 So welcome, let's do a quick, if we could, just introduction around the real is to who you are and where you're from and which role is. Hi, I'm Eli over here in Vancouver, Canada. I've got the world's best job because what I get to do is work with community champions around the world in about 40 different cities to help them build out tech for good communities of practice, like this one being created here by Bob. I work for TechSoup Global, a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits get access to technology for free or at discounts. All kinds of pretty amazing stock there. And if you're a nonprofit charity church or library, you should definitely go check it out, link in the chat. Thank you very much, Eli. Thanks, Bob. My name is Nathan Frankenberger. I'm an IEP master's student. I'll graduate next month. I was able to do a work study opportunity where I work with Bob and then one of the guys at the school for a work-study community engagement workforce development. And then I'm also a member of the local community pride board here in Punctua-Tawney. I do some revitalization and investment. And so definitely looking to learn when the nonprofit side of things to make tech is where it's at. So anything I can take away from this and excited to learn. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much, Nathan. Good afternoon. My name is Lynn Williams, and I'm the executive director of the Great Careers Groups, it's greatcareers.org, but it's Great Careers Groups. We provide career education and networking to people who are a career transition, meaning job seekers, as well as provide career education for people who do career management, meaning self-employed and employed. We've been around since 2010, and we run about 40 to 50 events a month. And they are all online. I'm based out of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. And so I'm the executive director of the group. But to make a living, I also write resumes and LinkedIn profiles. And I'm working on my doctoral dissertation on the topic of LinkedIn for job seekers. So that's me, Lynn Williams. Thank you, Lynn. I can ask a question. Are you associated at all with the workforce? Investment funds and the money to come through the workforce investment boards? No, we are a 501c3 non-profit. We are on TechSoup, but we are independent. We basically sustain ourselves and survive based upon our very small membership fee of only $49 a year to attend 600 events, which is we have to pay our virtual assistant, our insurance, our software and that TechSoup doesn't offer us. As well as our hosting cost and whatnot. So we are not involved in anything workforce development. But we, I suppose we could be because we do an awful lot and help an awful lot of people. Thank you. I'd be interested to have served on two workforce development boards for probably a total of 20 plus years. It sounds like you would be an ideal contractor for workforce development. So I'd be interested to have a good follow up discussion. Absolutely. I'll put my book of call information in the chat. That's good. Excellent. Eric, tell us about yourself, where you're at, where you're from. Eric Jacobson, I'm a retired engineer, project manager here today as from the first Unitarian Church of Baltimore non-profit. I'm very active in the church. I'm the treasurer involved in audio, visual systems and other activities at the church. Thank you very much. That's so you're bringing your engineering background to the community after church, basically. Correct. Yep. And I'm my name is Bob Pardamone on my home, Mr. Potsatani, Pennsylvania. My bio is on the TechSoup work on TechSoup sites. I'm not going to repeat a lot of that. I will admit that I'm a tech junkie. So I have that addiction. And when I was working full time as the executive director of community action agency, and then I wore several hats in the military that were technology related. And I would often get accused of being on the bleeding edge of technology where you often shouldn't be maybe until something is trying to test it. But it was usually we're down for me, which allowed me to excel. And so I've learned a lot about technology. I've probably become one of those people that engineers and other highly specialized trained networking people are afraid of because I asked too many questions and I do a lot of trouble shooting. The later has to be undone. But anyhow, long story short, is I think one of the things that nonprofits lack and I was the executive director for almost 30 years for one is the ability to mobilize technology to to make it basically when I call a force multiplier in your organization. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to become a host in Pennsylvania Pennsylvania currently does not have any other hosts and I'm hoping from this group, we spin them up in other cities and other towns here in Pennsylvania. But it's great to have you guys all on board. Everybody forces welcome in just to clarify something that you're that Eli and I've talked about several times is TechSuit provides primarily software and hardware. We're going to cover some of this in the edge of slides to 501 C threes. You do not have to be a 501 C three participating in any of these strict sessions like today. They're open to really anybody that wants to be to register for events and there's plenty of them out there every day. And so this month, what events being hosted from all over the country and some of them are very sophisticated and those are very basic, but they're all very valuable to help people learn about technology and how it's being implemented. I see somebody joined us. I'd like to welcome them. Is it just mark your first name or your last name or tell us a little bit about yourself? Sorry, it's just the abbreviation Brian Burkett. Calling from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Nice. Can you tell us who you're with there? University of North Dakota Alumni Association. Well, great. How did you hear about this one in Pennsylvania from Dakota? It just showed up in my mailbox and picked it up. Yeah. Great. Thank you for joining us. Actually, I must admit, I'm sitting in Florida as I speak right now where it's probably about 85 degrees and sunny. So there's either in full refinance. I'm not going to make any big deal of that. I was going to put that full behind me and I decided that probably was the best thing to do. But it's funny because in all the years that I've been involved in nonprofits, one of the things I'd like to bring to nonprofits is trying to show them how to leverage technology. And I found TechSoup to be an extremely valuable asset. From a variety of means. One is because it can offer reduced hard-wired software. But I think something that's most that's even more important is it brings people together. It allows us to form a network of people that did, for example, airy pink call and say, hey, I'm trying to do this. Or would you know of a product? Or do you know anywhere I could get this at a discount? Or I'm trying to develop a specification for a small server for my facility. And all of a sudden, you have a list of names and contacts that you can reach out to in the community. And the other thing is I want you to keep in mind that you have the ability, especially as a final one, three other organizations to become hosting sites for university tech interns. They could be a management information system intern. They could be a computer science co-owner. They could be an engineer support person, somebody to just builds and maintain some troubleshoots workstations. I had my first intern in technology was in 1979. And my nonprofit would not have had any way to develop the technology we did if it wouldn't have been through the use of interns. And even till today, I have maintained contact with all of those interns I had over from 79 forward. Most of them are making probably three or four times when I ever be working for the nonprofit. Somehow when we go to dinner, I still end up in check. But it's still nice to know that I made that I was able to mentor and also be mentored by kids and youth and now adults that have a lot of great knowledge. In Pennsylvania, there's a lot of programs for interns to be placed with nonprofits for either nothing or for minimum wage where they can nonprofit can register for Pennsylvania Higher Education Association and get a reimbursement for interns that are on site. That would be another asset that I would highly encourage no matter what state you're in to look into what's available, particularly in today's world of trying to help other people, what resources are available in the area of getting interns at your site. There's a lot of nonprofits can't afford the tech staff that we'd like to have. And you guys all come to the table with various resources that your fingertips knowledge and please feel free to share any of those that any of that information as we go on. Some of these slides, I'm going to forget that slide presentation just so we can see where I'm headed. OK, so basically, I think I've covered everything on this slide. Everybody had bring something to the table, so please feel free to offer any suggestions or ideas or experiences that you have. One tech sue, but it's affordable tech for nonprofits. It definitely is. You're not sharing any slides. OK, yeah, I guess it would be nice if I did share before I did that. Bear with me. Thank you very much. Here, one back to. Sorry, share. So I think this is the right one now. OK, yep. OK, thank you. Well, again, verbal tech for nonprofits. Just curious, is anybody in the list non-compliant on one C3? So everybody can take maximum advantage of tech soon. Laramie said this isn't something that's just local, by the way. And the first session that I did in October, I actually connected with a grave that is doing something very similar to what we're doing right now in Nigeria. And I hate to use the word Nigeria because it brings around a lot of connotation about spam and whatever. But there is a non-profit in Nigeria and it has a couple of for-profits attached to it to develop the build websites. And I actually used one of those for-profits to build a website for a regional economic development corporation that I'm a board member on. The total cost to build that website, which I ended up donating to the Economic Development Corporation, was four hundred and seventy dollars. So it wasn't like a major expense because they're trying to gain a reputation outside of Nigeria. There's one way of bringing people together. There's a huge amount of educational content on TechSoup. And we will spend a lot of time with that. But boy, if you haven't had a chance to just go to the TechSoup site and dig around, please do so because you're going to find lots of free, valuable content. And of course, the whole issue of TechSoup was a global community and it's a great opportunity to share information. This basically just shows you what's available through TechSoup. Basically, it falls into the hardware software side. Anything from hardware to injectors to hotspots. And here's some of the companies that contributed to TechSoup. Of course, what's the advantage? You know, why would a company do this? The way it works is basically a company makes it probably a tax deductible contribution of hardware and software to TechSoup. And then TechSoup distributes that for usually a very small processing fee to the nonprofit. For example, I know when I was at my last job at the Community Action Agency, we were able to get Gigabyte Cisco switches for very minimal cost, like a $12,000 switch cost us a couple hundred dollars, which was the processing fee that was, you know, TechSoup was passing on task. The actual cost of the switch would have been unaffordable to the nonprofit if we would have purchased it from TechSoup. The same with Microsoft's licensing. I didn't map to TechSoup's chain. And excuse me, Microsoft is changing some of its license and processes. So you'd want to check that out. But you can see this is just a small, when I say Dell and Adobe and QuickBooks and Cisco and Symantec. This is the small grouping of items that are available to go to their site. We can see all their products, what they're available and what the eligibility is to be able to draw down on their products. Very reasonable pricing level. Again, primarily available to Final 1C3's public libraries, the BLIMLS listing, friends of library groups, Final 1C3's and many foundations and churches. You again, the registration process is very straightforward. Registration is free. You submit a qualification document to the very short period of time. You get to turn around that you're eligible with the user ID and password and that could choose access to basically everything that's out there. They also have a lot of services available. And I don't get it on some of these already, but like here, they're managed IT services, the TechSoup courses, which are immeasurable. They do have consultation available, help desk services. Very reasonable cost. The biggest problem with a non-profit in IT, it's definitely better today. I've been in a non-profit business long enough when you wanted to swap your typewriter for a computer, you had to write a 10-page justification. It's like why did the computer was considered non-essential? Now, most funders today consider a computer to be essential equipment and the class associated with it is considered a supply versus an equipment box, which means it's much easier to purchase. Matter of fact, most non-profits are expected to have a website to be able to post certain documents. Grantors have accepted the idea that non-frontals need technology and technology is one of the few things in our life that has become less expensive over time. However, it's still a cost to the non-profit. Sometimes it's considered an admin cost, which is less than a non-profit business now that the administration dollars are usually very minimal when it comes to the non-profit. Anything over that five to seven to 10 percent is considered abusive or waste of resources. And it's got to be one of the things we'll talk about briefly today is some ways to deal with that. But again, all these things available through Texan. And then again, these webinars, how to write and some blogs all available through Texan. And that if you're a member, I'm sorry, that was a lot of redundancy. And if you're not a member, I hope it went with your appetite to go check out what is TechSoup and how can I benefit from it? What I wanted to do today primarily was have a dialogue with non-profit managers and staff regarding how do I bring technology into the non-profit? And what I've learned is as an executive director, nobody had to sell me about the advantages of technology. Maybe some of that was because I spent many years in the military and I didn't have the advantages of email in 1995. I was trying to sell to my commander in the military that there's we can go from communicating from seven in the morning till six o'clock at night to communicating 24 seven if we would go to an email console. So they gave me like a six thousand dollar budget to implement email. I'm talking about a five state reserve command in 1995. Within three or four months, my budget went from six thousand dollars to like a hundred thousand dollars. And the next year, I had a 20 million dollar budget for technology. When I left, it was 70 million dollars because we started to connect all of our sites together via fiber hot to for cybersecurity reasons and for the speed of being able to communicate. So I learned very quickly of the advantages, at least as a manager, sometimes staff can see those things as advantages, by the way. When I've learned that the advantages of technology in doing business and to me, I see it as a way of maximizing time as a way of getting most of us. The other thing that's very unaffordable in non-profit is staff. I founded by implementing technology. I could do more work with less staff, not that I wanted less staff. It's just that I couldn't afford more stuff. So I had to find a way to sell it. So neither was in the military or was in the non-profit. And the reason the non-profit was to the board. And I had a multi-county non-profit made up of nine members from each county. One third of that board was public elected officials. And one third was low income representatives. And one third was business. And so I had to sell them. And these are some of the things that I try to use to sell technology to the board of directors and the same in the military. The first and foremost, I don't care what kind of organization you're in, probably have a mission, whether it be the church or the business or whatever it is. And anything that you write related to technology should first and foremost, particularly how technology can help you accomplish that image. I think there's many other things like estimating the technology costs. Board members and other people in leadership and governance, they want to know what it's going to cost and don't be fooled by the fact that technology is just not a one time cost. Technology late moves. Other costs, whether it be a building or be staff, it has that there's non-building costs. And that today you have elections. You don't have to buy technology, police technology. So there's a way of building it into the budget every year where it's going to cost you. You don't have to have equipment on site to be done by cloud services. If you have the bandwidth to support cloud services, sometimes in rural areas, you don't. Another cap that I wear is I sit on two local school boards. And during the COVID period of time, that the school boards had issued 600 hot spots. So kids that were working from home could use the cell service to communicate because they did not have the broadband in their local areas. And we really did a lot of advocacy with our Congress people to say, rural America like the rest of the world in our urban areas are intended to broadband to keep, excuse me, to keep a to keep on an equal platform with people in the rural areas. Again, I think you have to be able to to be able to articulate or return on investment, how to save money over time through the use of technology. One that maybe often people don't think about is how does it improve customer experience? I don't care if that customer is a client or a consumer of a service or if they're a business client, I don't think that customer experience better in use of technology. I mean, that could be a ticket or a binder ticket about when to come for your next appointment. It could be a thank you note after the service is provided. But all those things are lending selves to the economy. It could be a church bulletin. Again, there's many ways of improving customer experience. Employee productivity, I think is another critical one. Everything from completing a time sheet online to being able to produce for employees with their actual odds are to make them get easier for them to communicate with their fears and external entities that they deal with. One that I'm very I've always been very financially conscious and non-profit. My nonprofit was anywhere from six to ten million dollars annually. So it was all about including organizational controls. In other words, how do we show that we're being accountable? How do we show transparency of the way we do business? And I felt with technology, it was easy for me to capture data, put data in a firm that was easily understood by the public and then put it out on the website where there'd be a 990 in the form of a annual tax document worth the annual word in terms of charge and diagrams. It just the technology just made it so much easier to demonstrate that we were being accountable to the general public. And finally, for managers. And when I say finally, there's probably so many others, but these are all the things that I found that managers and governance people wanted to hear. But I've always thought of information as a means for a manager or a leader making better decisions. How much over time did we spend in the last two weeks? If you think about that from a manual process, it's much more difficult than if you can just punch a couple of keys and see how much over time we spent. Or where are we with our budget today? Are we in our second month or already spent the first quarter's worth of our budget? I think the first and foremost sale is to show management that technology will allow them to be able to better control their organization, better achieve their mission. And that's the first sell. And so if I was a technology person in a nonprofit today or any business today, my first customer internally would be my manager. How can I do things that management would say, oh, this really helps me because if they buy it, they're going to dedicate the resources that you need to expand technology for actual organization. They're going to see it now. So let me stop there before I go on. And I know I'm going to already buy it after one. So what are your thoughts about these items for discussion management about buying? It has been, to me, the painful lesson of learning to work in an organization. I used to be like, oh, the quality of the work will speak for itself. And that, of course, was foolish naivete. Yeah, so the internal salesmanship, the internal work of getting people excited and on board and in alignment is truly half the work to get real change happening in an organization. So I just like that you're leading into this because because I always try and bypass it and then regret that choice. I've learned the hard way with many of these things, but that military experience I had where commanders saw how quickly they could communicate up and down the chain of command with technology was a major selling point. And I will say, I don't want to make it sound like it's all honey and sweet because those that have to respond to these quick requests for information are often not as happy as the person who requested the information and expected equipment. And because technology does have a tendency and I know all of them experience this to raise expectations and a urgency of reply. So, Eric, what's up? So I have a situation at my church for the last couple years, our church, like many, have had virtual services. And we're now just and we're now just getting back into in person, but also continuing with virtual. So we're putting together a audio visual system, cameras and microphones and what not. And we're just kind of band-aiding it together right now, but we want to buy some real equipment. So we're trying to sell that to the board. And we've tried to sell it one time so far. I got kicked back with needing more justification for it. So I wonder if you have any thoughts about that. I have been involved with several church projects going virtual. Most of them have bought into a service that provides all of the equipment and does all the scheduling and does all the hosting. And I'd be happy to get you information about that. And send it to you, but basically. They make sure that the service and I did I'm on carriage council to up. I have this flow where I can't say no when it comes to some of these organizations and so I sometimes don't work commit. But my church did this virtual thing. And so when I started to ask questions about it, they said, what we did was we just subscribe to this this church. This this organic this company that basically tends to virtual services and they put all of the equipment in for a fee. It's like a monthly fee. And and so if something goes bad, there's no there's no the church. People don't have to worry about servicing it or the broadcast or the onsite women that I can definitely I can reach out to the senior guys working with and say, give me more information about that and get it to you. But that's best I could do at this point. That it will that help Eric? Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, I think that will help. Well, there are, you know, it depends on what the cost is. Our border or border trustees is very cost resistant. And the thought is we also want to be able to rent out our facilities to others to come in to use it. So having our own equipment may be a good thing. Is it that you definitely options next definitely get on to the rural way of offsetting the costs. And so as a nonprofit, it's funny because you bring up another topic. And I'll just say it briefly, is every nonprofit is trying to raise money. And the old fashioned way, of course, is raffles, big sales, dinners, my nonprofit didn't do that. What my nonprofit nonprofit did is using my interns was write professionals, custom software, which we actually in the case of my organization, which we sold to the state of Pennsylvania. And for a five year contract, it was over a million dollars. And that was a way to generate revenue for the nonprofit that was a lot easier than doing a lot of the small profits that no one takes into time to account with the cost of the times. Now, we did do it as an unrelated business activity, which meant we paid tax on the profit. So we did jeopardize on final one C three stands. But it did give us a lot of credibility because people can understand or people that how can this nonprofit be developing software to the state of Pennsylvania? So I throw that out because it's out of the box saying what you made me think about it when you said you're going to do something and make it available to the public, basically, or other organizations that could be all nonprofits to raise some money. And that's a good way of saying it to your board. This will sound fun over a period of time. So I will ask those questions. We get back to you. I just want one last thing. That does TechSoup have any discounted audio visual equipment? You speak that directly? Yeah, there have been sometimes through the catalog, things like projectors have come through. But I would say it's it's not reliably there in the catalog. It's one of the things that comes and goes. But definitely worth taking a look there. The other thing is there's also things like a wireless hub. So if you don't necessarily have like good internet at that space, you guys should get on to like cell network modems instead. So I can sometimes be a backup way to get onto connections depending on where you're like hosting this event. Another option here is to consider reaching out to some of the major sound system companies. We did this in our chamber to see if they would donate certain types of sound equipment as a tax write off. And we were successful at getting some of that done. We didn't get everything wanted, but some of the major companies like Bones and Sonus and Clipsch, they all have donation programs that said that would be something else that I would just do a little bit of research in and try to explain, especially for church services, that would be the only thing they emphasize is they want to make more church services virtual because that definitely would be a tax deductible expense for them. OK, good. Thank you. Anything else on this one? I want to talk a little bit about allocating technology costs. Now, this one, I don't know if I'm going to fall on dead ears, but this or not. But I really, if you're running a nonprofit, one of the key things that always comes up is what's the technology budget? And if you're not building a technology budget, I think you're making a huge mistake. Just bugs opinion. That's all. Because if you don't build a budget, then you don't really know what the ongoing costs are going to be. And all of this stuff has a shelf life. So you're going to have annual costs for and I try to identify what some of the common technology costs are like the infrastructure in the building, which never cut corners with infrastructure, like the wiring, where the wireless access point to the switches, where the servers, where the broadband, if you have it in your area, the maintenance and provider fees, the backup solution, which a lot of people skip and virus spam filters, those kinds of things. If you don't have it's almost like building a home and doing it like on the dime. And then realize that when you put the roof on, you can't substantial that the rest of the house collapses because the infrastructure is bad. So I can't overemphasize this. I remember again, when I talked back to my army days, I was highly criticized for when at King time and at that point in time, I was overseeing technology implementation of the five states. I was highly criticized for making a decision to be finer optics across the fire state, five states. And this was in 1995 when a 10 metablai switch was considered very high speed, whereas today it's in the gigabytes. It's considered very high speed. But my view was is running cable or running five or across five states is going to be expensive. But if you're going to pull something, it gives you some future expansion. And if you just pull what you need for today, you're going to be doing it again in a pretty short period of time. So when you try to sell the infrastructure, you want to sell a vision that content continues to grow in size that everybody wants more speed every day that people get addicted to the use of technology that you're always going to be finding new uses for technology. And so you want the best you can afford now. And in cutting on infrastructure is the worst place you can cut because once it's done, it's not easily to replace. So having said that, and I group these because infrastructure is probably considered a common cost. Everybody who uses it is everybody who uses technology is sharing the infrastructure. So that type of cost from my perspective can be shared to be allocated among the pieces. So again, hope this makes sense. But in the sake of my team organization that I manage, Community Action, I always visualized as an umbrella. And under the umbrella of Community Action, there was the program called weatherization where you got weatherized people's homes and adult education, which I think everybody understands and workforce development. And we have 30 of these services under the umbrella of Community Action. In my view was is that all those programs under the umbrella were going to use the common infrastructure technology. So they should be able to pay a piece of it. And it would not be considered then something that the management using admin funds had to absorb. So the key was on the accounting side, determining how to best allocate the common costs. So we decided that we ended up using staff hours. So if a program had a hundred staff hours a year, they paid one hundredth of whatever the total proportion was of the total staff hours was our method of allocating staff of common costs. Now, there could be many other techniques. You may say, I don't want to use staff hours. I want to use any time equivalent or I want to use one hundred transactions. You can't use if you're getting any federal or state money. You cannot use certain things like you can't use total budget. That's why the disallowed costs, but there are a lot that are allowed and I only bring this topic up because if you try to put all of your technology costs into administration, then you're going to find that usually technology is unaffordable. You have to be able to sell the technology is required to provide most of the services of the organization. And if those services are considered to benefit a consumer, then they're not really administrative in nature. So I hope that makes sense that don't get stuck with the paradigm that technology is an administrative cost. And I've had this tested many times over time. We implemented technology in my nonprofit and it always came out. That makes sense. If you need technology to do face management, then the tech that technology is not considered administrative. Now, if you need technology to do accounting, that is administrative. So think about the use of the technology. They figure out how to allocate it. And then is it a program or administrative cost? I had a controller who was going to be on the call today in the last minute she she texted me saying I can't do this today. Because I wanted her to get into some more detail. But I think that if you just think about the concept that I articulated on its slide, have a budget, identify what the common costs are, determine of the common cost, how do you allocate it out to the various components of your organization? And then of those components, what's administrative and what isn't administrative? And it's all based on how to choose. If it's used in a program manner, it's program costs. If it's used in an administrative manner, it's an administrative cost because most nonprofits have very little administrative costs to work with, maybe 5%, 3%, 7%, 10% administrative costs. Any questions on that one? Does it make sense? This I'm shocked when I go, one of the things I did when I left my job as executive director is I became a consultant to other nonprofits and helped me with technology. And I was shocked when I go in and I took the budget. First of all, many of them did not have a technology budget, which I think is a huge incentive. You need to be able to capture what your technology costs are. The same way you do your building costs, your personnel costs, your insurance costs, all those things that are going to be reoccurring every year because they will need to be replaced and upgraded and so on. And then the next thing was I usually found them all in the admin budget. And it's made up most of your costs because they're in the admin budget. So I decided this was something that really needed to be looked at. Another thing that I wanted to just talk about in a few minutes we have left is matching technologies to the environment. And the reason why I threw this one in here is I think you have to consider what kind of organization you have and what technology do you really need? One of the things we've already hit on, for example, is in the earlier days, all technology was basically on site. You had servers on site. You had email servers, you had application servers. You had a lot of infrastructure on site. And that now in today's environment, a lot of that hardware doesn't need to be on site if you have decent bandwidth. If you have decent bandwidth, then you can do a lot of this stuff through cloud computing where you're using a server that's located in some server cloud, which again, I know it's hard to articulate for some people, but it could be a server located in Madison, Wisconsin or any place else in the country. It doesn't really make any difference with the speed that bits and bytes travel. And that some of the benefits of the cloud computing is they take care of the hardware it needs upgraded. They take care of it. If you're worried about backups, they take care of backups. So you offset a lot of the technology functions and tasks to the cloud-based organizations maintaining your equipment with Microsoft Office Suite or with the Google Office Suite. A lot of that can be done in the cloud. So you don't have to worry about having these applications on a server internally and making sure they're all current, making sure the applications are current, making sure the operating systems are current. They're always being patched to the sake of security reasons. The another solid advantage of that is they're available to you from anywhere. They're available to you from your home. If you want to make them available for off site, they can be locked down just for certain locations where they can be made available to use anywhere in the country or anywhere outside the country. So that's some of the basics. Now, if you're a huge corporation, maybe you determine I need a bank of service internally. I have the staff to maintain those things internally. We're rating our account. So we want to do that internally. So you really need to analyze what you want to do with technology to what your technology needs are. And again, there's a lot of people out there that can help you do that, including myself. One of the last jobs I did for another agency located actually in the Delaware County part of the state was they put together a matrix. And on that matrix, I said, basically, here's the technology task. Here's something I think that should be done by your technology staff. Here's just here's something that I think should be contracted out. Here's something I think you should go get an intern to do and try to figure out, like, what are these tasks that you've done and where do they best sit in terms of what you do? So that was just some other way of trying to make people think more about because if you get a product, if you bring a provider in there, they're going to not necessarily do what's in your best interest. They're going to do what's in their best interest and we'll go to further them because you're not necessarily knowledge. So one of your responsibilities is to at least come up to speed where you can ask good questions and feel comfortable about the answer. But say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I see now your point. Otherwise, you'd get rebutted into a decision that may not be the best fit for you. Any questions on this one? I mentioned this already in something so we'll spend a long time. I always this force multiplier terms, the military term, using technologies and force multiplier. I have to add when I pick this term out of the mid 90s, we didn't think about technology as being a threat. But it's definitely something you need to think about today. Technology is a force multiplier. But if it's not implemented correctly, it's also a threat. You have to have read about hat games, ransomware. One of the people I invited on his call today was a technology director at a local school district. And last year, his his servers were taken under ransomware. And the insurance company and the paying about $15,000 a year by the way for cybersecurity. And I sit on the school board, by the way. And this year, the cheapest thing they could find for cybersecurity was $57,000. And part of that was because they had a ransomware match here, which between the school district and the insurance company paid on $150,000. And I know you probably don't think about this, but if you get any kind of federal or state money, data is covered by a lot of rules and regulations at the federal and state level. For example, when you put two pieces of data together, like your name and your phone number, it's considered personally identifiable information and technically should be encrypted from the workstation level the whole way up. And I know in my school district, it's not encrypted any place. And one of the reasons it isn't is because it's not that easy to do and nobody thinks about it. When you have hundreds and hundreds of workstations like the school district does, it becomes hard to do. I know I'm downsliding. It's always, in my perspective, knowing what your threats are is as important as knowing what your benefits are. You're hoping the benefits outweigh the threats and they surely can if you take precautions. And the biggest precaution you can take in technology is educating the user, because I don't care what you put into place from a technology perspective. If you don't do education, it isn't going to make any difference. Somebody that the biggest fault line can have is the user. But yeah, definitely technology improves internal and external communications and collaborations. I believe technology should always be used for decision support systems. I think that's one of the key factors in being able to analyze data and information and making better decisions. Obviously, in today's world, you can use social media to enhance the organization, promote the organization, assist in fundraising. I think this whole issue of improving customer service should be another time priority. And lastly, a great productivity we already talked about. So that's where I see the benefits are. And again, you must consider the threats. I don't know if I put one down here. Yeah, I guess I did for threats. It definitely will change your work environment. Technology will, I think, most probably change your work environment. People rely on it every day. I've been in environments where the power goes out, where the infrastructure doesn't work. The Internet's out. People are sitting there for linear terms because they're so reliant on technology that they don't have any backup systems to go to a manual process. I already mentioned that users must train in these controls. Again, a big control freak. You have to have a technology plan. You have to know when your hardware and software need updated. Encryption is a big factor if you're dealing with PII data, personally identified information. Equipment must be maintained. You have to have some kind of standard. I would not let people be installing all kind of software on equipment. It should there should be some standard that said everybody's going to use Microsoft Office. And before everybody's going to be using Google desktop software, because the more you allow the standard to deviate, the harder it will be to control it. So that's today's presentation. I hope you felt that it was valuable. And I appreciate any feedback you have as well as any topics you'd like to see us cover for the next time we do this, which I hope will be no later than 60 days from today. Robert, about risk assessments, it would be good to talk about password controls and security around passwords, I think. I know we end up using the same password and it's shared among people and it's really a terrible situation. In my organization, because we were writing software for the state, we had to implement the state's password control, which was random passwords consisting of upper lowercase numbers, special symbols that was required to do business with the state of Pennsylvania. People hate the password change every 60 days. People hate it down to. But it's there's nothing worse than having a data breach. And then you have to. One of the reasons the schools data, it costs them so much money is every user on the school system had to be provided with free. Monetary of their data from like North state of security, life lock and those kinds of things that you probably heard about, they had to be provided free to every user because to make sure that their data had not gone into their own hands, saying that's one of those things about user trading. And I think if the user understands what risks the organization has and what personal risk they being how all of a sudden it is a pain in the butt that they get better at using password protection. So really good point, Garrett. What else would you like to see us talk about? The whole cybersecurity thing is not going away. And I think with what's going on in the Ukraine and the threats that are being made by Russia that we haven't even begin to see, see the cybersecurity attacks that we're probably going to see as time goes by. It's one of the few things they can do, basically, to retaliate. And who would have thought your local unks of 20 areas sold in Strip would be attacked with the ransomware? You know what I mean? We don't think about it. It happens locally and a lot of times, even on your own home computer, particularly if you're using your own computer to remotely access your work data, then your home computer on to have some kind of security system installed on it, too. Really, that be your or something just to help make sure that you're protecting it. And there's a lot of ways to look at an email and say, I don't think this key from Microsoft or I don't think this key from Symantec and there's a ways to study the URL that it came with the to the address that it was attached you to say, that's not an additional Microsoft email. But before you click the link to the email, which then causes a lot of problem on your computer, particularly if you have no vulnerability software on your computer. Thank you. Well, I hope you guys find this useful. And please, you have my email. If you think of any other topics, shoot in my way. If you think of any other organization that could benefit from this kind of information, please forward maybe today's recording and encourage them to register. The more we get involved, the more we can form basically like a support network of our own, feel free to reach out. If you have questions or comments and if I can answer any or if I can't, many of my former interns are working for three letter agencies or security. Two of them are school technology directors. One has 17 individuals working for them at the school district. We have a lot of resources that we can tap into on our own. And so it's a way of getting some free advice and I'm reaching out to you on the top. It's something we talked about and I have to read it and I'll send it back to you. Thank you. Thank you guys very much. I appreciate you participating today and help us spread the word and I hope to see more people involved and I look forward to next meeting. Thank you. Thanks guys, on my.