 This conference is being recorded. Welcome to the Green Tech Reducing Your Paper Usage webinar. My name is Tammy Griffith, and Anna Yeager will be interviewing Steve Adams and Susan Kinslow today to talk about the ways that nonprofits and libraries can reduce their paper usage. What I'd like to do is quickly go over our agenda for the day. We're going to do some quick introductions, and I will be interviewing Susan who's with Conservatory. We'll continue the conversation with Steve Adams from Protus, and we'll talk a little bit about Recycle Paper, take questions and answers from the audience, and then I'll take a minute to tell you a little bit more about TechSoup. So here are the folks that will be hosting the webinar today. We're really excited to have a great group of people who know a lot about this area and can share their knowledge. So Anna Yeager was the Director of IT and Applications, but now she's bringing her 15 years of technical leadership and management to be the co-director of Green Tech Initiative, and she will be telling you a little bit more about the Green Tech. And she will be interviewing Susan Kinslow who is the Executive Director of Conservatory, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization that specializes in environmental paper and recycling issues. And I've personally talked to her, and there's a ridiculous amount of information this woman knows, so we're really excited to have her on the line. And we have Steve Adams, who is Vice President of Protus Marketing. He manages strategic relationships and actively consults with leading customers to assure services and meet and exceed their business goals. And Protus is the maker of MyFacts in TechSoup. We'll be offering MyFacts as a resource for the nonprofit and library community, and we'll be hearing about that product in a few minutes. And again, on Kamie Griffith's training and outreach manager, I'll be volunteering on the chat. So during the webinar, anytime you have questions about TechSoup or about ReadyTalk, if ReadyTalk is having any issues with hearing me or with the slides, just send me a quick chat. And Sam Webe from Protus will be answering any Protus or MyFacts related questions during the webinar. He also knows a lot about paper usage and statistics around that, so please feel free to send questions through the chat at any time. So what we're going to do now is I'd like to bring on Anna Yanger, and she will tell us a little bit about GreenTech. Hello, and thank you for joining us today. The mission of our new GreenTech initiatives is to help nonprofits and other social benefit organizations reduce their environmental impact through the effective use of technology. This month in particular, we are running an educational campaign to help nonprofits and libraries reduce their paper use. The changes we're encouraging you should see on your screen. The high-level ones are assess and track paper use in your office, and it's very important also then to report back on it, and let people know, individuals and departments know how they're doing with their paper use. Change printer and copier settings and habits. These might include using narrow margins, printing double-sided, use print management utilities like GreenPrint and FinePrint, using electronic documents like the electronic faxes that you'll be hearing about a little later today. Set them up the system to store documents electronically. Instead of in firing cabinets, if you can store them electronically, it saves space and makes it easier to locate documents with a search feature. Use on-screen editing tools like track changes in Word, and budget for multi-function machines or all-in-one machines. These are machines instead of a separate fax, a separate copier, and printer. You have all of those and a scanner all-in-one machine. This will help you also save on space and cost, energy, and toxics. You can use the scanning function of all-in-one machines to convert paper documents into electronic ones. The fourth recommendation is to distribute annual reports in marketing, collateral, and PDFs. If you can distribute those things electronically, you can post them on your web. Not only can you get them out to a broader audience, but you're reducing your paper and your costs. And the final one is buying recycled content paper. And we'll spend a few minutes on that later today in the webinar. In addition to this webinar, we have held an online forum, written articles, and blog posts, and pointed readers to other resources on other sites that can help you make these changes that we're suggesting. So I encourage you to go and check out our website to find some of these other resources. And we definitely invite your participation and feedback. If you have some stories to share, some tips that you think other nonprofits would benefit from, please come onto the website and share those in our discussion forums. And our website URL is at the end of this webinar. It's texsoup.org slash green tech slash paper for this month. So looking at the information that many of you entered at the time of registration, I see a couple of common themes. You want the tools and information about how to make these changes that will help you reduce the paper. And you want to know how to get other people to buy in and to accept the changes. During the first part of the webinar, we plan to recommend some tools and help you understand how to make the changes in the most cost-effective way. And during the second part, we will address the buy-in and recommend some steps you can take. If your question doesn't get addressed during the presentation, please raise your hand and ask it during the Q&A section or submit it via the chat feature. So let's move on to the presentations. Susan, can you tell me why it's important to reduce the amount of paper we use? Sure. Thanks, Anna. Hi, everybody. What I want to do is put paper production into the context of the tremendous amount of resources that's required by today's paper manufacturing processes. So let me give you some examples. The paper industry is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases among all the manufacturing industries. And we actually think this is considerably undercounting that forests store roughly half of all the terrestrial carbon and that makes them really critical in reducing climate change. And mature forests store a whole lot more than newly planted stands which is why it's important to conserve long-standing natural forests. And yet, even though forests are so important, more than 40% of the industrial wood harvest worldwide is ultimately used to make paper, much of which, as we know, is discarded immediately after use. Now, if the paper ends up in a landfill, it decomposes and it produces methane, which is a greenhouse gas that's 23 times more potent than even the carbon dioxide we're usually concerned about, and more than one-third of municipal solid waste still is some form of paper. But if the U.S. could cut its office paper use by even just 10%, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking nearly 300,000 cars off the road for a year. The paper industry is also the largest user per ton of product of industrial process water, which means that they use a whole lot of water to make their product, and they're continually withdrawing and returning water to local rivers and streams and lakes, which has ecological impacts. And of all the energy that's used for manufacturing in the U.S., the paper industry uses over 12% of it from a whole wide variety of sources, including from burning trees, and also uses lots of chemicals and fillers, including a rapidly increasing amount of calcium carbonate, which happens to be crushed marble. I bet you didn't know that there's a whole lot of crushed marble in your paper. The paper industry emits a lot of different kinds of pollutants to both air and water. And when you add these all up and realize what heavy resource demands there are from the paper industry, the point that has me most concerned about the current methods of paper production is that the reality is that all the printing and office paper that we've been making for the past many decades has really only been made for about 20% of the world's population, primarily North America and Europe. Now there's a lot of developing countries, and particularly China, that are ramping up their paper production systems. And there's a lot that's really positive about that. The access to paper provides lots of benefits like literacy, communication, business development, health protection, even art. So it's great that billions of people who had very little paper before are starting to get access to it now. But think about this, China has another 20% of the world's population. And India, which has started to develop its paper industry as well, has an additional 20%. Now we're already using, creating such enormous resource demand from paper production for the first 20% of the world's population. And if we keep making paper with the same methods as in the past, how can we possibly have enough global resources to double or triple paper production for more of the world's population without resulting in tremendous environmental degradation and destruction? And yet, I think that we really could provide paper for much larger populations if we do it in a way that significantly reduces paper's footprints. Here in the US, while we've got pretty good levels of recycled content in newspapers and in some kind of boxes, it's still the case that more than 90% of our printing and office paper has no recycled content at all. And we're using pulp from forests in the Northern US and in Canada, including the Canadian boreal, which is up around the aridic circle, which is an especially fragile area. And also from the US Southeast, which supplies about 25% of the world's paper fiber from tree plantations that replaced previously natural and extremely biologically diverse forests. And we're also using pulp from plantations in South America. Keep in mind that while tree plantations can regrow trees, they don't regrow all the environmental contributions of forests. So I tried to put it in context kind of what we're talking about, why paper is still important. Thank you, Susan. And can you tell us a little bit, and this is such a huge issue, what is it that nonprofits and libraries can do to make a difference? Well fortunately, I think there's a lot that individual organizations can do, especially if you work on reducing the resource footprint of your paper purchases. A lot of our paper uses in the US is wasted paper. And that's why China and other countries want the paper that's collected in their recycling systems because there's so much waste, and because we don't do nearly enough recycled product manufacturing ourselves. But we can significantly reduce how much paper we use, as well as the resources that are needed to make the paper that we do use. And I can think of three things right away that nonprofit organizations can do to reduce their resource use. First of all, you can reduce paper use overall. And you can use significantly less paper and still run an efficient and successful office in nonprofit. In fact, reducing paper use can pay off in other ways too, because you might need less storage space and there's a number of other cost savings that often you can get by reducing your paper use. Anna, you gave a good starting list of actions you can take. And we also have lists and articles on conservatory's website as well. And there are a number of other websites that list changes that an organization can make. But let me give you a few of my favorites. One of them, a lot of organizations are still pre-printing their letterhead. And you don't need to do that. In fact, you can have more up-to-date letterhead without having boxes and boxes of unusable letterhead when you move or when somebody's name changes and you get a different person in or something by eliminating the pre-printed letterhead and instead printing your letterhead directly from templates in your computer as you need it. Another idea you mentioned setting copiers to default to double-sided copying. You can reduce your paper use up to about 40% by just doing that. A third thing that you can do is use print-on-demand for reports and documents. Anna, you talked about electronically producing reports. And then some people do still want them. A lot of people only want them in PDFs, but there are still people who want them as printed versions. But rather than having a whole stack sitting around waiting to see if somebody wants them or sending them out to people who may not want them, if you only print them as they're requested, you can save a lot of paper. In fact, a lot of book publishers are even now able to arrange for printing books on demand so that the book that you order today might get printed tomorrow and sent out the next day instead of keeping a whole lot of copies in the warehouse. Agencies that are nonprofits that may be social service agencies or have different forms that people fill out for them often can put them online. They can review any forms that still need to be printed and combine a lot of them so that that reduces paper use. Another thing you can do is to scan documents to put them on CDs instead of keeping them in paper form. One of my favorite examples of that was in Almeida County in San Francisco Bay Area where they made a film of all their ideas for reducing paper use. And one of them showed this huge long warehouse filled with boxes and boxes and boxes that they had to keep for seven years from their social service agency. And it was piled up to the ceiling and everything, and they scanned all of those, put them on CDs, and those CDs took up about two bookshelves. That's all that was needed for all these papers that had filled this whole long warehouse. So not only did they reduce the paper use, but then they also reduced the spaces that they needed to warehouse things, and the energy, and lighting, and lots of other things as well. Also, if you're having materials printed, you can work with your printer to have the designer fit the design to the size paper that that specific printer will use because printers have different presses that use different size papers. And there was a designer that I talked with years ago at Minneapolis who just was wonderful in how she would not only work with the printer to arrange her design so that it maximized the paper use, but then for any scraps that might be left over along the sides of the papers, she built in designs for note papers, and even some business cards, and postcards, and one panel flyers for her clients. So they got a lot of extra material out of the paper that they were already buying for their printing anyway. So those are some ideas for reducing paper use. Another way to reduce your resource footprint is to use recycled paper, and we're going to talk about that more later on in this presentation. But for now, I just really want to note that using recycled paper significantly does reduce resource use, and you can do this not only for your own office use, but also for any bills and direct mail that you might send out, as well as by requiring any contractors like printers and janitorial services to use recycled paper for your contracts as well. And then the third thing is to talk to others about the importance of reducing paper use and using recycled paper and inspire them to do successes. There's a lot of places that already do this by doing conferences that talk about all their ideas and their successes in reducing paper use as well as putting them up on their websites. And as nonprofits, a lot of you have wide audiences that you can talk to, including memberships and constituents, communities, local businesses, patrons, and a whole lot more. Great. Thanks, Susan. That was so much wonderful information. I especially love this stat, about 40% reduction by duplexing. Was that what it was? Yep. That's incredible. So that was a lot of information, and I want to remind folks that I'm sure you couldn't take it all in right now unless you're using copious amounts of paper to take notes. But a lot of this information is on Susan's website at conservatry.org and again that URL is at the end of this presentation, so you'll see that there. Great. Thanks so much for all that information. As we mentioned, one of the ways to reduce paper use is through electronic faxing. And here at TechSoup Global, we're lucky enough to partner with POTUS, the maker of MyFax. Steve, can you tell us a little bit about MyFax and what ways do you think it benefits nonprofits and libraries? I sure can, and hello everybody. So just to tie into the paper discussion, an interesting statistical faxing is that many people when they're sending a fax simply take something off their computer, print it, fax it, and then they're left with a hard copy they need in the first place. And an interesting statistic is that if 1% of all the paper faxes in America each year were sent electronically instead of by paper faxing, over 70 million trees would be saved. So the paper usage for faxing is high, both on sending and receiving. So MyFax is an internet-based fax service, or an online fax service. And it really lets you do everything you would do with a fax machine, sending and receiving faxes, but without having the fax machine. So without you sending and receiving faxes, just using your email, or you can log on to our website and do the same things there. What this means is that nonprofits and libraries can communicate with outside fax machines, so you can send a fax machine to the outside world, or receive a fax, and you can do that without actually having the fax machine. So without the cost, and certainly without any of the paper. With TechSoup, we're offering a 25% discount, and so the cost is very inexpensive compared to a fax machine. It's just $7.50 a month, and that includes long-distance charges. That's really the only charge there is. And it eliminates the cost, the paper use, and the service. So let me just take one more slide just to talk a little bit more about what it's like to use MyFax, just to make sure people get an idea as to what an internet fax service looks like. Oh, there we go. So this slide just shows how you can use your email to send and receive faxes. So in the top left, let me see if I can get a marker going, so in the top left, so to send a fax, you simply create an email as you would on every other email, and address it to the fax number at MyFax.com. You then type a little note in the email body and attach whatever document is that you want to sign. That's really all there is to it. When you send that email to us, MyFax receives the email, takes the document, and faxes that out electronically to the other end. So sending a fax is as easy as sending an email. When you're receiving an email, again, MyFax issues you your own local or toll-free fax number. If you've already got a number, you can bring it with you. When the fax is received, we bundle it up into a PDF document and deliver it electronically into your mailbox. We also store it on our website and it's stored there free for up to a year. So what we've done here is really eliminated the paper usage from faxing. So you can fax directly from your computer through email, through online, and you can receive faxes electronically as PDF documents, which are then much more easy to store, easy to archive. You don't need all the printed hard copies floating around. Great, Steve. Thanks for giving us the intro to MyFax. What are some of the challenges that people encounter when using an electronic fax service? And can you give us a few tips on how they can overcome them? Sure. Well, let me just talk a little bit about — I would say that the first challenge is that many people just aren't aware of Internet fax or online fax services. Everybody's used to a fax machine. They know what to do. So there is that mental change of eliminating the fax machine. So building awareness is certainly a key part of it. You know, fax machines are everywhere. You plug them in. They tend to work. But the downside is that they're costly. You know, a phone line runs about $40 a month. You have long distance charges. You have paper and toner and all the other pieces like that. You know, it's something like 300 million toner cartridges get thrown away every year. So while today we're focusing a little bit on paper, you know, that the energy costs and the toner impact are significant. One question we get when we talk about MyFax is whether faxing is really still widespread. And obviously a lot of communication is going toward e-mail, but a lot of people still use faxing for legal communication, for reaching people that don't have computers, and just for widespread distribution of information. And particularly in nonprofits, a fax machine itself can be limiting because the single fax machine sits in an office, obviously in one place. While many nonprofits are really virtual offices or have no centralized facility at all, it's a shared facility or it's mobile volunteers that come and go. So you really want something that can be used by everybody without having that single fax machine sitting in a place. And the kind of documents that people see are really anything that needs to communicate to the outside world via fax. Most often it's legal documents and contracts. You'll see purchase orders, financial transactions, anything that needs that legal record often is faxed. And so clearly we see a lot of the faxing industry and we see a lot of people switching from old fax machines to electronic fax, but what we're not seeing is a decline in the volume of faxing. It's still quite prevalent. You asked about the challenges and as I mentioned one of the real barriers is just building awareness and so I appreciate the opportunity to work with TechSoup in spreading the word a little bit. Maybe the next question we get is really a healthy skepticism about whether it's as easy as we say. And clearly we stand behind our product, but my fax is really as easy to use as your email, creating and sending a fax by your email. And there's really nothing more to it. The fax number that we issue you works just like an outside fax machine and you can communicate readily with it. The service is available 99.9% of the time and we fax literally millions upon millions of faxes to support our large customer base. And then the final challenge that people do think about it is the cost and clearly that's paramount for many nonprofits. And I'll talk a little bit more about some of the specific costs a bit later on. One final piece that I will talk with Anna that you asked to lead in email is about security. You're sending things by email. One virtue of a fax machine is it's perceived security. You're sending directly from one location to another. And obviously with my fax you're using email or you're using our online service to send. But really electronic faxes like my faxes are even more secure. When you receive a fax it's going directly to the intended audience. It's not sitting in a shared fax machine someplace. All of the data is well protected in our data centers and there's a state-of-the-art security there. And there's a variety of ways that people can use depending on your level of IT sophistication to encrypt or connect to us in a secure manner that helps maintain compliance with health and privacy and financial regulations about the protection of personal information. And I won't go into all those now. You see the collection of three letter acronyms there. But what I want to stress is that there's a real range of options for ensuring security. We've never had a security breach knock on wood. And really that online faxing with my fax increases the security and privacy rather than diminishing it. So those are some of the objections or concerns that we've heard from people. That's great. There are a couple of those that I've heard. You mentioned this earlier but I want to make sure that people really heard it and understood. We're not keeping your existing fax number. Oh that's a great point. And obviously many people already have their fax number in place. So certainly what we allow is for our users to port their number to MyFax. So porting simply means that instead of it ringing on to your fax machine, it will ring on to one of the MyFax facilities. And after that it just all works the same. So you can move your existing fax number to MyFax by porting it through the phone company or just forwarding it to our number. And then if you ever do decide that you want to leave MyFax, God forbid, we also let you take it with you. So you're not trapped with us but we do want to make it seamless for you to migrate your faxing into MyFax. That's a really excellent question. Great. The other question that I have heard from people is once you have these electronic faxes, how do you organize and retrieve the necessary faxes? Do you guys have any best practices or tips or training that you can so you can guide people into using those best practices? Sure. So we have a wide range of resources online from tutorials and case studies and user guides. But let me talk to you a couple points that are really relevant. The first is that we store all the faxes that you send and receive are stored online on the MyFax site, obviously in a secure area for a year. So that means that you don't really need to worry about where's that fax that I sent to Anna. We've got it. It's stored. Even if you deleted your email we still got the record of it. And online it's easy to sort. For example, by fax number, if I know your fax number I can find all the faxes I sent to it. It's easy to sort by date. And we also let you code. So for example to put a TechSoup code in all the faxes that I send to TechSoup and that might make it easier to organize by client or by a project name for example. So the online storage is there all the time. Also because we're delivering into your email system all of the filing systems and tools that people use to organize email and their online or regular desktop folders those are all accessible as well. We're providing you PDF documents that work and feel just like everything else. So we've found that by coding things with the recipient's name, by the phone number, by the date, and by an extra project code that the combination of those things really make it easy for our clients to find all the different faxes that relate to a topic or we're sent to a particular location or on a particular day. And those are some of the best practices that we recommend for organizing the faxes that you send and receive. Wonderful. Thanks. I understand that you have a demo to share with us. Can you share with us a little bit how it works? Sure. So what I'm going to do just to eliminate the technical challenges, I'm just going to use a couple of screenshots that show you what it's like to send and receive using MyFax. And I showed you a little bit earlier the example of using the email where you simply create an email and send it to us with an attachment. And sending by email is certainly the most common way that people use the service. But equally you can sign on to MyFax Central and that's part of our website where you can send and receive faxes or work through Microsoft Office. And I'll just show you a little bit of what those look like. So here's a screenshot of MyFax Central. And this is the first thing you see when you log in. So we tell you there's a tour that helps people orient themselves. You can see how many pages you use this month. You can see whether you have new faxes. And then a set of tools for managing your account. We won't worry about those too much. The point I'll emphasize here, Anna, is this is just like logging into Hotmail, or Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, or anything else. It's a very familiar interface. It's not difficult. It's not an IT-oriented tool. This is a real user-oriented tool and a very familiar interface. So if I switch to a screen where we want to send a fax, again it's simply filling in the blanks. You can add a person's name that you're sending to, their phone number, and of course you can fax anywhere in the world, so country code and then a phone number. We also let you manage a list of names online, so a contact list for example. So if you're commonly faxing the same information to your board of directors or an interested press release or something like that, it's easy to maintain that list and it's been just a single click to fax to all of those people instead of repetitively faxing the same document over and over. So at the top we're simply adding the list of recipients and you can fax to up to 50 people at once. And then here you simply are browsing and selecting a document that is going to be faxed. Most commonly of course, people fax PDF documents, Word documents, Excel documents, but we support a list of, I forget the number, something like 220 different file formats that we can translate into faxes. So really, or most any document that you've got on your desktop, we can fax. So a virtue of using MyFax Central online is it's very secure. It's the same security that a bank uses and there's no email issue if you're concerned about the security of email. One final way to send though a highlight is that within Microsoft Office, you can send directly from within the application. So here's an example of a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. We've simply clicked File, Send To, and then within there you'll see this using Internet Fax Service. So it's just like as you might print or send this via email, you can send it via fax, and after you select that, Microsoft Office brings up a screen. It puts in a cover sheet for you. You can change other ones. And off it goes. From here you simply press Send, and the fax goes off. MyFax delivers it, stores it, sends you back a receipt to tell you what's happened to the fax. So I've illustrated three quick different ways using email, using MyFax Central, and using Microsoft Office as very easy ways to send faxes. And all these ways can be used to receive faxes. So within MyFax Central you can receive faxes. Faxes are delivered to your email. All those PDF documents, so they're very easy to use, very easy to store, very familiar. There's no new technology, no software that's on your desktop. Everything's just using your existing email and your browser. So Rana, those are some of the ways that MyFax can be used, and I hope it gives you a bit of an overview. Great. Thanks so much, Steve. I see that there have been a slew of questions coming in via chat. If your questions haven't been answered yet, or don't get answered on the chat, please be sure to raise your hand later in the Q&A portion. Right now I think we're going to move on to Susan again. Susan, even with reducing paper as much as possible, nonprofits, as you mentioned before, still need to use the paper. What are some of your recommendations? Well, first I want to make it clear that, because people aren't always aware of this, recycled paper really does reduce a lot of resources. Not only trees, but a lot of other kinds as well. You can see that from the slide that's on the screen right now, that if you're using a copy paper that has 100% recycled content, then the production of that paper reduced overall energy consumption by 44%, reduced net greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, water use, solid waste, and of course it eliminated the wood use. Even if the paper you're using has 30% recycled content, which is also a really excellent choice. You've still done a lot to reduce some of the production requirements for resources that I talked about in the beginning, so that's really important. In fact, just talking about trees, if we look at the next slide, you can see that it's much more efficient to use recycled fiber in paper. If you're using a paper that most offices are printing papers, it's made in a type of process that needs almost 4.5 tons of fresh trees in order to make one ton of pulp. If you're using say a newspaper, that's a different kind of production process, and it only uses about half the number of trees, but it still uses a lot. Whereas if you're using recycled content, even for the most intensive type of paper production, which would be the office and printing papers, you only need 1.4 tons of recovered fiber to make one ton of pulp. Now you still need to keep bringing in some virgin fiber. We don't need to be using 100% recycled all the time, because when you recycle the paper, it does shorten and fray the fibers a little bit, which they can still be recycled many times, and that's why we should be using pretty high levels of recycled. And we're still going to be bringing in some virgin content to keep bringing new fiber into the paper. What our hope is is that we can stop using so many trees for that and actually switch the virgin fiber content over to using crops and non-wood types of fibers. But at this point where most of our fiber is coming from trees, if we use recycled content, actually no matter where that fiber is coming from, even if it's a non-tree type of fiber, it needs to have recycled content in it to keep it out of landfills and everything. But that significantly reduces the resources. Now there's also a definite perception that there are quality issues with recycled paper. What do you have to say about that? We did a listening study about using recycled paper and office machines, and that's on Conservatrix website at conservatrix.org. People might want to go look at that. What we did was we interviewed lots of people around the country and said, what kind of problems have you run into with recycled paper? And we found that they sort of broke into two camps. Most of the problems that people talked about actually dated to about 10 years ago or so. Not very many of the problems that they talked about actually had to do with recent papers. We then went to the manufacturers of the copy machines and some printers. We went to the manufacturers of the paper and a number of other experts and said, okay, so this is what people have been saying to us. How can you explain their experiences? And we found from the paper manufacturers that paper has been basically re-engineered over the past few years, and recycled paper is included in that. And so it meets the same technical specifications as all the virgin papers. So it should perform just the same. In fact, there was a state of Pennsylvania that they never had problems with all the recycled paper they used. They ran into problems when they were using virgin paper at times. So a lot of it has to do with which paper you're using and did you just switch it into a new machine and things like that. We also found Buyer's Laboratory, which is an organization that tests a lot of copiers for major buyers. And they said that they have always used recycled paper as part of the hundreds and thousands of sheets of paper that they run through these copiers in order to test them out for major buyers. And they said they didn't do it to test recycled paper. They just did it because that was some of the paper that they were using. And they said we've never seen a difference in the performance of recycled and virgin paper. So that seemed like a pretty strong support as far as we were concerned. There's also been lots of other organizations that have tested recycled paper and even large purchasers often will get a case of paper and test it out before they switch over to it. Often what they've found is that if they say to people, well now here's your recycled paper. They'll start getting complaints from people because there's a perception issue there. But if they just say, oh I've got some new paper for you to try out, generally there's not any more complaints than they would have had about the other paper. A lot of it has to do with what people are expecting. And also a number of the problems that people had to do with recycled paper actually didn't. And that's one of the things that we talked about in our listening study. Where do these different issues come from? Thanks. How about the cost of recycled content paper? On our website we have a list of all the environmental papers that are available in North America. Not just recycled but also those with tree-free fibers, chlorine-free bleaching, sustainable wood fiber contents, plus lots of information. And it's divided into lists that are appropriate for major paper purchasers, and then lists that people that buy in small quantities as individuals or small offices would want to use because you buy from a somewhat different source if you're buying in small quantities. What we're hearing from people is that first of all the cost differentials vary by the type of paper you're talking about. So for example, the papers that fall into a category that's called text and cover, which are the papers that most people use for letterhead, business cards, identity papers like brochures and marketing materials, those types of papers, they're often the ones that are really beautiful papers. They've got a lot of design elements in them or something. They're very competitively priced, whether they're recycled or virgin papers. So really with those types of paper for letterhead, business cards, etc., there's no reason not to be using recycled for those. And you get the widest range of possibilities there too. They're the ones that are experimenting with tree-free fibers and lots of different types of environmental aspects. So that's a good place to be looking for environmental papers. If you happen to be using newsprint for printing voters pamphlets or for lots of other types of things like that, that's pretty much the same price whether it's recycled or virgin. Some kinds of packaging actually are less expensive for the recycled version than for the non-recycled version. It's copy paper and printing paper like a bond paper that you might print reports or something on that people often find some higher prices on. And what we're hearing is that the paper that's about 30% recycled content is running maybe about 8% higher. The 100% is often considerably higher, often 25 to 30% more, although I have heard from some people that say they're getting it for the same price as the 30%. I think it depends somewhat on supplier and on region. But there's a number of ways that you can offset these costs. For example, the city of Seattle made a commitment about 3 or 4 years ago to they wanted to go to 100% recycled copy paper. But their source for it, which happened to be an in-state source that they also wanted to support, was about 30% more for the 100% recycled copy paper. And they didn't want to drop this commitment. Instead what they did was make a commitment to reducing their paper use by 30%. And that means that they end up with about the same paper budget, but they're using less paper and they're getting 100% recycled content paper. They also produce a conference every year in which they talk about the successes, how they've done it, what kind of challenges they've run into, what they've done about it. They've been really informative. Another thing that you can do is to buy in bulk. Paper industry, paper is not really priced as a set price for most types of paper. It's more, the price varies depending on bidding on contracts and negotiation and how much you buy. So I recommend that people never buy simply a ream of paper, especially something like copy paper that you'd be using quite a bit of. You should always be buying at least a carton because the reams within a carton are much less expensive than buying individually by reams. If you can buy 4 cartons or more, you often can get reductions in price. This is all really great information, but I wanted to leave some time for Q&A, so I'm sorry to cut you off, but I know there's a bunch of questions that people have and I'd like for us to be able to open it up. So I'm going to take this time now to open it up for questions. So those of you who have questions, please raise your hand. And I know that Anna has one quick thing she wants to say, so while we're people to raise their hand, I'll turn it back over to Anna. Thanks, Karen. So one of the things that we know about creating change and driving change is that you need to open up the discussion. You might have made the decision to move on and make a change, but not everybody in your office has. So try to open up the discussion and help people understand what it is, the change that you'd like to make, and why it is. Explain the environmental costs and the cost savings that you can reap by making some of these changes. I'd encourage you to pick one change and try to make that one change at a time. Don't shame anybody who's not on board. Don't point fingers, but just try to make that one change and then report back on the impact. There's this group of people out there who love the field of paper. You all read about it in your registration questions. Here are some things that you can do for those people. Use electronic faxes because even those people who love the field of paper, they're not going to print out every fax that they receive. They might still print out a bunch of them, but they won't print out every one. And they can be taught to not print out the cover page and any wasteful pages. Help them change their margins. Set printers to duplex. Use a utility like GreenPrint, FinePrint, or Adblock Plus. There's a print management utility, and we've got an article about that on TechSoup, and suggest multi-up printing or printing multiple pages per sheet. And then, of course, use recycled content paper when you can. So I'll also capture some of these ideas in a blog post, so look for that perhaps next week on TechSoup. Great. Thanks, Anna. Now, I'd like to call on Marilyn DeVod, if you could press star 7 to unmute your phone. Marilyn? Okay, we're going to move on to Shelly LeClaire, star 7 to unmute your line. Hello. I have a person that is really kind of computer challenged that she currently uses a fax machine, and I'm trying to... I've got the majority of the office using electronic faxing, or we're going to start using electronic faxing next month, but she's in a satellite office. So I was just wondering how easy is it for someone that is not very savvy when it comes to computers to use the fax feature, and do they have to have a scanner if they get a fax in? But if she has something handwritten, I guess she'd have to have a scanner to scan it in and then fax it as... Yeah, so there's a couple points there. The first is what level of computer or technical knowledge do you need, and that's very low. The bulk of my fax users, and there's hundreds of thousands of them, are like your workers, single people working by themselves from a home office or a very small business. So you don't need IT support, you don't need knowledge. As long as you can use your email or log on to a website, you're fine. To your second question of, so receiving faxes is no problem. Anything that gets received will be delivered directly into her email and stored online, which does mean you can also access her faxes from your office, for example. So that's one of the reasons people in virtual offices like my fax is because you can get the faxes in a number of different locations. So receiving is easy. If she's sending a document that's on her computer, again, it's simply attaching it to an email and sending it that way. The one catch that we don't solve is if you've got a physical piece of paper that you need to fax, that needs to be scanned in. So it's simply scanned, saved as a bitmap file or whatever comes out of your scanner, and then attached to an email to send again. And often what we find is people might do that with the signature page. Other people will scan their signature once and then just stamp it into the document online. But often instead of scanning the entire document, you just scan the signature page and send the rest of the document in the way I've described previously. Okay, thank you. Great, thanks. And that was another question that we had about signatures. So you would recommend scanning it and then placing it in the document or just sending that whole page as a signature, correct? That's right. Okay, great. So, Zanzel Lewis, star 7. One of the issues that I have at hand, I might have answered it already with the electronical signature. Do you know how that works? Because a lot of the paperwork that we have to send has to have signatures. And with you typing, with you creating a document and word, and it has to be signed. And you may have to go through maybe several people for signatures. Is there a method for that? Because I'm just trying to get on a bandwagon for being paperless. I still have some people that have to hold that paper. Oh, I see what you're saying. And if you're trying to collect a number of signatures within your organization, that can be a challenge. And that might be a good time to have that piece of paper. When it's an individual, what many of our clients do is that they scan their signature once and paste it into the document. And then when it's sent, it's fine. That's harder to do. So that adds your signature in, but you don't want to do that with your boss's signature and things. Because it's obviously not getting the approval, it's just putting the image of the signature in there. So my suggestion there would be to print the single page that needs signing, get that signed, scan it in. And then you can simply attach, like when you are sending the fax, send the original Word document and the scanned signature page at the same time. And we just stick the scanned signature page on at the end and it all comes out together. Is there a common ground of do's and don'ts for electronic furniture? Is there a way that you could, because I've signed things myself electronically. And I noticed that you saying that you just agree upon that you're doing this electronically. Is there something, is there a standard for that? And perhaps that may alleviate having that signature page on there. So I'm not aware of any single standard. I know there's a bunch of things around and a bunch of vendors have different solutions for the problem. Often, I think what you're referring to, you're seeing contract language as you're executing electronically that does try to get around that. But I'm honestly not an expert on the legalities of electronic signatures. Perhaps what I'll do is I'll pull out a couple of links and I'll send them to Anna for her follow-up posts. And maybe she can include those into, give you a couple of points to go from there. Sure, we'll be happy to post those in the forums. Great, great. So I had a comment from earlier in the question that was posted to the chat. Someone said that they have a larger organization that's spread out over a large geographic area and they send each other emails all the time. And that the only way she's found to organize the email is by printing and filing it. And one of the recommendations I gave her was to use Google Docs or to use an online project management tool. So this question is for both Steve or Susan. Do you have any recommendations for folks who are in that kind of scenario where they're only using email and what's the best way to organize their files electronically outside of the fact world? You know, I had a couple ideas about that. One is I've been using Outlook. And in that I can set up a number of different mailboxes that once the mail comes in I can put it into the one that's appropriate for that particular topic. And then just save it in my email so that it's always available there because you have to remember to back that up. Another is that there's a Save As function so that you can save it as a Word type of document and then put it into any folder on your computer that you want to. And the third thing is that I've got Adobe Acrobat on my computer. And I've been doing a lot of saving documents. I go to print but I use as the printer a PDF version of Adobe Acrobat and then all of the documents that I wanted to save come out as PDFs and that's been really helpful too. Excellent. And Steve, did you have anything to add? Well, I'm not sure I'm the best organized person to ask but one tool that I use for personal email is Gmail. And that's interesting because it makes it very easy to organize by conversation. So if you've got a Northeast conversation going on just by topic and person and things and all the Google search tools work in it. So to a degree I don't organize things and I just use Google search to find all the emails that are relevant for me. Actually, Tammy, if I can jump in here too. This is Anna. We found that if you store documents electronically instead of on paper you can use like a few other people have mentioned electronic search engines to find the document you're looking for so you don't have to know what is the name of it or exactly you can do a text search to find the content. Also you should create a good filing system just like you have a filing system in your office for paper. Create that on your server. And that way you can find if you use subfolders that are named appropriately you can save your emails there. You can save your electronic faxes there. You can save your documents there. That way you can have all the different types of communications in one place and save appropriately. Then you can also search on those. If you go to wikihow.com, W-I-K-I-H-O-W.com they have an article there about create a flawless filing system on your computer. Once you have created it then you can back it up and it's much more secure especially if you can use an online backup system. You could use something like BoxNet or Google Docs or some other things are available. But I think we have to wrap it up now so I'll turn it all over to Kami again. Thanks Anna. So we just have a couple minutes and I wanted to let y'all know that this discussion will continue in our Tech Planning Forum. I will be sending out a link to this URL with the follow-up email. If you had additional questions or if you wanted to share some of your ideas on how you are organizing your documents electronically it would be really great if you could post it in this location. And for those of you who are new to TechSoup I just wanted to let you know that we have much more than just discounted software. We have articles in our learning center and we do have the donated software and hardware. And the community forums where you can post questions and have them answered by a school of volunteers we have around the country. And we have been offering these webinars now since June and starting next year we will be having four each month. So we are looking forward to offering more for education to the nonprofit and library community. We have over 33 vendors. Here is a collection of some of the folks that we partner with and we are really lucky to have them donate their product to us so that we can redistribute it at a great discount to the nonprofit community. And we have branched out internationally. We are in over 16 countries and these organizations redistribute the donated software to their communities and serve the same kind of purpose that TechSoup does here. And I wanted to let you know that we will be having our next webinar on December 9th to promote our mail shell product. Stop spam today and I will be sending out a link to that as well. And a big, big thank you to our sponsors to ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk has donated their systems to TechSoup to expand awareness of technology through the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. And also MyFax, of course we heard from them earlier, and their Internet Fax service that allows organizations of all types to send and receive Faxes electronically via their email account or the web. Internet Faxing virtually eliminates paper documents allowing users to preview and read inbound Faxes in their email as well as forward, store them, and print only selected documents. So thank you both for helping make this webinar possible. And here is some contact information for the folks who were presenting today and I'll send this out in the follow-up email as well if you want to see in touch with any of these folks. And my name is Kami Griffiths again. If you have any questions, you can email me at kami at TechSoup.org. And I hope you're able to attend a future webinar with TechSoup Tops. Thanks everyone and have a great day. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Susan. Thank you. Well done. Bye now. Thank you. Please stand by.