 Welcome everyone. You are joining us today for Transforming Communities Through Apps Part 2. We are happy to have you with us and we will go ahead and get ourselves started on this webinar. First, to take care of a couple of housekeeping things, we are using the tool called ReadyTalk today that you have logged into. You can chat and raise your hand to ask us questions throughout the webinar. You are welcome to chat in this little box that you will see at the bottom of your screen. All lines will remain muted throughout the duration of the webinar to ensure that there is no audio issues, but I am actually seeing that we are already having some audio issues. So can I make sure that all of the presenters are muted? I am getting some messages in there saying that we are getting an echo. So if you lose your Internet connection, please rejoin the webinar by clicking on the link in your confirmation email. If you lose your phone connection, you can redial the phone number that we will post in the chat tool for you right now, or you can try to join the web conference again with that link, and you should be able to hear the audio through your speakers. If you have any issues, feel free to chat to us to let us know. So thank you to those folks who told us that they were hearing an echo right away, and let us know that so we can try and fix it quickly. You can also call ReadyTalk support if you have any issues. Today's call will be recorded so that we can keep this webinar available for all of our users who are unable to participate live today, and keep it in perpetuity for you to re-watch later on. You can find our webinars at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. If you are trying to scribble notes, don't worry, you will receive a link to this full presentation, all of the materials, including the slide deck and any links that we discussed today later on this afternoon. If you are tweeting the event, feel free to use the Twitter hashtag TechSoup so that we can all be talking together. With that, I'd like to formally welcome everybody to Transforming Communities Through Apps 2 with Jill Kone's Adnan Maud Mood and Puneet Java. And just to go ahead and introduce our presenters, once again I'm Becky Wiegand and I am an editor here at TechSoup. I work in a variety of capacities, managing the TechSoup blog and writing articles, and work with our content creators and obviously host some webinars. Also, we'll be joined by Ariel Gilbert-Knight who is a technology analyst here at TechSoup. She researches and writes about the technology topics for our nonprofits and library audiences around the world. And she has also been at the helm of our Transforming Communities project that we will be talking about today and how we can transform communities using Apps. And then we'll also be joined later on in the presentation by Adnan Maud who started JillKona.org, a nonprofit organization aimed at inspiring the next generation of philanthropists by making it easy to make micro donations to global development projects online. He has worked with technology-related projects at Microsoft and he recently left Microsoft to launch GeoCo, a startup company building technology solutions for nonprofits to easily create compelling giving experiences. He will also be joined by Puneet Java. He works at Microsoft and is a regular volunteer for JillKona.org. He has a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, and he played a significant role in helping JillKona envision and develop their Windows phone apps that we'll be looking at today in the case study. So with that, I want to go ahead and just show off the agenda that we'll be covering. So we're going to talk a little bit about TechSoup and what the Transforming Communities project is. We'll get us all on the same page around terminology and definitions, and we'll talk about the decision-making process for whether you need to join or need to create an app for your organization, or what types of projects for mobile you need to focus on. We'll talk about the app creation process. We'll give some examples of nonprofit and library apps that are already out there that you can look to. And we'll look then at JillKona's change app as an example of how they did it at their organization. And then we'll have Q&A and some resources. Again, throughout this webinar, feel free to chat questions to us. We will hold Q&A to mostly at the end of the webinar, but I'll try and raise any questions up as I see them. We will have Kyla on the back end who will be grabbing all of your questions. So if it's not responded to right away, just know that we are capturing them. So who is TechSoup? If you are not familiar with us, we are part of TechSoup Global and we're working towards the day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. So we're here as a nonprofit as well to try and help nonprofits and libraries really use technology to fulfill their missions. We are like I said a 501c3 nonprofit and we serve nonprofits in 40 different countries around the world and have donor partners like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, and Symantec. We just launched a brand new website this week. So if you come to our site and find it looking different from the last time you were there, we welcome your feedback on it. We're still working out some kinks, but we're excited to have a site that hopefully will be easier for you to get around and find all of those resources that we try to deliver. So with that, now I want to turn it to our audience to give us a little bit of feedback on where you're at with a mobile strategy. Does your organization have a mobile strategy? Do you have a mobile app? Do you have a mobile optimized website? Do you not have any of the above but what you're thinking about it? So if you could take a minute and go ahead and check off what you do have, give people just a moment to respond. That will help us during this presentation hopefully tailor our conversation to everybody so they can know how to move forward with your own strategy. It looks like so far we have not too many people with a strategy or an app, but a handful with an optimized website, and most of our audience is thinking about it. So I'll go ahead and just count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I'll go ahead and skip to the results so everybody can see. So we're at 76% of our audience right now does not yet have any of these things, but they're thinking about it. So that really helps us understand kind of where you're at so we can speak to that level and speak to that experience. So with that I will go ahead and turn it over to Arielle, our technology analyst here at TechSoup Global who will take it away and tell us a little bit about the Transforming Communities Project. So with that welcome Arielle. Hi everybody, thanks for joining. As Becky said, I'm a technology analyst here at TechSoup Global and I am here to talk to you about app development. And the session isn't really going to be geared towards people who already know a whole lot about developing apps. This is designed for people who are starting to think about developing an app and want to know more. So it looks like that's a good match for what we saw from the poll. The first thing I wanted to share a little bit about is why TechSoup is so interested in apps. We're working on a very cool project called Transforming Communities. The Transforming Communities Project is generously funded by Microsoft and it builds on what TechSoup and Microsoft together already learned through an earlier project called App It Up where we learned about how nonprofits and libraries are using apps, the apps that are already out there in the wild, and the apps that they wish they had but don't exist already. So our goal through this project is to create a scalable approach to understanding the needs of nonprofits and libraries and supporting the identification and development of technologies that can address those needs. So what all those words mean is that we're doing a lot of research and learning about and sharing about what apps are already out there. We're doing this through App Roundups on the TechSoup blog and we'll share links to that and follow-up materials. And if you missed our first webinar for Transforming Communities, this is the second of two. There we shared a ton of great apps for nonprofits and libraries. But we do realize that there isn't always an app that meets your organization's needs, so some organizations are thinking about possibly building an app. And we're here to share some advice that can help you in the decision-making process during design and development and after your app is already built. So that's why we're thinking about apps. Here are some reasons that your organization might be thinking and talking about apps. According to a recent study by Pew, 45% of American adults have a smartphone. 25% have a tablet computer. And according to other research, there were over 45 billion app store downloads or downloads from app stores in 2012. The popularity of mobile devices and apps is only expected to increase. According to Gartner, by this year, 2013, mobile phones will overtake computers as the most common way to access the Internet. And the vast majority of phones being sold in some countries, including I believe the U.S., will be smartphones. So what all the statistics and predictions say is that mobile device usage is increasing enormously. Apps are everywhere. And more and more people are consuming information and email and web content via their mobile devices instead of their computer. So what that means for your organization is that you should be thinking about your mobile strategy if you aren't already. And building an app can be part of that mobile strategy for some organization. So if you're starting down the path of considering a mobile app for your organization, we are here to help. Before we get much further though, I would like to start with a definition of just what is an app. So we're all thinking about the same thing. An app is short for application, which basically just means it's software. But generally, apps are small applications with limited or targeted functionality. So we're not talking about a full Microsoft Office suite, but just a little bit of software that does something interesting. And they're all different kinds of apps, but mostly what people think of when they think of apps are mobile apps. These are the standalone apps that you download onto your mobile device. And that's mostly what we'll be talking about today. So clearly there was a lot of interest in the audience in mobile strategy, mobile optimized website, mobile apps, etc. So this is just a quick reference for how you might think about parts of your mobile strategy. First and foremost, if you're planning on developing an outward-facing app, meaning something that will be used by people outside of your organization, that decision really needs to be part of your organization's broader mobile and communication strategy. So your mobile strategy would include things like your website, your email communications, maybe mobile fundraising, and potentially other mobile solutions like SMS or text messaging. And keep in mind, despite it being kind of a decision tree, these options aren't actually mutually exclusive. You can do any or all of them. And if you had all the money and resources in the world, you'd totally be able to have a website that looked great and worked flawlessly on all mobile devices, and you could create a killer mobile app and make sure your newsletter and email looks great on all mobile devices. But nobody has infinite time and money. So if you're working with limited resources, you may need to start with what will best meet your organization's needs and your user's needs. So one option is to pursue for starting off with your mobile strategy is a mobile optimized website. You may find that more and more of your constituents and supporters and funders are using mobile devices to access your website to donate, to read your emails, etc. And they'll expect your website and your email to be easily read on a mobile device with a lot of pinching and scrolling around. So that's what a mobile optimized website is. Basically it's a site that looks good and is easy to interact with on a variety of mobile devices. So it's definitely something you should be considering, especially if you're seeing that a higher and higher percentage of users coming into your site are coming in on mobile devices. Mobile optimized websites isn't really going to be our focus here, but it is something to consider. And another option is developing a mobile app. So that would be something that's downloaded and used on somebody's mobile device. But how do you decide with your limited resources what makes sense? An early question to ask is, is there something an app could do that your website can't? And there are a lot of things that apps on mobile devices can do that your website can't do. So an app, for example, can take advantage of all kinds of cool things on a mobile device. The mobile device can take pictures. It can locate things nearby using GPS. And if you want to take advantage of those cool things that a mobile device can do, a mobile app may make sense. One thing you don't need a mobile app for is just to provide basic information about your organization and services. People can get that from your website that they can access with a mobile device or computer web browser. We'll talk a little more about some suggestions for what you want your app to do a little bit later on. Another question to ask is who you are trying to reach and if you know what devices they are using and is an app the best way to reach them? So for example, about 45% of the US population has a smartphone and those numbers vary up and down by age and ethnicity and financial situation. So if you know some of that information about your target audience that may dictate whether a mobile app that they would need a smartphone to use is really the right way to reach out to them. So there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Mobile apps give you a different way to engage your users by taking advantage of additional features on mobile devices like I said, the GPS for location-based services and the camera and other features that are on a mobile device. A mobile optimized website on the other hand will likely be a less expensive way to get started with engaging your community via mobile. It's certainly less expensive than hiring somebody to develop a high quality mobile app and a mobile website also works across most smart mobile devices that have web browsers so you don't get into any of the complicated questions of which operating systems you want to build for, which leads me to another little bit of terminology that's important to be aware of. So just like computers, mobile devices run on different operating systems. So there are different operating systems for Windows phones and Apple devices and Android phones and Blackberries and others. This is important to know because an app developed for one particular operating system will not actually necessarily work on another operating system. So if you do decide to build an app, there are some decisions you need to make in terms of what operating system you're building your app to work on. And there are a couple of other terms to be familiar with. A native app is one that's designed to work on a particular operating system so it's designed to work on a Windows phone or it's designed to work on an Apple device. These native apps are usually distributed through a specific app store for the operating system. So there's the Windows store, there's the Apple store, there's the Google Play store, which is where people will actually go to get your app. A cross-platform app, on the other hand, is designed to work on a variety of mobile operating systems and this means you can reach a lot more people using different devices with less development effort. And it's not as clear-cut as that. There's actually kind of a hybrid approach in between, but these are terms that you'll see discussed in terms of making decisions about how you build and what platforms you build on. So how do you choose? How do you decide which operating system or operating systems you want to build an app for? And does a native app or a cross-platform app make sense for you? Which approach makes sense is actually a really hotly debated topic and there really isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your organization's resources and who you're trying to reach and your priorities. If you do know what devices your users are predominantly using, that should help guide your decisions. And there are advantages and disadvantages to each. So native apps will tend, one that's built for a specific operating system, will tend to give you more access to the devices built-in features. And since most operating systems all have a different look and feel and the way users are interacting with them is different, a native app is more in tune with that automatically because it's built to work seamlessly with that particular operating system. So it might be a little more consistent with what the users used to and work better on that particular device. The disadvantage, of course, is that if you build a native app, it only works for the one operating system you built it for. So if you want to reach out to more people with other kinds of devices, you have to rebuild your app for those other kinds of devices. So there's more development effort involved. And we'll include a link in the follow-up materials to learn a whole lot more about the pros and cons of each approach in which you select will really depend on your organizational priorities, your audience, and your resources that you have available. You've decided that you do want an app and that it makes sense in your organization's broader mobile and technology and communication strategies. So one thing to be very clear on is that what your goals and objectives are, what do you want the app to do, and what purpose does it serve as part of your organization's overall strategy. You don't want to develop an app just for the sake of having one. And as I said earlier, you also don't need an app just to provide information about your organization because people can get that from your website. What you really do want is for your app to serve a particular purpose. And if you want people to use your app, they need to have a reason to use it. So there's this quote from Beth Cantor and we'll include a link to her blog post this very thought-provoking discussion about how and when nonprofits should be engaging with mobile technologies. She says that unless an app makes a person's life easier or better, the app won't be used. So ideally, you want your app to focus on a specific task It should do something for the user. It should help them do something that they're interested in doing. It can also do something like provide timely information or calls to action that they can't get elsewhere, that they aren't getting from your website or from other communications from your organization. It also helps if your app is fun to use. It's not required, but it's great if it is. A couple of other tips as you're in your planning stages, you should know your audience and listen to them. Get as much of their input as you can. How do they want to engage with your organization via mobile technologies? You should also know what success means for your organization. So what is a successful app? What would that mean for you? Does it mean that a certain number of people have downloaded it or that you see increased engagement via mobile technologies or that you get a certain number or a certain amount of donations that come in through mobile channels? It will vary depending on what your organizational priorities are, but you should build in that evaluation upfront. You should also know what skills your organization can bring to the table if you have design skills, in-house or development skills, marketing skills, etc. because those are all important components of the app development and distribution process. And finally, in addition to developing your app, you'll need to plan for marketing and supporting it afterwards. There's a lot of planning upfront. So you've done your upfront planning, and now you're moving on to designing an app. One really key thing to keep in mind is that you really have to prioritize. I think sometimes people are tempted to just cram in all kinds of awesome stuff because they have a lot of information to offer and they have a lot of great ideas, but you really do have to prioritize. You've only got about 3 inches of screen to work with in the case of most mobile phones. So you really need to line out the main actions you want users to take and figure out what information will appear on the screen and what's the step-by-step flow that people will go through when using your app and really winnow it down to the most basic things you want them to be able to accomplish. And even if you're not a designer or a developer, you can and really, really should have a lot of input at this stage. So you have a basic design in mind. You don't necessarily have to have picked out all the colors and the icons and all of the images that you're going to use, but you do have this basic idea and this basic flow of how your app will work. You know who your audience is, how you want them to interact with it. Then you need to get the app built. There are a lot of ways you can do it. You can have someone else do it. That might be an app designer, or an app development company, or if you're very lucky a volunteer. The key thing in situations is to go back to that clear specification you had in your mind or probably written down for what your organizational goals are for the app, what you want the app to do, who your audience is, and how you're expecting them to interact with your app. Because having that up front will help you and the developer decide if the developer is a good fit for your project. You can also build the app yourself if you or someone in your organization has the skills. There are also some do-it-yourself tools that are geared towards helping non-developers create apps, and we'll talk a bit more about those later. Another way to get an app built is to participate in an app for good event. Hackathons and challenges and contests are all ways to identify social needs and create technology solutions to help meet those needs. These kind of events match up people who have an idea for an app or a new technology or a need that's not being met with current technology solutions, matches those people up with people who do have the technology skills to develop solutions to meet those needs. And those kind of events can be a really great way to get started in app development, especially if you've got a great idea for an app but don't have the skills or resources to do it yourself. So in terms of do-it-yourself app development tools out there, there are a lot of tools that allow non-developers to create apps. Most of them offer a variety of app templates and let you customize to a certain extent with color and graphics and what's included in your app. A lot of them do use this drag-and-drop layout where you just click you want this here and drop it in to whatever section you want it to appear in. So it lets you create your app without actually having to do all the complicated back-end programming. A couple of examples of these kind of tools are App Maker, Swap Apps, and Mode Base. There's also an article that includes a list of about 14 or 15 app development tools with a brief description of what their capabilities are as well as their pricing structure and which one you choose will depend on what you want your app to do. So a lot of them, almost all of these app development tools charge a one-time app creation fee for using their service, and then many have monthly fees after the initial app creation. So it's not free, but the good thing about them is that there's less expense up front than hiring an app designer or an app development company, and actually the other advantage is that they require relatively little in-house technical know-how versus designing the app from scratch and programming it yourself. And it does help you get your app up and running relatively quickly. The downside of these tools is that they aren't super flexible or customizable. So if you're trying to do something really, really unique, it's possible that these kind of tools won't really meet your needs that well. Whichever approach you've taken, your app is done. It's been thoroughly tested. It's beautiful. It works brilliantly. You're all finished, right? Unfortunately, no. You still have to distribute your app. Most cases people distribute the app through the app store or marketplace for whichever operating system it's been built on. But you also have to market your app. Just because you have an app and you put it in an app store doesn't mean anybody will actually know it's there. So how will people find out about your app? How will they get excited about it? How will they know to go and download it? You also have to deal with support. So what if something is broken? You have to deal with bug fixes. What if the operating system it runs on changes and suddenly things don't work? You have to be able to plan ahead for these kind of support issues. And also think about how you're going to be providing support to app users so if they have questions or run into problems using your app. You should also expect to be gathering and incorporating feedback. What's working well? What isn't? Is there anything users really wish your app could do? You don't have to incorporate all the feedbacks of course, but listening to it is very important. And then lastly, just a quick reminder that a mobile app really isn't the sum total of your organization's mobile presence. You shouldn't overlook your website and email communications as part of your mobile strategy. And your app really should be integrated into that broader strategy. So that's a lot at a very high level about designing apps for nonprofits. I wanted to give a few examples of organizations who had done it well. The first is called Not Your Baby. It's from a Canadian organization called Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children. And it gives users ideas about how to respond to harassment situations. So the screenshot on the left, you can see they can choose their context if they're at home or at work or at school or on public transit. And then on the right, you choose who is harassing you in an unpleasant fashion. And the app generates suggested responses to that situation and context and it also provides support resources. Diabetes UK is another example. They're an organization that provides information, support, and advocacy for people with diabetes. Their tracker app for iPhone helps diabetics track and monitor their condition so they can readily see how they're doing over time and easily share that information with their family or caretakers or medical providers. The Nature Conservancy's Nature Near You app uses the phone's built-in GPS to help users find and explore nature preserves in their area. And users can also use their device's camera to take and share photographs of the area that they're exploring and see photographs that other users have taken of the area. Now what all these apps have in common is that they're aligned with the organization's primary mission and further that mission, but they also help users do something that they would like to be doing anyway. So it's not just talking about what the organization does and how wonderful it is and the many services that it offers, but it also allows the users to accomplish a task that is of interest to them. And as a perfect example of that, I'll turn it over to our friends at Jocona so they can tell us about their experience building their Change app. Great. You know what, Ariya, I'm going to just interrupt really quickly before we bring on Adnan and Puneet to talk about the Jocona app. I just wanted to have a couple of questions that related specifically to your slides that have come in, and we'll answer the other ones in the Q&A as well. But we've got a couple of questions asking, so is the best option to build a cross-platform app, or is it better to go with just one platform, or is it easier? It's certainly cheaper to build a cross-platform app and reach more people that way. None of this is hard and fast, but a native app will tend to run better and faster and allow you to take advantage of more stuff on a particular device. So again, it depends on what your situation is and what you want your app to do. And there really is a hot debate over which development approach makes sense, but if you're really dealing with limited resources and you want to reach a broader group of people using more devices, I personally come down on the cross-platform side of the debate, but there are others who feel very strongly that native apps are the way to approach it. Great. We also had one question that I'm sure is kind of tough to answer because I know it depends, but we had one person ask, and I'm sure a lot of people thinking this too, how much does a basic app cost? What is the amount of time and per hour cost for developers for one platform app? And I know that you mentioned that there were some articles that had pricing scales if you used some of the do-it-yourself pre-existing package type apps. So can you give an idea of what the cost is? So I do know about the do-it-yourself apps, and they vary considerably, but if you're using one of those DIY tools, the upfront cost is a couple of hundred dollars for just the app development fee, and then you usually pay a monthly fee, and that can vary considerably from anywhere from like $10 a month to up to several hundred dollars a month depending on which vendor you're using and which features you're using on their app development tool. I don't have as much visibility into the cost surrounding, like the per hour cost surrounding hiring a designer or an app development company. I have heard figures thrown out, and I don't want to scare everybody, of around $10,000 to $30,000 to hire somebody to develop a really professional, high quality app. Those figures were specifically around iPhone app development, but those are the numbers that I've heard. Great, thanks so much. That's helpful to give people an idea of maybe what direction they want to start looking in. So if you're on the lower end of the budget, maybe the DIY apps are probably the best place to start. And if you have that bigger kind of budget maybe looking for a high-end developer would be the better place to start. And actually Becky, one more thing that I wanted to mention is that volunteers can be a really great way to get an app built, but there are some organizations that I've heard of that took kind of an innovative approach to finding them. There was one organization, today I can't think of right now, that built a public art discovery app, and they had their local computer science program build it. So the students built the app and so it was really great for the students because they got real live app development experience. And it was really great for the organization because they weren't hiring a professional app development company. They were using students. So it was much, much, much less expensive. So there are various ways that you can get that same professional skill set without necessarily having to shell out the enormous amount of money that app development would typically take if you hired a firm. Right, well that's great. That's helpful information. And I'm sure like we said, it varies, but there are also hackathons that are being held around the country for things like apps where developers are donating their time. And Joe Kona, who we will now bring on the line, Adnan and Puneet to talk about their experience where they use largely volunteers to build their app. So welcome Puneet and Adnan. We'd love to hear about your experience creating your change app. Thanks Becky. My name is Adnan Mahmoud. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Hello from Pacific Northwest in Seattle. So I'm going to start off by just talking a little bit about Joe Kona and then hand it over to Puneet to really go deep on the specific app that we built there. So Joe Kona, for those of you who are not familiar with it, we are a web portal where people can go and pick out different projects to donate to around the world, micro donations. The specific thing that we do is every donation that comes to our portal, you get a feedback on what happened to it. So it's a donation level feedback for the donor. We were inspired to start this organization because the problem we're trying to solve was how do we get young people engaged in giving? And my co-founder and I, we like to consider ourselves in the young professional age group. And the biggest problem we identify of why young people or our peers don't give as much as we could is because we don't know where the donations go to. And so if we can try to solve that problem, then we thought that could be a pretty good impact. So that's how we started Joe Kona about three years ago to solve the problem of transparency. So every donation that comes to our portal, you as a donor get a feedback on what happens to that money. So in just about three years, we have done about $600,000 in donations. And so $25, $5, $10 increments. So I volunteer myself as Becky was saying. It's mostly about the organization Joe Kona is. So everything that we do, we try to be as efficient and cost effective as possible. So one of the things was that when Joe Kona started about three years ago, I was still an employee at Microsoft. And so while at Microsoft, I, while at Microsoft in three years we were doing a third Joe Kona, so since then we have, Microsoft has played a very strong role in supporting Joe Kona. And every year Microsoft has this event in October where it's called the Giving Campaign where they open up the whole campus to non-profit organizations to come in and pitch their stories and get donations and get engagement from employees. So every year we look for ways to engage that Microsoft community because that's the strong part of who we are. A lot of our volunteers are from Microsoft as well. So last year in 2012 we were looking at how do we engage more of the employees at Microsoft. And the idea of one of the ideas we had was, hey, this Windows Phone is a new platform for Microsoft that's starting to push. What if we try to engage the employees through the Windows Phone? There weren't a lot of giving related apps in the Windows Phone platform or marketplace. So we thought it would be an interesting project to create an app that lived on the Windows Phone environment and could help us attract more Microsoft employees into Joe Kona. So that was the original inspiration and as I believe Ariel mentioned that when you build a mobile app you don't necessarily want to just provide information or have it just replicate what you have on your website. It needs to really leverage what's unique about the mobile platform and the phone itself and engage people through that. So the idea that we came up with was what if we build an app that allows people to focus more on their habits and improve their habits while doing that and engage them in giving. So that's the journey of Joe Kona and how we got started three years ago and then how last year we decided to work on a mobile app and build a mobile app. Puneet and a couple of our other volunteers, Pavan and Nancy, the three of them really drove this whole initiative. So I'm glad that Puneet is able to join us today and I think at this point I'll let him take over and really dive deep into how they went about coming up with the idea and then implementing it. Puneet. Hi everyone. So what I'm going to talk, I'm not going to give you guys an overview of the organization and what I'm going to talk about is a little bit more about the process that we use to build our mobile application. As Ariel mentioned earlier, there's a lot of decisions and choices that you have and what I'm going to talk about is the path that we chose to take. But yeah, we had to face a lot of the same questions that Ariel raised earlier to do that. So I booked this presentation down kind of into three buckets. One is research, like how do we figure out exactly what we want our to build and what kind of value we want our app for users. Let me talk a little bit about the design, which is now you kind of have an app idea. How do you take that and actually build a design that will work for kind of that 3-inch screen experience and then talk about how we actually went about coding that application up and then shipping it. So first off, we had a similar question, which is if we are building an application for mobile, do we want to just take that website and extend it to the mobile platform, or do we want to really do something different? And myself, I worked at Microsoft about seven years. I'm now on Amazon as well. So I've been involved in technology for a little while, particularly the mobile space. And so I've actually shipped the two applications before. And one thing that we know in this space is that the phone is inherently a different medium for communicating information. It's not the same as the website. And that one has obviously a lot less screen real estate, but even the way people use mobile devices is different than the website. For example, a mobile device is used kind of more in short bursts. So if you think about a specific way, you might use a phone. You might be sitting on a bus and you want to kind of read a couple of articles, or you want to check your email or do a quick action like that. And the session on a mobile phone can last anywhere from like 30 seconds to 30 minutes versus someone who's sitting on a computer browsing the web and they have a lot more time to process information. So really the challenge with building a mobile application is if you communicate less information, but you also really want to keep users more engaged. One of the stats that's floating on the web is the average times a user uses a mobile application is three. That's it. So if you spend a lot of your organization's resources on building a mobile application, I think most people will be very disappointed if the user only launched their application three times. So you really want to learn to feel something engaging. So I think after doing this research we kind of knew right away that that we didn't just want to take our website and make a mobile version of it. We actually do have a mobile web version, but really we want to do something different and something a different way to engage the user and a different way to promote them together. Obviously we already talked a little bit about cross-platform and what that means. And really there's three main smartphone ecosystems that we looked at. We looked at the Apple which is the iPhone and the iPad. We looked at Android devices which is from Google. They make phones and tablets. And then we also looked at Windows Phone and Windows Tablets. Clearly our main goal was to promote Jocona in the Microsoft giving campaign. And since we're talking about Microsoft employees, our decision was easy. We knew we wanted to target the Windows Phone for our first version of our product. And one more thing, and so anything I want to call it, it was a discussion about whether it's good to kind of build an application that works cross-platform or one that leverages kind of the native application for each device. And really we found that the best way to engage our users, especially since they're very techies and they have all the latest gadgets, was that we wanted to build a native application that would leverage the native feature. So one really cool feature that Windows Phone has, it has these things called Live Tiles which is the ability to communicate to user some useful bits of information even if your application is not running, it will communicate to images on the home screen. Apple has a lot of great native features as well. They have a lot of built-in sensors like GPS and pyrometers that you can leverage. So really when you pick a platform, make sure you understand what that platform has to offer and figure out how you can really leverage that in your application. There's another tool that I want to call up called Model Touch. And this is a tool that's actually used to build a cross-platform application. But it also allows you to actually use the native features of each of those platforms. So that's a tool that we're really excited. We actually didn't use that initially, but that's a place that we're migrating to. But anyways, for our case study here, we decided to go with the Windows Phone application. And like we said, we wanted to do something different. And now our goal was, okay, well we wanted to do something different, but what exactly is that? So we met with several of our Jocona team members. This is one of the images from our late night brainstorming sessions. And we have a lot of ideas that we wanted to do. And within a couple of meetings, we converged on the idea that we wanted to create an application that would not only inspire people to give, but also to do good for themselves. So the idea that we came up with was we wanted to create a goal-setting application. The next step for us with creating a goal-setting application was we wanted to see what is out there. No matter what your idea is, we've come up with a lot in the past. We found that when you go out there, there's a hundred of the people that have thought of the same idea as you. So rather than getting discouraged and saying, oh, it's already out there, we don't want to build that, you should go and research them and learn what they do well and what they do poorly. And so we kind of said, I have to do that. And what we found was there's a lot of goal-setting applications out there, but there were one very, very specific to different tasks. So there's applications for tracking a workout, applications for collecting nutrition, sleep habits, your work. And what we found was there's nothing really general. We wanted something very, very simple for a user. So we wanted to have a lightweight experience where the user could set a goal for themselves and then it will help them accomplish that. I'm going to go a little bit faster now considering we are running out of time a little bit. So just if you have questions, we'll definitely answer those towards the end. So now we knew what we wanted to do, which is we wanted to build a goal-setting application for Jocona and in some way promote our project through that process. Thanks for our connections with Microsoft and other groups in Seattle. We were able to secure three volunteers. It was myself, one other person who helped us with code, and then one designer. If you are planning on outsourcing, this is the point in time where you really want to get a designer involved earlier on the process to kind of help you through some of the brainstorming and the thinking of how exactly you are going to tune your application for the mobile device. What we have here is just an image of kind of some of our earlier explorations. Anytime you are doing an application idea, trying to build an application, it will involve a lot of iteration. And so if you sit down and try and come up with high fidelity mock-ups of what that's going to look like, it's going to take you forever. So we kind of use the sticky pad process where we just had a bunch of sticky pads and we put some images and tools on there. And we really went around a few times, more than a few times, to iterate on and figure out the flow that would work. And then with our help of our designer, we were able to build a few better wireframes for us. I thought people had some questions about really what to do with how to build some good wireframes. And there's a lot of tools out there. I mean, you can even use Microsoft Paint for example. You don't need something that's really high fidelity. You just need something that communicates what you are trying to build. In our case, we use a tool called Balsamic, B-A-L-S-A-M-I-Q. And that's basically how to create these sketchy looking workflows. But it actually gave us the resources we need specifically for Windows Phone. So you see the keyboard here and the buttons here. These are exactly like they would look on the Windows Phone, but we didn't have to sit down and build those ourselves. We were able to use the tool and it provided that information. So we iterated a few times until their design came, until we came to a conclusion of what we wanted to build. And this is probably the point in time where you're going to have to go out and look for outsourcing the coding work. In our case, we were lucky because I just want to have myself and one other person who volunteered to help them build the application. But really one of the first things you want to do when you are looking at building an application is to come up with a project plan. This is something we put together really quickly in Excel. You don't need to know Microsoft Project. You put this together in Word or in e-mail or however, but there's a few pieces of information that I really need to identify whenever you're trying to build this. One is the date. So if you kind of look on the top right corner, you can see the arrow. If it's hard for people to see, they can click on the full screen button at the top of their screen to expand it so they can see it a little bit closer. So one of the key things is you really need to make sure you set up some headlines whenever you're outsourcing work or whenever you're working with anyone. There's this thing called the mythical man month when working in task. No matter how much time you give, whatever task it is, it will always take the full amount of time you give it because there's so much to do. Setting a reasonable timeline that's not too compressed, not too expanded is the right thing. For us, we knew we wanted to get the beginning campaign. In order to do that, we needed to ship our application by June 31st. You see here, I put June 17th because all software projects always run late, so you do want to make sure you give it some buffer. One other thing we did was we sat down and poked down our application into just a list of features that we wanted to create. And that's what you're seeing down the left side here. And it's a very, very important to prioritize. As Ariella mentioned earlier, there's so much stuff you want to do and you'll never have enough time to do it. You're always going to have to cut. So here you can see kind of our first stab at the schedule. And already the things in red, we started to cut stuff because we knew we wouldn't be able to make our deadline if we didn't cut that. And on the bottom you can see because we had volunteers, we assumed it's not a 40-hour work week because our volunteers also have other full-time jobs. But for us, it took about 132 hours. Well, we estimated 132. It's probably just more like 200 hours for us to actually build this application over a course of 6 weeks. These are just some images from our work session. This is kind of our last push the week before we shipped the application. You can see even in the week before we shipped, there was a lot of work to do. And kind of at the end of that session, you can also see that not only did everything cut earlier but even towards the end, we had this postpone bucket of stuff that we just couldn't get to for V1 over shipping. And we only really shipped 66% of what we said we were going to do. So you always have to make sure you're continually evaluating where you are and making the right decisions for what you want to ship. And then we were finally able to get our app into the app marketplace in time for the giving campaign. So that was definitely a very exciting time for us. I was going to go through and give you guys a walkthrough. It's not a question of how many downloads. So for the giving campaign, we were able to secure actually a few hundred downloads in a very short time of shipping our product. So we were very excited about that. And people really liked the notion of goal setting along with the projects that were donated. I will actually skip really quickly through these scenes because I do want to give you guys a quick walkthrough of what we built but I don't want to spend too much time on it. So here you can see kind of our Windows phone app with our live tile. So in the top right corner, that's our application there, Change in 21 Days. One of the things we found when you're building a mobile application is the first run experience, the first time a user launches their application, it's a very important thing because that's basically your hook to get them addicted to your app. So you really want to make sure when they first launch it that they're not days or confused or disoriented and you kind of want to guide them through the process. So this is a look at a little bit of our first run experience. After that we asked the user to basically set a goal. We provided some goals that our community members had but they could also select their own goal if they wanted. And then every day the user came back to the application. We would ask them how they did against their goal and they could add a little bit of a comment for themselves. And once they did that we would give them this visualization of their day-to-day progress against their goal. And along the side of that we would also display our project and we would tell them how we did against our project and our project's full as well. So we kind of did this parallel thing where people set up a goal for themselves but we show them our goals as well. And that's a quick summary of the way we built our application. Great. Thank you so much for that. And it looks like a great app. With that I want to jump into some questions since we're nearly out of time and we're just going into a brief period of Q&A here. So feel free to put your questions in. If we can't answer them right now we will try and address them in our community forums with that link that Kyla showed earlier in the chat. So can I have Ariel back on the line to answer a couple of questions? We have one from Chris asking, will an app, a mobile optimized website look different on different operating systems? Yes, to a certain extent it will. There is a way that you can actually check how your site looks right now. There's it's mobilephoneemulator.com I believe. You can get the specific URL and we can share it which will show you how your site looks on various different types of devices. Great. Thank you. We also have a question from Elizabeth asking, are fillable forms appropriate for an app? And she mentioned that they have, actually it was a different person who asked but who also sort of related asked if they could develop an app that didn't require internet access to actually use the app. So for fillable form you could also have they download the form and fill it out and upload it when they have internet access again later. Would that kind of thing work for an app? That would work for an app actually. But there are already things out there that allow you to do that. And we can provide a list of those. There are a number of really good and very flexible and customizable sort of more SMS based and not smart phone based, not requiring internet access based data gathering tools that might be a really good fit for a situation like that. And the thing about having internet access, one of the nice things about mobile apps is that once they are on the phone as long as you aren't needing internet access to update information, that app is just there on their phone. So if you are working with a group of people who typically don't have internet access or an area that doesn't have good cell phone service, they can still access the information on their phone without needing that, or on their device without needing that kind of access. So that's actually really good for disaster and emergency response situations or first aid information for example. Like if you just have that on your phone and you don't need internet access to be able to see it, that's where an app comes in really handy. Great, thank you. We have a couple of questions about specific types of apps. So asking if anybody is aware of a library app that would make it easy for patrons to sponsor like a specific book purchase, or just for patrons to sponsor some type of donation campaign for libraries. Any idea on that Ariel? Not off the top of my head. There are a number of small initiative-based and sponsorship-based fundraising websites and applications. I'll have to dig up a little more to provide some more information on that. But there's something out there I bet. Great, we have one person, Jerry, chiming in to say have you tried app moments. So I don't know if that's related to the library thing, or if it's just a suggestion to try an app. But we are at the top of the hour, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up here. We have some resources here that are linked in our slide deck that you will receive in the follow-up email later today. You'll also receive some links to the different apps that we discussed today and the different resources, some of the wire frame tools that were mentioned. I know we crammed a lot of stuff into this hour, so we appreciate your patience. If we didn't get to your question, please join us in the community forums to continue the conversation. We also have a list of apps created for and by libraries, which we didn't cover a lot of library resources in today's webinar, but we do have many of them on our TechSoupforLibraries.org website. Also we have a webinar tomorrow taking place that is a tour of our new website. So if you're a TechSoup user and you want to do a quick half-hour walk-through of what our new site has to offer so you can find your way around and get all of the donations and resources you need, please join us tomorrow at 11 a.m. And I'd like to quickly thank our sponsor for the Transforming Communities Project, which is Microsoft. And I'd also like to thank Puneet and Abnan for their participation in today's webinar, and also thanking Ariel for her work in putting together this webinar, and Kyla for manning the chat on the back end. Lastly, I'd like to thank ReadyTalk for their sponsorship of our webinar tool. So thank you all for joining us today. Join us for the webinar tomorrow if you're able, and we will share the link to this webinar and the recording as well as the prior Transforming Communities App It Up webinar in the follow-up later today. Take a moment to complete the survey and let us know how we can improve our webinar program. Thank you all, and good luck building all those apps. Bye-bye. Thank you.