 Well, hi there friends, welcome to a NetSquared program. You're gonna be here for the messy three month transition. We'll actually be renaming the NetSquared Vancouver group, which has had that name for over 10 years now. And we'll be turning ourselves into TechSoup Connect over the next little while. You will surely get an email from me, but if you see something that says TechSoup Connect instead of NetSquared for the next couple of months, roll with it. It's gonna be totally fine. Same group, slightly different name. I did start the recording, but if I don't put that there, I definitely will not. So we're into this time. Hi, I'm Eli, I'm your NetSquared and TechSoup Connect organizer and these chapters that I'm part of are a program of TechSoup. This NetSquared Vancouver is actually part of a global network of Tech for Good Meetups. And all of these meetups are actually part of the under the umbrella of TechSoup, which is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits get, implement and use technology effectively. When I said a global network, I totally was not lying. Check this out. There are actually chapters all over the place, whether that's going to be Toronto, whether that's going to be in New Zealand, whether that's gonna be in London. We likely have a local Tech for Good community for you. Right now we're meeting of course online, but the day will come when you're gonna get to nerd out with your fellow nonprofits in person as well. Like every community, we have some rules. One, we welcome everyone. Two, we put our community first because we're here to support each other. Rule three, this is a nonprofit meetup, not a technology meetup, although we will definitely use technology as the lens we use for our discussions. Next, we invite your participation. We think that everyone has something to learn and contribute and I'll tell you more about how we can put you to work. And then finally, we treat each other with kindness and respect. So that means before you put something into that chat window, one of the ways you can participate, just ask yourself, am I bringing my kindest and most empathetic self into that interaction? And if the answer is yes, type away, we trust you, but we totally need your help. So we're a group of volunteers coming up with event ideas every month and I'll be honest, ideas are hard. Finding great case studies and experts is a challenge. So if you've got a great event idea and know someone who might be a good presenter, if you wanna become one of the chat moderators here to help make these events run smoothly, if you wanna help promote our events online, reach out and I would be happy to find a great role for you within this community. Communities also run because you've got some sponsors to help it. So our parent sponsor is TechSoup, which provides platforms of anti-ideas, scheming and plotting. And TechSoup is like yourself, a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits get access to hardware, software, and services to help you succeed with technology. The way that happens is TechSoup is partnered with most of the major technology companies, the Google, so Microsoft, the Adobe's, the Amazon's, the Zoom's, the Dell's, the Lenovo's, the Adobe's, which I've probably said twice now. And so what happens is you create a free TechSoup account. That proves that you're a nonprofit and once you've done that, you basically get instant verification to free or discounted services from any of those partners. So think of it as being able to write a grant application and then use that exact same grant application for the next foundation and the next foundation and the next foundation because we've standardized that process of applications. And just to give you a sense of practically what that could mean for you as a nonprofit, I mocked up a savings or an organization with 10 staff. And as you can see, it's really significant. There is some real value in creating your free TechSoup account. And if you have one, to dig a little bit deeper and see if there's additional savings for you. And of course, we can't answer every question in this event, so we also have the TechSoup forums. So NetScript Vancouver, soon to be called TechSoup Connect Vancouver, I will stumble on that for months, is sponsored by a number of pretty amazing organizations. So first of all, we've got IATS payments, who has sponsored our in-person post-event social. They'll basically buy the first round of beer or wine or whatever you like in our live events. That sponsorship of course is on hold, but we'll be taking advantage of it soon. And if you don't know IATS payments, they're actually based here in Vancouver and they help you with all of your online payment processing needs, whether that's on your online donation forums or hooking into something like your sales force instance or helping you create forms. Basically, if you want to accept a credit card or a bank transfer, they have got great solutions for you. And because they're based in Vancouver, it means you can lean on them if something isn't quite working for you because you've got this, you can walk into their office if you really wanna do. We also sponsored by a one day website, which makes sure that our WordPress website is up and running and functional and I'm grateful for that. And our friends at the Nonprofit Technology Network again have been sponsoring food and other things at our events when we get to be together in person. But now let me get out of the way. Today's guest, Singular, is gonna be Maggie Milland who is gonna be talking about graphic recording and how we can use that for building equity and community in this virtual age. Maggie's gonna tell you a little bit more about her background in a moment, but I think you just need to buckle up because I've seen some of the samples of her work and I think it's going to be a really powerful tool for you to consider as you think about how you can bring people together into conversation. So with that, let me get out of the way and pass it over to our friend, Maggie, one moment. Tabs, this, that, sharing screen is done and it's over to you. Thank you so much, Eli. Let me know if you can't see anything, if there's anything funky there. I'll try and keep an eye on the chat, but yeah, it's so great to be here with everybody and I actually see quite a few familiar names and I'm really excited to be able to be presenting in front of friends and just to say hello to everyone virtually. So thank you so much for the opportunity and again, I think it's such an interesting time that we're living in where we're trying to connect and we're trying to build community and we're all part of these amazing organizations that are trying to do great things for individuals in our community. So how do we actually promote equity when we're online for the most part or how do we get more engaged with our community and create sustainable solutions and have better conversations? And I really want to introduce you to or delve more into graphic recording for those of you who aren't familiar. So the other thing I was gonna say is just that, you know, I would introduce myself and go really into depth about that, but you know, this really isn't about me, it's about you, it's about the work you do, the graphic recording in action and it's really about storytelling. So I'm gonna start with a story that many of you can probably relate to and I hope it doesn't like make your blood pressure rise a little bit, but it might, so warning layer. Also did not plan on the animations, it just kind of came with it. So, okay, so picture this back in December. Remember when we're all pretending like we were going on a holiday break but checking our emails? Cause that was me. I had this nonprofit leader reach out to me and she's wonderful. She goes, hey, so I didn't know that you did graphic recording and could I run a potential project by you? And I was like, oh yeah, of course, let's do it. So we're just hopping on this call and during the initial meeting, she laid out this literally impossible task and I love her for it because she said, can we run our first online all staff event of almost 300 participants? Can we keep everyone super engaged? Can we also create this visual output that kind of shows the unique identities of our new structure? So each different part, but also can we figure out what our vision looks like as an overall organization? She said, oh, by the way, this is the first time that many of the staff have been, they will be meeting each other. So we also have a month and a half to do this and let's go. So of course I said yes, absolutely. We had this plan laid out and I went to my notebook and hashed it out. My colleague, Jesse, is online and she was part of this project and I'm so grateful because it became very clear that this was gonna be no small feat, but we're up to the challenge. So this organization staff, they worked tirelessly to serve communities across British Columbia and beyond and the thing that we ran up against was why would they want to spend several hours in a virtual workshop when they could be out helping their clients with the daily needs? So we had to create this event that focused on the clients and how each of their individual actions as staff every day that mattered to the overall organization. So I love a good metaphor. And as I show this, this is kind of what the outcome became. So the metaphor that I'm going with is that you take a piece of fabric, each thread is made from fibers and the threads are woven together to make this stronger material. And I decided we'd hold three individual sessions, one for each group, so that each staff member had this opportunity to talk about their work and how it related to the organization's values. So you'll see, I purposely made it pretty small and tried to make it non-identifying as well, but in each of these visuals, you have this part where they're able to talk about some of the values that they all share. And the stories were very unique and yet they had some common thread. And I was simultaneously during these workshops creating this visual. So for each of them, they had this reflection of a conversation, but the anonymity was preserved. So while each person's stories came into building this common thread, they were all created so that we can take bits and pieces from their stories, weave them into this common fabric of the organization. And then we held this fourth session and that was where we talked about us as individual regions and then us as an organization. So what do we all share in common while preserving that uniqueness that we all contribute to this organization? So in this way, we were able to build the foundations of their new identity through co-creation. And we also recognize the uniqueness. And it was just such a powerful experience for all of them. And they said, we need to put this on all of the mugs and t-shirts and everything we can find. I don't know if I would be able to do something like that but I thought that was really great to show that 300 people could connect online. So this realization of how to co-create has been with me from quite a young age. And it's really because of my sister Kelly, she's my older sister that I've always been pretty acutely aware of how important it is to include especially the folks on the sidelines. Like they don't have the loudest voices. Maybe they don't speak English because they on top of, sorry, maybe they do speak English but on top of other languages. Or maybe they are quietly thoughtful and like to let things sink in. And then they tell someone, this is what I found from this conversation. Or maybe they don't see themselves agreeing with people who have the same or people who have different socioeconomic or racial backgrounds as them. And they don't know how to express themselves. So for Kelly, that was, it was in that she was fiercely proud to be part of her high school and middle school growing up. But her peers were often the ones that were trying to make her feel unwelcome because she was different. Kelly's autistic and was repeatedly bullied in high school. So just made me to feel unwelcome. And it was almost like she was that stray strand in the fabric that was our high school's culture. So when I led this anti-bullying campaign in my high school and invited hundreds of individuals to reflect upon how we wanted our high school to stand up to bullying, how they played a part in that, they signed their names as an act of solidarity on this mural that I created. And it was so powerful because they signed their names right beside my sister's name. So she could actually see herself woven into the identity of our community. And later that year, Kelly and our mom and I were invited to the White House's first summit on bullying prevention. And there was this powerful moment where she shared her story and I spoke with global leaders in the former Secretary of State's office and we were urging them to listen to young people on these matters. Like we are that essential thread as well. And I mean, I was just one person woven into that movement but I'm proud to say that, and this was back in Minnesota, proud to say that Minnesota went from having that 37 word policy on bullying to having a 45 page mandate and process the following year. So this is all to say that community change is possible when you create opportunities for people to see themselves as an essential part of that conversation. Fun fact, I actually lost my phone in the White House and they had to mail it back to me. I don't think they would do that these days. And I don't think that phone was really worth it in the end. But again, that was such a powerful thing for my sister to be able to be heard and part of that conversation and that change. So I mean, at this time, I didn't know what graphic recording was and I was just really passionate about using visuals as a way to unite people around a cause or understanding but I wanted to share with you some insights into why graphic recording really does help us connect and it builds better solutions as a community and we promote equity within our gatherings and our documentation. So our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and that's so important because you think about all these black and white types of documents that we have come through our inboxes or on our desks day after day and maybe you're like me and your brain lets out a little sigh and it kind of says, okay, let's set to work, let's actually read this document but you kind of dread it a little bit and maybe for some of you, it kind of collects some virtual dust and you don't actually read a document, it's heavy. And it maybe doesn't represent you or the people that you serve. It feels like work. So, and I think that's the key word but when you have a visual summary of notes or you have some visual to hold on to, you're intrigued and you're actually looking at the colors and why is there meaning with that and what are the people doing and who are they? What are the key words? It's not linear and I was just in a workshop actually last night where we talked about a linear process being very westernized whereas community change is itself non-linear and more of a system. So that's just something to consider as well. Another reason is retention. Raise your hand if you are like me and forget things really easily because I can't remember something that I've actually listened to or read recently whereas when I visualize it or if I look at something that's an actual visual piece of information I understand so much more of it and that's coming through in a statistic where we only retain about 10 to 20% of what's written or spoken whereas we retain more like 65% of visual information. So there's no wonder we love social media. I mean, it's visual and it draws you in and then you keep scrolling for hours and then you realize it's one in the morning but it's for that reason that we love visuals as people and maybe you're not a visual person or identify as one but there's another stat and forgive the awkward half person in there but it's really to show that there are over 60% of people who identify as a visual thinker. So I know we don't necessarily have like reaction buttons but I think you can send emojis, right? So if you are a visual thinker I'd love for you to put like a thumbs up or something in the chat. And yeah. You can totally go crazy with emojis in the chat and here's a power tip for you. If colon and then start typing from text it's sort of gonna autocomplete for you to like sort of search for the emoji so it'll pop up right there. Now go wild friends. Awesome. Yeah, thanks Eli. And Felice, I'm going to get to some great resources as well but you're making me think of some even further ones that I don't have on here. So, all right. So this is just, I'm going to show you just how I've done a graphic recording in the past. So what is it about graphic recording that makes it such a unique tool and what even is it? So in this case, a video is worth maybe a million words. So here's a time lapse of a graphic recording that I did a couple of months ago for a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant on community engagement. So as a graphic recorder, I do three things simultaneously. I listen for key themes, connections, aha moments and then I synthesize that information and I visualize it and it's kind of whatever pops into my head I just always thought like that. It's not like I have things that are set. It's kind of a malleable process. And I typically use my iPad so you're seeing me working on an iPad and I just use a playback function in Procreate. I'll get to some more of those pieces a little bit later so on the tools. But I normally do this in like live sessions where I show my progress. So let's say in that example I showed you a bit ago it was where I was in those three different sessions and we would have moments where people would do breakout sessions. I'd be kind of a fly on the wall and then I would present back at different moments in the meeting so that they had touch points where they could say, oh yeah, this was our aha moment or I wanna build off of that comment. And so it's pretty amazing to be able to use just what's coming up in my head as a visual thinker but you also don't have to be an artist in order to use some of these aspects of graphic recording. So I'll get into more of that as well but I wanted to focus on four different reasons why graphic recording is such an important tool when it comes to equity and community building. Number one, it prioritizes accessibility. Number two, it helps to foster trust. Number three, it builds collective ownership and then four, it promotes deeper understanding for long lasting change. So although I can't share this visual with you because of it's just a sensitive information, there's a great example of these elements at play that I just talked about and you can see on the screen. So it's from a feedback session that I did for a nonprofit legal service organization. They serve immigrant and refugee women who seek help to get out of domestic violence situations. And it was probably one of my favorite sessions ever just because I mean, if you think about how personal these experiences are and how important it was for someone to share their experience and how they got this legal help to get out of a situation they were desperate to get out of, I wanted to be able to show them the documentation of this conversation, of this feedback instead of it being typed on a screen that was facing away from them and then they wouldn't necessarily ever see that document again. It's almost like their conversation goes up to the ethers. I was able to be in the space sharing this visual as it's being created, but I could also preserve the anonymity. So someone sharing sensitive information can still be represented in themes and visuals while not being shown as the individual who said this or that. And then the other pieces that we had some other people on the video, they weren't in person in the room and so they were able to still access this conversation. There's a lot of ways that graphic recording can help bring people into a conversation who wouldn't normally be there. So whether or not they have a learning disability that makes it harder for them to view things or process information. So I'm processing that information for them or visuals can really help people kind of connect the dots and think about things in a different way or maybe they're learning English and we're speaking in English and we're representing things in the English language, but they learn two other languages on top of that. So what might we be able to do? Well, we have common themed visuals that can help them understand the conversation better and they can provide more feedback and incorporate their own understanding into that conversation. And then the other thing is that the cool thing is to see people building off of each other's stories. So during breaks these women in this particular feedback session, they would say, oh my gosh, this is beautiful. Like, I love how you've captured my story and that was so powerful. I mean, there were some tears during the moments and so to have something that was so powerfully connecting them back to their conversation and their experiences was pretty amazing for me to be part of. And now, even the long lasting change piece that I wanna touch on, it's that the visual now resides in their organization's office. They, I think they laminated it and made it all beautiful and it sits there, but it also was used to ask for continued financial support from their stakeholders to say, thank you for what you've done already. This is where we're going in the future. All right, so I wanna go into kind of how I use this in my current role. So I'm the community activation and facilitation lead at Realize Strategies. Realize is based in Vancouver and I know some of you from the work that I've done with Realize Strategies. So thanks so much for your support as well. And I do a lot of work just understanding the needs of our community because as a consulting from Realize works for people to build better resilient organizations in the purpose-driven sector. And I love using this tool, graphic recording to create engaging conversations with diverse groups of people. We uncover aha moments and just understand ownership as an asset to a community and to an organization. So for co-creating something together, there's more of a chance that you are going to have people following through with their action steps, following through with understanding how they play a part in the organization and there's just further engagement. So this was from Real Talk, which was one of the initiatives that I started at Realize and it's just an opportunity for purpose-driven leaders to co-create solutions to really challenging problems or just challenges in general. And this one was on diversity, equity and inclusion. And what was so interesting is that we had a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, it's my friend Dante and he led us through this kind of personal action, organization-wide action activity and then we made commitments to how we were going to promote DEI work in our own community and our organization. And the thing that we found is that we created this completely new way of thinking about DEI. So diversity, we paired that with hiring and inclusion, we paired that with our governance and culture. And then the last aspect of our organization is procurement and that was really about like our community and how do we promote equity within our community? So to redefine something visually was so helpful for people to understand how they could adopt DEI in their own practices by putting it into different bite-sized pieces. And then we broke out into small groups and were able to use this as a tool to record some of the key findings and then put this out to our networks. All right, so how can you personally use graphic recording? So Eli and I were trying to figure out, can I like share my iPad screen or something like that and just show you like how I use my iPad but I'll do it kind of by picking up my iPad and showing you, but I had this emergency slide for you just in case and it came in handy. So there's a wide range of reasons that you can use graphic recording. And I'll go through a few of these examples. Impact reports are super interesting because I think more and more people need to use them and even if you are not someone who receives grants, you are interested in how do we impact our community and how can we visualize this? So in impact reports, some of the clients that I've had I ask them, how do you want your people to be represented? How do you want to show your efforts but also make it really understandable like what you are doing? What's the story that you are trying to tell? So there's an aspect of storytelling. And again, it kind of hearkens back to this black and white document or even multi-page document. I'm sure you've all had to deal with some kind of like 24-page impact report before but what if it was just one image that could share the story of what you do and how you did that year over year or maybe just over this past year? So I had someone who was a large cooperative organization and they had their impact report for 2020 and they said, we wanna show that it was a celebratory year. Yes, there was a lot of struggle and strife and it was a terrible year for so many people but we wanna show that because of our values we were able to create a community and a place for all of our supporters, our members and we were able to grow in the industry that they were in. And so 2020 for us was a big celebration for showing that we were able to be resilient. And so we had this great story of, what are the visuals of your people in action, your members and your stakeholders? Instead of it just saying the name, we visualized that because of the diversity that they had in their organization and their community in feedback sessions. So we talked a little bit about that in the one case study example that I gave but another one is from when I first started actually doing graphic recording. I'm completely self-taught disclaimer but I think I've always been a graphic recorder at heart. I was always that kid doodling in school but I retained everything I heard just because that's how my brain worked. And there was this feedback session for an ESL program with the UBC Learning Exchange. And that's where I started graphic recording because it was just something that my mentor there had mentioned, hey, you should try and do this. So I was able to be involved in their feedback session and they invited the community members who actually are the ESL teachers. And they said, we want you to visualize our conversation. So then they were able to show, they were able to be more involved because we weren't just giving a survey out. We had a conversation, people could come to a space and see the graphic recording tracking kind of what we were talking about but the high level of conversation. And then we had a break in the middle and I had all these people come up to me saying, oh, can you add this? Can you put this there? Oh, that was so cool. And the organizer came up to me later and said, this is the most interactive our feedback sessions have ever been. So just consider, when you have a feedback session, how are you making that accessible to the people you're trying to get feedback from? Are your stakeholders actually able to show up? Are they able to feel like they are being honored and their information is being recorded in a way that they can see or that they can give feedback on? So I was asked people, is this accurate? Is this representing you? Please let me know so I can change it. And even that gives people the opportunity to see this not as an art piece, but something that's malleable, something that they are building as important people in these sessions. So I loved that session though, that was great. Workshops, I kind of touched on real talk, but another thing is you can do this during a workshop. So what I'll do is I'll share my screen. So let's see if this will... Shift. Okay, so I don't know if you can see this very well, but what I'm gonna do is I'll kind of show you what I was going to do on... Sorry, Matt, if you could turn off the screen share for a moment, that would give us a chance for your video to get bigger. Yes, thank you. Okay, so this was just what I was going to do. I was gonna show you that I use things like layering so that you can kind of work with different colors and different shapes and things like that. And so I'm drawing each piece individually and then just making a collective image. So yeah, I just kind of... I don't know if that's really helpful, but I can get into that a little bit more. But when it comes to workshops, it's really helpful to be able to then share my screen. And even after the fact, we have some time-lapse replay action going on. So you can see how I created it. This is very brief, but this can also be helpful because if you see a document and it's already done, you can't necessarily see the progression. So that can be helpful for people to see as well. Plus I've just created a cool animated gift for myself to like share it through all my social channels and look amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can create gifts and everything. There's an animation assist function on there and I've created a couple of gifts. It's definitely hard. So I need to practice more at that. I'll go back to the presentation. So I've mentioned grants are great as well because I think you can underestimate the power of a visual and how even the process of creating that visual can bring up some really amazing statistics, feedback, representation, and it gives people a sense of what you're really working towards. So I've had people do grant applications or use this as part of their grant applications. And then the other thing is stakeholder recognition. So using this either in combination with an impact report or just saying thank you, like this is what we've accomplished. Here's a visual of what we've done together. All right, so I promised you all tools. So I'm just gonna go through a few things that I wanted to share with you. When we talk about equity, something that is so important to note is that when you are working with visuals, there are some things to note. Contrast checking is really important so that you can create something that people aren't gonna be able to, that they will be able to see and if they can't distinguish the words from the background, that can be an issue so you can check your contrast. And then there's a palette generator that helps with figuring out what your colors are gonna be. So if you're interested in graphic recording, check that out. I use Procreate and I also use, you'll see it in my screen, but you'll see that I have an iPad Pro, it's a 10 and a half inch 256 gigabytes and I have heard that Fresco and Illustrator for iPad are really great as well. So if you are curious to just try those out, I know Procreate's like eight bucks on the App Store, so it's very accessible for you to just check out and just try for yourself. In terms of other resources and people and tools and things like that, there's a Facebook group that I'm part of for all the Vancouver graphic recorders and facilitators. There are some amazing Indigenous graphic recorders and Sam Brad from Drawing Change is a great resource. I've just, I've loved his work and Ava Orloff as well. They've really started the movement here in Vancouver and I would suggest that if you are looking to engage groups around a topic like that pertains to an Indigenous group, look for an Indigenous graphic recorder or maybe it has to do with something completely different, but if you have representation from an organization or from a group of people that you want to be involved in that conversation, and I would really highly recommend reaching out to, I mean, I can connect to you or anybody from that group, Sam Brad, Drawing Change, I'll just put those people out there. Thank you, so those questions here, which is one is what's the name of the Facebook group again? Yeah, I think you have to be a graphic recorder facilitator, so it's like Vancouver Area Graphic Recorder or Graphic Facilitators or something. But yeah, I feel free, I have my contact information later on too, but yeah, if you are curious, then I can definitely let you know. But yeah, I also wanted to share this with you. So we have this really great initiative and kind of programming within our organization at Real Life Strategies. So Jesse and I, Jesse's on the call, thanks, Jesse for being here. We do innovation hours and this is just a way for us to be creative and grow in our creative confidence and as well as just understanding how to use innovative practices or think differently about something. So I did a graphic recording innovation hour and I basically brought my whole team through graphic recording and what that felt like. And so I created a little card where you can actually practice this with your organization, with your friends, with your colleagues, whatever you feel like, but that can be found on our website. So I've put the link there. If you need a screenshot, if you need to find that, but I would really recommend it, it was pretty fun. It was just another way to practice visualizing even if you aren't a visual thinker or someone who draws, we did stick figures, so don't worry. It's really about connecting with someone else and understanding and listening to their stories. All right, so I wanted to make sure that we have some time at the end for questions and comments, but I just wanted to leave you with a few more thoughts as well as just here's my information, put a little coffee where my email is, just because I love coffee chats, feel free to email me and just say, hey, I'd love to pick your brain or let's talk more. You can also find the innovation hour pieces on graphic recording on the Realize website and say hello on LinkedIn. I always love connecting with people, so there's my information, but I wanted to leave you with a couple of thoughts. So the first one is think about how you want people to be represented when you are meeting, when you provide visuals or even documents to your people, to your stakeholders, to your community. Because I think it's so easy for us to write something and have it be just this black and white document, but when you put the people that you serve at the core of what you do, almost like a storybook, like they are the protagonist. How are they being represented and how do you think about them as someone in a story? Is the story being told from first person point of view? What does this person look like? How are they feeling? It's really design thinking or human-centered design principles when you think about it in this way. And we know that representation matters. Ownership and belonging is the backbone of our community. It's our way forward together. So what I want to leave you with is this. You have a typed document that's black and white and you don't have something that shows someone that you serve and they are older or they're a young person or maybe they're autistic or they're black or brown. This is a way for you to have them tell their story because graphic recording is a way to represent that whole picture and people are so complex. So I would really encourage you to think about how to visualize people and the people you serve, the people you work with yourselves and tell stories in a way that represents that whole picture. And with that, I will hand it over to Eli and all of you for questions, but I wanted to sincerely thank you for listening and I hope that you learned a few things today. Lovely, thank you so much. And I think there's a lot of excitement on like what we can do next around this. So the first question I've got here comes from Felice Lam who might be able to come on mic. Felice, do you want to try that out? Did I come back to your question? What happens when you put poor people on the spot? All right, in the meantime, I'll go and give this a shot. So the question is what are some resources which could be like books, websites, podcasts that you would recommend to like help to get us go deeper into graphic recording, learn and see some really inspiring examples? Oh gosh, I have like a whole, I've like a bunch of things bookmarked. I might have to get back to you on that like for podcasts and things like that because it's so visual. But let me see if I have, so I have this book. I might stop, well, I'll stop sharing for a bit. So this one, I have this book and it's the facilitators guide to participatory decision-making. It's not graphic recording, but that might be helpful or of interest to you. And yeah, Lauren, that's a great idea. I will give you some opportunities to check out more resources as I gather them. Again, I'm really bad with just like reading information, but I know what it looks like in my head. Very visual, to a fault. And then, ooh, that's great, yeah. Thank you so much, Eli, for putting the book in there. Let me think. If something comes up, I'll pop it back into chat or think of it again. But yeah, there's folks like InkyThink are, they're a great graphic recording and facilitation group. So Sam Brad from Drawing Change. They're basically this network in Vancouver and across Vancouver that have amazing work that they do. And then, yeah, so I can also just, yeah, send a few more of those things. I think there was another question from Alyssa about the markers that I use. So I use Neuland. It's, here it's, they're a German company. So I always have my markers shipped to me. I have a huge bag of them. And what I love about them is that they are water soluble. For the most part, you can choose if you want water soluble or not. But they have these, the nibs, like so where the ink goes in, it's refillable. And so it's a lot more eco-friendly than just buying and chucking markers all the time. That's kind of what people swear by. So I got a bunch myself, I love their colors. And so yeah, they have more of like a, more of a, an eco-friendly approach to what they have. And they're just really high quality. You can, you have like ink bottles you can just reinsert ink into. Cool, well thank you. I've got another question here, which is some people are just curious about like, what are some places you might go to find visual assets or resources? If you maybe aren't someone who is a confident artist, but maybe could like collage things or like maybe find a good source of like icons or other kinds of photos. Oh yeah, okay. So Miro has this function. Miro is great for collaboration. If you're not a, you know, someone who wants to draw things out, but you want to have some kind of visual, Miro has awesome icon finder functions. And so you can look that up easily. It's just like, I think there's like the three dots or something on the bottom right hand left hand corner. And it has a built-in generator. So Miro is great for that. It can create flow charts and different mind maps. You can collaborate with your team on it. You can use it individually. The other one that had come to mind was, oh, Canva of course. Even, I mean, Canva's just great for someone who might not have a graphic design background, but you want to create something that is impactful and you want to show someone like, this is what I mean. So Canva's great. It has a free function. I use the pro version or whatever. And I think it's like 12, 13 bucks a month. Ooh, nice. There's a Miro nonprofit discount. I also love Jamboard. Jamboard's awesome for collaborating. There's a tool on it where you can draw, but I'm always awful at drawing on that. It's more for the stickies and collaboration. So I would say that's a really great tool if you want something that's free. It's pretty accessible. You can screen share and then just have everyone use the link and be collaborating on there. Oh yeah, Linda, Miro is interesting. I asked on my LinkedIn, do people like Miro or Miro better? Or is it kind of either or or and situation? And it's kind of Miro and Miro because they all have different functions now, but that's a really great one as well. So I would say the most complex one is gonna be like Miro and Miro and then really simplified as Jamboard in that sphere. Right, that's super helpful. Yeah, and I meant just to remind with you as nonprofits, Canvug will give you 10 of the licenses includes things like access to their own icon and graphic sets, as well as the ability to upload your own branding templates and logos and sort of color palettes, which is really nice because then it makes people who are not natural designers work within a pretty constrained template so we don't destroy our designer colleagues great work. So yeah, I also highly recommend it and say like, take a look and 10 free licenses, go crazy. Absolutely, I love the, so there's Crello, I've heard or I'm just seeing in the chat, Judy, thanks for the book, sketch notes. Any other questions from folks? Actually, I had one more question that popped up during the course of the event, which is to say, so as you're talking about, so many of us are visual thinkers, but many of us maybe are not. If I wanted to go on a journey of discovering visual thinking and trying to sort of figure out like, how do we even start wrapping my head around that? How, what would you recommend? Am I just gonna go on like find a couple of people who are inspiring on Instagram or like what's the path you might recommend? Yeah, okay, so one thing that I would really recommend is come with that mindset with a challenge. So for example, maybe you have this ridiculous challenge and you're like, I have no idea how to say this. It's kind of like a, if you know, like the explain it like I'm five, I would say that if you have a challenge, sit down, grab a piece of paper and try and draw it out. So one thing is maybe like, how would you draw out your organization? So it can be starting as simple as, you know, what are the webs that it forms or how do you visualize your colleagues and like how you all interact? And then maybe branch out from there. That's why the thing that I shared about innovation hour and that activity is that you are asking another person in real time a story that they are going to tell you and you are going to draw it out. So it's really about then adding on and really just taking one marker, one color, drawing stick figures and squiggly lines and start trying to understand how to pick up on key themes. So not grabbing the whole picture, but just saying, you know, oh, this person's talking about their dog. Like what are those key pieces that they're sharing about? So I would say like start with just one thing that's really tangible, like your org structure or maybe the story of your life and you can kind of give it a chronological order and then ask someone to tell you a story and you try and visualize it. Yes, Linda, that's another one I started doing. When I started out, I used to go on Ted.com or Ted for just their Ted Talks and then I would draw out the story. So that's a really great one. And you can pause then too and kind of take some time. Lovely, well thank you so much. Really grateful for that. To the attendees, a lot was coming at you real fast. Know that we will, one, have the recording of this session so we can sort of make sure that you have that asset available to you. And the other part of that is we will collect several of these key links and resources and that'll make its way into the blog post that we'll be putting together over the next little while, of course, and by now. We, of course, have been not me at all but Lauren's gonna do that hard work. Also keep following us on Twitter. We're at Net2Van, Ben's been putting all kinds of really amazing resources in there and so you'll find all that good stuff going on there but otherwise I guess this is what I get to say which is let me just do one moment and tell you what comes next. So this was today but we're not done. Our next event has already been scheduled out. It will be on May 12th and it's actually gonna continue a little bit around the storytelling but this is going to be this time around the theme of how do we use Google Data Studio which is sort of a free tool built into your Google account that allows you to bring data from multiple sources whether that's gonna be a spreadsheet or your Google Analytics or all kinds of other external resources like maybe your MailChimp account and bring that all together into one dashboard so you can start getting a more cohesive sense of what are you actually doing across the organization, what's working and also have a really clear single place you can manage your relationships with your boss around to say like this is what's happening in the organization, don't ask for the other things this is what we're gonna care about and that can just really again because we've made it visual it can now suddenly be open to people who wouldn't have otherwise been receptive to some of the stories you're trying to tell in your organization. So stay tuned May 12th will be that event and we are plotting and scheming all kinds of other events. In fact, I think I may have like lined up our September event today so I'll be announcing those in the next couple weeks but otherwise so grateful again to Maggie for coming sharing the expertise and I would strongly encourage you to dive in and join the innovation hour. I think that'll be a really fun resource and again follow that Twitter and I bet Ben will get some links out there in the next while to help you follow up in these resources. I've just fallen told the poor guy, poor kid. Otherwise thank you so much everyone for joining us today and if again if you want to get more involved with us you've got event ideas for the future reach out to me and I would be happy to have a conversation with you and find something that doesn't take over your life but will be super fun. Lovely, well thank you all so much and with that I will stop the recording.