things you want to think about is kind of weighing on this important balance of the cost and the benefit. How much is it really going to improve the way that your organization works? How much better will you be able to meet your mission? Is it going to save you a huge amount of time? Is it going to save you a huge amount of money? Is it going to, like the backup, help you avoid catastrophes? Those are extremely valuable elements for you to weigh out compared to, all right, this is going to cost a lot of money. It's going to be super complex and we need somebody else to help us. Finding that right balance, finding the things that doesn't cost too much money, doesn't take infinite amounts of time, but it's going to have a huge impact on the organization. That is the ideal project for you. Trying to narrow in on what those could be can be very, very effective. Now once you've picked out a project, it's time for you to create an action plan. And unfortunately, you're not just done. Great, we're going to replace all of our servers. Check? No. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. At that point, once you've come up with your problem or the challenge that you're going to address through your technology plan, you need to come up with a timeline. And you need to go through a process. The timeline doesn't go with identifying the problem. There are lots of steps after that. We're going to identify a problem. We're going to define our needs. We're going to consider process improvements. This is where you would say, say we're going to be purchasing a new donor management system, for example. At this time, before we even get to the new system, we might say, hey, what in fundraising are we not doing, what are the things that we could do that would be more optimal? So you're going to kind of improve your current processes. And then you're going to explore what's out there and make a decision. But again, this decision-making process, it's not the end of the game. It keeps going. Once you've decided, you need to figure out how much time and what energy you need to put into implementing and configuring your tool. You need to define how people are going to use whatever technology improvement you've done and how they're going to get support if they need it. You're going to figure out how to train them and actually do that training. And then you want to make sure that it doesn't just end there, that you check in. You make sure that the technology program or the process that you've implemented, it's going well. Because the best way to kill enthusiasm for technology is to do a really exciting, brand-new technology project and then have everybody heed it and for you to not do anything about it. So you really want to make sure that you're working to understand what are the bugs, what are the problems, what are the things people don't understand to continue to wrap around. Now these stages are pretty universal for technology projects. So let's look at a few different examples here as kind of our close-out and then we'll open up the floor for some questions. Now if you want to put together a project for, say, buying a new printer, say you want to buy a laser printer for your organization, we're probably talking just two to four weeks for you to do all the planning, identifying what it is you want, what you need. Here, improving processes. We're probably talking giving people instructions to print front and back. It's always print in black and white unless they really need the color, those kind of things. You want to research your options and order your printer. Then you still need to implement it. But this is probably pretty quick. You get it up and running. You set up on everybody's computers. You explain to people how they need help. Probably this is putting a little sticky note on the printer that says, printer not working. Here's the booklet. If it's not in the booklet, here's who you call. You train people. And this is probably not a full, massive training. This is gather everybody around the printer and show them how to put paper in and where you press go and stop. And then make sure that people are happy by measuring, is it working? How much paper are we saving, et cetera? Now compare that to a much more substantial program say we're doing a software selection for a fundraising system or donor management tool. Here, we're probably talking one to six months. We're not talking weeks. We're talking months. We're identifying what we need. And this planning process is going to be pretty substantial. We need to define our needs and improve our process. We're going to research options, do demos. We're going to pick our tool. But then again, there's a huge amount of implementation. You're going to customize and configure, which could take a lot of time. Migrating data always takes more time, like triple the amount of time you expect it's going to take. So keep that in mind. You're going to define how people use it, train, and then measure success. Or a communications challenge where we're maybe redesigning a website where again, we're talking all the way up to maybe six months or more for a website redesign. We're here, we're doing different things in the planning process, identifying our goals and needs, researching options, but then we need to do content navigation design. We need to design the graphic design and the look and feel. Then we get to creating the website, moving over content from the old to the new, and then doing our define, train, and measure. All of these, they're complicated processes where you need, especially the last two, the website redesign, the software selection, you need help probably in most cases to kind of go from start to finish through these processes. Whereas a smaller project like buying a new printer, you should probably be able to do that in-house. So you're going to need to think about what type of project you've identified, how big it is, and who you're going to need help with. My best recommendation would be as you're looking at your pyramid, picking out things that are lower on the pyramid is advantageous, but also picking out at least one small, kind of quick win project, even if that's something that's up here, to balance out some of the bigger projects will be a really nice way to kind of keep people engaged, keep them excited in this technology improvement at your organization instead of kind of derailing that process. All right, and I want to stop here. We've got a lot of time for questions. So I want to see, Becky, any specific questions that have kind of popped out to you that we should address? Sure. Well, we had one question that just came in that was specifically related to one of the slides you just shared. So I'm going to pop us back over to that slide so you can respond to that. Let me just do this real quickly. So Justine asked, so what do you mean by improving processes for web redesign? So what kind of processes might you want to improve if you're doing a web redesign project? Well, you want to think about if you're using, in my mind, in doing a website redesign, you may also switch content management systems. You may have been using something that was a static site and then going to a content management system, in which case you're going to need to improve all the processes for kind of how information is updated, who holds the kind of key to adding information. It's those kind of questions that you want to think about. When you're doing website design, what is the process for content creation? What's the process for content posting or content curation? And what were you doing? And is that really the best thing for you to be doing or should you move forward? That's kind of where my mind immediately jumps with website redesign. There's probably lots of other things as well that kind of fit into that category. This is definitely a substantial project and something that, as I said, you would really need a consultant to help you with unless you're doing quite tiny website. And so a consultant will help you guide through the real intricacies of kind of what are the processes that are the current best practices? And what should you be doing differently to make sure that you are taking the most advantage of the website? And then redesign process. Sure. We just actually went through a big redesign process here at TechSoup not too long ago and it seems like it's nonstop. And we're a bigger organization with more than 200 staff. And I know that we probably have some organizations that are larger. And what I would think of in those process conversations would be how many people really need to be editing it? How many people need to have different roles and permissions to be able to add content or delete content? And how do we, you know, that stuff would be a lot of that early end. Improving processes and defining needs, those conversations can take months if you're a bigger organization. So just throw that in there. You may be asking such questions as who's actually in charge of the website and should they be at this point? We have those questions here at our organization. Should the website really be housed under marketing or should it go under training or should it go to somebody else? And how much should I actually be involved in my training team be involved in the website at all if any kind of what are those roles? That would all fit into that. Absolutely. We have a bunch of questions from different people around hardware. So kind of both ends of the spectrum, like one being our refurbished computers as effective and at what kind of age do you really need to phase a computer out? We had somebody earlier mention that they had servers that were more than 10 years old. What about your desktop PCs? TechSoup has recommendations in that area, but I'd love to hear your take on it as well. So we are not huge fans of refurbished computers over here. We find that computers, especially non-superpower computers, if you don't need computers that are doing huge multimedia or something that's a really sophisticated type of process, then you probably don't need a super powerful computer. So we are probably talking a few hundred dollars to buy a new lower-powered desktop computer. So it's not going to be something that's going to necessarily break the bank. And in that case, we really prefer to buy new instead of refurbished. Refurbished we find to have, you're inheriting all of the historic problems from somebody else. And it just feels a lot more risky. Especially I have to say hand-me-down computers. We at nonprofits love the concept of free. And certainly here at I Feel Where we definitely echo that. However, if our local bank offered to give us a round of computers that they were decommissioning and having replaced, we would probably say no to most of them. If you've got volunteer computers that aren't doing very complicated stuff that just need to access the Internet, if you've got public computers like in a library where you've got a public bank of computers where they're going to take again that kind of minimal sophisticated type of processes then potentially some of those refurbished or hand-me-down computers can function. But for your staff, every day, day-to-day computers, we tend to try and avoid that. In terms of age of computers, I'm not a super expert in this, but typically what we say is somewhere around kind of the four-year mark for desktop computers and maybe the two- to three-year mark for laptop computers in terms of when you would ideally be replacing them. Again, if they're taking a lot of wear, if you've got a laptop that travels all around the world, it's probably going to need to be replaced sooner than later. I know my laptop that travels with me everywhere, we pretty much need to replace once a year or so because it takes so much wear and tear kind of disintegrates into a million pieces. We also have a really high-powered video computers that need to be updated on a much more frequent basis because they certainly get to a point where they can't support the power that some systems that they need to run are requiring. That's great. Just to chime in with TechSoup's recommendations on that as well, if you're looking at refurbished machines, they should be factory refurbished machines, not your neighbor dude down the street who just volunteered to give you some stuff in his closet because like Andrew mentioned, they can be a lot more trouble than they're worth and you don't know what you're getting or really what the age is. Factory refurbished machines tend to be younger than a lot of computers that may be donated from within your community because big companies like Dell or General Motors have a much tighter cycle time for their hardware and so those business grade machines that they have may be cycled out every 2 to 3 years. So they may have 3 or 4 years of life left in them for a business setting and if those are going back to a factory refurbisher, we have actually some partners like InterConnection that does factory refurbishment and they get most of their machines directly from Dell headquarters. And those machines I think you're looking at apples to oranges kind of comparison if you're comparing something like that to a computer that's donated by somebody who just does it as a hobby. So I would caution being careful. And any machine we recommend if it's 5 to 7 years old, you need to be preparing to replace that machine within the next few months or a year. So really you should be budgeting for that if that's the case. We also had some questions about moving off of the hardware altogether. I mean obviously people still need computers to access it, but moving off of the hardware like servers and moving to the cloud and what your recommendations are around cloud-based storage and servers and backing up to the cloud and what your thoughts are on that. So we've been doing a lot of thinking about that over here and keep your eyes out on our email list because we'll be putting out a workbook that pretty much addresses the fact of that question, should you move to the cloud? You're going to find that you're actually on the cloud for a lot of things. Your Facebook, if you're using any kind of Gmail or your Google accounts, those are all in the cloud already. So the cloud is not as terrifying as it might sound. You're in the cloud right now. You're sitting on this webinar as well. We do recommend thinking about backup, especially backup and file share, well file share partially, depending on the size of your organization, but we really do recommend thinking about the cloud for a lot of those kind of core infrastructure pieces. In some areas you may not have much choice. So for example the donor management or the constituent management world is really starting to almost completely shift towards the cloud. So there's a lot of companies that used to have installed versions that are decommissioning the installed versions in favor of cloud-based versions. So you may not have much choice in that direction. There are a few things to kind of weigh out. How much tech support do you have in-house? If you have a really hefty tech staff in-house then you probably don't need as much to rely on the cloud because you can do that with your own staff. However most of us don't have that benefit and so moving to the cloud allows you to get rid of that reliance on having to call Bob from the tech support company to come over and it takes time to get him to come over and all of that. You also want to think about cost. Installed types of projects or programs, they're typically in a lot of cases kind of upfront cost which is potentially larger but then nothing down the road. Whereas cloud-based systems often are on a monthly or a yearly subscription fee so you're going to have kind of a larger or longer payment process. It may be cheaper in the short term but you're going to be always paying. You're never going to pay it off. Additionally you want to think about how ready your infrastructure is for cloud-based stuff. So if for example you have a really bad internet connection, you've got a really slow internet connection then I wouldn't necessarily recommend you go to the cloud but if that's not an issue then that shouldn't be a barrier. There's kind of lots of pros and cons there and for each one of the areas you need to think also about are the features more important or is the cloud more important? Because for example in the donor management world I would way care more that you think about what features a vendor system has to offer than care and then make cloud be the kind of defining yes, no decision maker of whether you would consider a tool or not. Great. We are almost out of time but we did have a couple of people ask about Office 365 and whether that cloud option is something Orgz should be looking at and whether they would need help with it. And I know a lot of that depends. We typically say yeah unless you have dedicated IT staff who can dedicate quite a bit of time to migration particularly of the SharePoint portions of Office 365 that you'll likely need help but for email if you're just looking to host your email there not so tough. Andrea do you have a take on that? I am not an Office 365 specialist so I will let you fill that in. No problem. Well we do have a variety of content that we've been writing about Office 365 here on TechSoup's site so I can point people to some resources if that's something you're interested in in the follow-up email. And we also have some consultants who have been writing free content on that and doing webinars on the process for migration to help you know whether it's something you can do yourself or not. We are actually at the top of the hour so even though we didn't get to all the questions I'll try to answer a couple more of them in the chat window as we wrap things up. But thank you so much Andrea for all that great information. We would invite you if you didn't have your questions answered today to come to techsoup.org slash community where you can ask your questions in our community forums. We have a whole group of tech experts and people who do tech consulting and IT network administration at nonprofits there that can answer your questions and give you advice. And I would also recommend checking out these additional resources. Obviously idealware.org has a lot of great information on all of these types of tech topics and different types of software that you may be looking for. I know somebody asked about learning management systems and other people asked about case management systems. And they're a terrific resource where you can search for those different terms and see what kind of content is there. Additionally Techsoup, our site has a lot of that similar types of content. And then if you're looking for more information on how to develop your own tactical tech plan, Idealware has recently offered their series of, what is it, 26 sessions? Yes, 26 on-demand videos. Right, but you can watch at your convenience and they've recently made it available at a good substantial discount to nonprofits. So you can find more information about that at techsoup.org slash Idealware. So thank you so much Andrea for sharing your expertise with us all today. And I'd also like to take a moment to thank our webinar sponsor too, ReadyTalk who provides the use of this platform for our webinars each week. And you can also access donations for that program at techsoup.org slash ReadyTalk if you're looking for a system like this for your own training. Please take a moment to complete the post-event survey to help us improve the program. And have a wonderful day. Thanks so much.