 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Online Collaboration Tools. My name is Kami Griffiths, and I'd like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series. Today's presenters are John Warner, Jay Bourne, and Ronald Ho. But before I introduce the speakers, I'd like to tell you a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup Global is working towards a day when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. We are mainly known for our product donation program which redistributes hardware and software donations from corporate partners. We have hundreds of articles in our learning center along with information about free downloads. Our community forums is a place where you can post your technology-related questions and have them answered by dedicated forum hosts and volunteers. 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We currently operate donation programs in 33 countries. And in total, we've provided approximately 4.9 million donated technology products since our program started around the world. Now, I'd like to introduce today's speakers. And so John, I'd like to get you started. John, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization? Sure thing. My name is John Warner, and my organization is 350.org. 350 is an international organization dedicated to building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. And our mission is to inspire the world to rise to this massive civilization scale challenge, which is a bit of a tall order. And our main way of working is by empowering a global network of people all over the world, young and old, rich and poor, to put pressure on our political leaders. Great. Thanks, John. And we're going to hear a bunch more about 350. So I wanted to have Jay introduce himself quick. Jay, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Google? Absolutely. My name is Jay Bourne, and I work with Google.org, which is the philanthropic arm of Google Inc. My role is primarily focused around charitable giving and nonprofit outreach. One thing of note maybe that for those of you who are interested, I write a monthly newsletter for the nonprofit community highlighting new feature updates in Google products and other things of note. You can sign up at google.com.com. Great. And I will include information about that in our post-event message by send out. And Ronald, lastly, can you please introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at Google? Sure. Thank you. My name is Ronald Ho, and I'm a product manager at Google. I work in the Google Docs and Sites team, and specifically focused on the Google Spreadsheets and mobile documents, so all of our mobile tools for accessing your docs. I'm pretty excited to be here, and great to really see how Docs and Sites can really transform the nonprofit world. Thank you, Ronald. And again, I'm Kami Griffith. I'm the training and outreach manager here at TechSoup, and I'd like to thank Becky Wiegand, my co-worker, for answering questions on the chat, as well as Leslie Hall from Falsa Labs who will be answering questions related to that product when we talk about that in a few minutes. Without further ado, the agenda for the next 50 minutes or so will first start talking about 350.org and the tools that they're using. We'll spend some time looking at Google Apps, digging in deeper, looking at Google Docs and Calendars, and getting a live demo, and then wrapping it up with more about 350.org and how they're using Google Apps, and with about 15 minutes of Q&A. So with that, John, can you please tell us more about 350.org? Absolutely. Well, as I said, we are an international organization and to sort of get the obvious question out of the way first, what is 350? 350 is named after the goal of reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the current level of 390 PPM back down to below 350, which is what meat and climate scientists say is the safe upper limit. It's a bit of an odd name for an organization. It's a fairly arcane scientific target, but 350 has the virtue of being a number, which means it transcends language barriers, and it's sort of just mysterious enough to drop people in to learn more about what we do. So we started the 350.org about three years ago, and when I say we, I mean me and six friends from college along with Bill McKibbin, this guy on the left. He's an author who wrote the first book about global warming for a general audience, and me and this team of people on the right had been working together for a couple of years that saw a very urgent need for large scale global collaboration on this issue. So we went ahead and launched 350.org. The important thing though is that our strength as an organization doesn't really come from these people on this slide, some of whom are living in the United States, but it really comes from people all over the world. Everything we do at 350.org is global. And hundreds of thousands of supporters and volunteers in every corner of the planet power our organization. Last year we organized what we called an International Day of Climate Action which had over 5,200 offline events, rallies, teach-in, concerts, lobbying sessions on a single day, and it happened in 181 different countries, which is pretty much all the countries that there are. This year we're actually doing a similar day of events with a focus on actually implementing climate solutions, rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. Solar panels and community gardens and wind turbines at the same time will be strategically exerting pressure on political leaders. So to pull off all of these big large scale global events we have a somewhat unconventional structure. We have a core team of seven here in the middle and we have some regional coordinators who work with that core team. And then this big orange circle on the outside is the most important part. Those are our volunteer organizers who actually do the hard work of outreach and education in their community. And to operate like this in such a distributed way, I'm here in Oakland. I have colleagues in Mexico and Spain and Washington, D.C. and in Northern Africa. To operate in this distributed way, we rely on a set of tools that we harness to catalyze this wide variety of offline events. And when we look at tools, we look at tools that can enable us to collaborate closely, to work remotely, and to stay productive even while we're traveling all over the world. Basically we have to have our entire organizational infrastructure sort of in the cloud. So in order to do that we rely on these tools listed here on the screen. We have Skype, Salsa, Flickr, Dropbox, and Drupal which is the system that powers our own website. In addition to these four, we of course rely heavily on the Google App Suite for nonprofits which Jay and Ronald will speak to more thoroughly. For registered nonprofits with 501c3 status, Google Apps provides amazing ways to manage your organization's communication and planning and collaboration. I basically spend my entire day living within a sort of virtual Google Heff. But I'll leave Jay and Ronald to talk about that and I'll just dive into Skype. Skype is sort of the always-on lifeline for our core team. It keeps us together and connected even when we're thousands of miles apart. Skype's main claim to fame is a low-cost virtual telephone system, also known as VoIP, Voice Over IP. But it does a lot more than that too. The low-cost calls are great. I work with people in remote Pacific Islands in the Skype. I can have video calls with them for just pennies a minute. But you can also do a lot more. Over here we have me chatting with someone. We can also transfer files and just the ability to have sort of the face-to-face connection even when we're far apart really does enable us to work closely and get things done even in the distributed system. The other thing about Skype is that by having it sort of always-on, it greatly reduces our team's clutter. The random emails, unnecessary meetings that you go to, conference calls that take 20 emails just to set them up. So Skype really helps us stay productive and stay efficient. The next tool I'll touch upon briefly is Democracy in Action. They are a company based in D.C. and they provide what's called the Salsa platform. And for cash-strap nonprofits looking for sort of an all-in-one constituent relationship manager, Salsa is just a godsend. In one package, Salsa provides you with the ability to email your supporters, to process donations, to launch advocacy campaigns like petitions and letters to the editor, and to organize distributed events or just single one-off local events. There are lots of other competing tool sets out there with State Digital, Convio, lots more. But in my opinion, I think Salsa remains the cheapest and easiest way to have a lot of what you do organized under one roof. I'll very briefly talk about Flickr for us. We rely on images and almost everything we do, they help us tell these evocative stories from all over the world. And because of Flickr's API, which is sort of a language that enables our website to talk to Flickr, we were able to harness Flickr to basically organize over 25,000 photos from all around the world and get those out to media so that we could land on various front pages of New York Times and BBC and CNN and on and on. So Flickr is very, very useful for us. And lastly, I'll just mention Dropbox, which is a fantastic tool that enables you to share files and have redundant backup systems. This basically means that the files that I store in my Dropbox folder, it's just another folder on my computer, automatically get backed up. So for my team who needs to often have multiple versions of files and backups and share very large files, Dropbox is incredibly useful. And I'll cut myself off there. Great. We're going to keep it on that slide. I have a quick question before we move on to Jay. So earlier you mentioned in the cloud, and I'm sure lots of people have heard of cloud computing. This is the concept of all of your data living online somewhere. So the catch would be what if your staff doesn't have access to the Internet? So can you tell us a little bit about how you deal with that? Sure. I guess I have a couple points on that front. Many of the tools that we do use provide backup or offline options. Dropbox, the one I just mentioned, has all of your files stored locally as well as stored up in the cloud. Gmail, which our entire team runs on, provides offline email, which allows you to process mail offline. And then when you go back online, you can send and receive email. Google Docs, which we're about to dive into. Also I think had offline functionality until recently, and it's about to resurrect it shortly. So there are a lot of systems that enable you to work offline and online. The other point that I'll make is that while not having Internet access does make things a bit more difficult for my team, we are now able to do so much with mobile computing. So even if I don't have full Internet access on my laptop, I can do things on my phone that you couldn't have done even just a couple of years ago. I sent out an email to a quarter million people last week by pressing a button on my iPhone. So there really are a lot of possibilities even if you don't have a solid Internet connection that's not to discount some of the difficulties that you inevitably encounter when you do so much of your work using online tools. Great, thank you so much. Now we're going to jump over to Jay, and he's been tough about Google Apps. Hi there. Great. So I am going to give a very high-level overview of the Google Apps suite. So apologies to those of you who are already very familiar with this. But basically what Google Apps refers to is this suite of tools listed on the right-hand side here. So you may be familiar with these as independent Google products, but in fact they all work together in conjunction. And when we refer to them as a group, we call them Google Apps. Now at the core of Google Apps is this idea of easy and real-time collaboration. We hope that by using these tools you will free up more of your time to be able to do the things you need to do to run your organization and not have to face the frustration of sending revisions back and forth and missing each other trains in the night sort of situations. And we'll get into that in a little bit later. Now what Google Apps will also do is run the back end of your organization in the cloud. So it provides a white-label solution for you to have your email address and your shared documents and your shared sites and calendars and groups and Google Chat and video chat and all these things running in the cloud so that you don't have to have servers taking up space in your office hosting all this information. And it's available to you anywhere you have an Internet connection. And of course the best part is it's all free for nonprofit organizations with less than 3,000 members. And for those larger organizations with more than 3,000 members or employees I should say, we provide a deep discount. So here's sort of a slide outlining maybe why Google came around to the idea of Google Apps in the first place. And that was a frustration with business as usual. Knowing that to get a simple document shared and revised with people you face this situation like this. I'm sure this looks very familiar. You share it with four editors, three of them are very prompt and get back to you. You assume the fourth one is dropped off or is busy or has no feedback to give. You continue along with your revisions and then boom right when you think you're done somebody who's working on an antiquated version of that document gets back to you with input that may be valuable but is now a bit too late. So what's the solution? The solution is a set of tools that allows real-time collaboration so that nobody is ever left behind because they missed a revision or were dropped off an email or anything like that. And in addition to email, real-time collaboration applies to all of our products whether that's calendars that are updated in real-time and shared across your domain or Google sites which allow you to organize information either internally or externally. And in addition to Gmail and Docs and Spreadsheets which we'll be diving into a little bit deeper. Gmail I'm going to gloss over but I just want to clear up a common misconception which is that if you want to run or host your organization's email using the Gmail backend you would have to have an atgmail.com address or it would somehow be less professional than other enterprise solutions. In fact if you sign up for Google Apps for nonprofits and your organization starts to use this suite of tools you'll maintain your atyourorganization.org email address and the backend will be handled by Google's infrastructure in the cloud. So moving on to Google Docs, Ronald is going to dive into this deeper as well but I just want to give a high-level overview of some of my favorite features. A big one is the ability to upload and save to and from your desktop. So although Google Apps is a cloud-based service we recognize that everybody is making the transition from a desktop-based system. So if you have a thousand documents saved on your desktop PC you can easily bulk upload those into Google Docs and then share them with the people you wish to have them shared with. So we're doing everything we can to make it easy for people to make that transition and it also provides a great backup solution. If you're still operating with your documents on your desktop and you want to maintain that you can also bulk upload them into your Google Docs folder so you can share and find them anywhere you have an internet connection but you can also just use them there as a backup or a storage solution for the time being. So this is the theme we're going to keep coming back to at any time from anywhere. So Google Docs allows you and the Google Apps suite in general allows you to move away from this concept of the PC, the personal computer where you are physically tethered to your machine because all of your files and all of your information lives there and if your hard drive crashes or your computer gets stolen you're in a tough spot. With Google Apps your information lives on the cloud and you can set controls so that you control exactly who has the ability to see or edit this information in conjunction with you but it also gives you the ability to edit anywhere you have an internet connection to access your files anywhere whether you're in Oakland or Mauritius it doesn't matter as long as there's an internet connection. And as John mentioned we also provide offline features so to take the Mauritius example if you are there and there's a really good hot spot near your hotel you can get all the information you need, cash it in your offline settings and then access it from the field. Picking who can access your documents is a big feature as well so the privacy and sharing settings are totally customizable for every document every site every spreadsheet so that you choose exactly who can see these exactly who can edit them and exactly who can't. This is something we alluded to already I'm going to keep going but sharing changes in real time is important and when we say real time we really mean it. When you're in a document or a spreadsheet or editing a site when somebody makes changes it appears on your screen no matter where you are or how many people are editing this document at the same time so you really don't have to worry about missing changes or different revisions. If I'll just start securely online I already mentioned this and it's an important point for us we take online security very seriously. And also like all of these products it's free which we know is very important for nonprofits and for-profits alike that by freeing up both your time and your budget to do other things it will allow your organization to grow in great ways. That's our hope at least. Moving on to Google Spreadsheets. Again real time features here. So it's not just documents that allow you to do this. Even in spreadsheets you can be updating both text formulas, layouts, visualizations, anything that you are doing can be seen by your co-editors. Visualize your data and analyze it with built-in features. So for those of you who are used to Excel Google Spreadsheets is quickly building out new features. And the great thing about the Google Apps suite is that it's a living set of services. So you don't get version 1.0 of Google Apps. You don't get version 2.0 of Google Apps. By becoming a Google Apps customer you sign on to receive all of the updates that become available when they become available. And that's a great part about having this cloud-based solution rather than having software sitting on your desktop that you have to update. So Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, all of these tools are getting better all the time. Another easy plug for me here to sign up for the Google for Nonprofits newsletter because we do our best to keep track of these updates as they become available. And those that we feel are most relevant for the nonprofit community we'll tell you about at the beginning of each month. Collecting utilize responses from forms. This for me is a huge feature. So you're able not only to create spreadsheets that you are maintaining or your co-editors are maintaining, but you can create a form that lives either internally or externally and solicit responses from your target demographic. And all of those responses are going to be captured in Google Spreadsheets in one place with a time stamp and the person's name if you choose to ask it and any sort of information you want to collect from them will all be there and shared with the people you want it shared with. And from my conversations with nonprofit organizations I found that this is one of the most useful features of Google Spreadsheets. Shared calendars, I mean for me at least I don't know how I could operate without these by having calendars shared within your organization in real time. Not only people but shared resources can be assigned a calendar. So if you're looking to set up a meeting with four of your coworkers and say all four of them are in different locations and you need to book a room for each one of them being able to do that in calendars knowing that all that information is up to date is a huge time savings. And it frees up not only time but frustration for people trying to find one another but narrowly missing or finding out that calendars aren't up to date or having to send 100 emails back and forth to figure out what people's schedules are. And like all the features of the Google App Suite you can set privacy controls to determine who sees your calendar information and who sees either that exactly what you're doing or that you're busy or just no access at all. And so that's fully customizable as well. Moving on to Google Sites, I'm going to give a brief overview of these. Ronald's going to dive into this a bit deeper but I think this is probably, I don't know if it's fair to say the most underutilized but maybe the most underappreciated part of the Google App Suite and I find it to be by far one of the most useful. So what Google Sites allows you to do is create sites either using templates or free form if you know HTML or just enjoy working in that and embed gadgets easily. So it's not just text. It's videos. It's Google Spreadsheets. It's Google Docs. It's forms. It's all these things. It's not only Picasso but Flickr. It's all these different things that you can embed in your website to create a pretty rich immersive experience. And this can be true either for external websites if organizations are just getting set up with their web presence or want to save money without hiring a web developer. But more often than that it's used internally for organizations to collect all their information in one place. So I use Google Sites most frequently for project management to keep track of all the different information and projects I'm working on whether it's running notes or team members or current information or docs and spreadsheets. You can keep it all organized in one site and all linked and easily accessible for all your different team members. And again choose who has access. So if it's a confidential project and you only want your team members to see that information it only takes a click or two to do that. And so again share information on a secure company intranet. Also collaborating on projects and planning meetings and activities. So if you have a big volunteer event or a big fundraiser coming up being able to point everybody to one website where all the information lives rather than trying to maintain a bunch of different email threads and keeping track of 100 different links to all the documents and relevant information. Being able to put all that place in one site and as you might be able to see in this photo doing things like simple things like embedding a calendar on your site or keeping a ticker, a countdown of when, how long you have to accomplish your goals can be really really useful. At least I find it to be so. And most importantly and something Ronald can definitely talk more about is the ability to get this all on the go. We're very focused on making all of this information accessible and useful on your mobile device whether it's Android or Apple or Symbian or anything else. If you're using a mobile device and Google Apps you don't need to worry that things won't be compatible or just because you're away from your desktop computer you won't have access to that information. So sorry for going so quickly. I hope that was helpful for some people and I'm going to turn it over to Ronald. Okay, I think I've shared my desktop. I'm sorry to see everyone can see this. Alright so I don't want to speed through this so I'm going to just pick and choose. I usually speak on this topic for about an hour and I have about 10 minutes now so let's get started. So this is a document. This is Google Docs. We rolled out a new editor a few months ago. And what I really want to show off is the sharing and real-time collaboration of documents. Because let's face it, documents as you see it right now is not interesting. You've seen this in like open office, you've seen this in notepad, you've seen this in Word. I'm entering text. That's not that big of a deal. But what's the most exciting part is the share button right here. The sharing is you can say this document is currently private. And let's say I want to share it with my personal account. And once I hit share I can put in a message that says hi. Hit share. And now I can also change the visibility of this document. If I want everyone on the web to see this document or if I say only certain people with the link or it's only private to the people I send it to. So we have very strict controls on sharing that you can go through. So let's see if I got this document here. In this document you'll see that the next time somebody opens, this is my personal account. I'm opening up the document. So these are two separate accounts on the top and on the bottom. And you can see as I'm typing right now, as I'm typing right now, I'm trying to squeeze this into my screen here. So the way real-time collaboration works here is as I'm typing you can easily see the presence if you see right up here and I'm typing down here in my other account. Hi there, how are you doing? And this happens nearly instantly all across the world because we have the infrastructure for distributing real-time collaboration across. So hopefully this shows you the power of this. So it's really amazing to watch a document literally come together and grow right in front of your face when you're watching everybody build a document together. So that's real-time collaboration that's sharing. On the spreadsheet side of things, I want to show off a couple of key things. Again, I have to pick and choose my favorite things here. I only have a few minutes left. This button here, Form. Go to Form. I'm going to say Create a Form. Now give me about 15 seconds to create a form to collect t-shirt sizes. So I'm going to say t-shirt, hey, how are you doing? And sample question, I want your name for example, send it to me in text. I want your t-shirt size. And let's say it's a multiple choice question, small, medium, large. So hit Done. And that's pretty much it right there. You've created a form in less than about 15 seconds. I'm going to now email this form to, let's email it back to this account here. So you can see the integration that we have. I've just emailed this to myself. Before I email this, let's go back to the spreadsheet. Remember, I started with a blank spreadsheet. Let's hit spreadsheet. Notice here in the spreadsheet, Google has already populated the fields. We know you're looking for a name. We know you're looking for a t-shirt. This is already set for you. So let's see what this looks like in email. If you click on email, if you use Gmail, you get the form embedded directly in here. Now I'm going to try something here. I'm going to fill out this form. Ronald, and let's say I wear a large, and I'm going to hit submit. Now before I hit okay, I want to bring, oops, let's hit cancel for now. Before I want to do this, I want to show you the spreadsheet here. I'm going to hit submit. I'm going to hit submit here. I'm going to hit okay. As you notice, my responses came in instantly. It's amazing when you send out a form and watch you fill it in and literally watch responses pour in. And that's one of the really key things here. Now, the last thing I want to touch upon is Google's site. Jay was absolutely correct when he said Google's site is one of our most underutilized things. And folks don't really know about Google's sites whenever we ask them. So let's create a site. So in my experience, creating a site, there's two difficult parts in creating a site. The first one is coming up with a name. And the second one is going through this, figuring out this silly cap tray here. So let's come up with a sample site one. And GRI, excuse me here. Getting old. All right, here we go. Is that incorrect? Oh, name is already chosen. Oh gosh, I'm not very creative here. Let's try 45. I'm pretty sure it's not that one there. Let's go. All right, here we go. So instantly I have a site up and running. If anyone has online right now, you want to go and hit this link and you can access the site. You can think of Google's site as two different things. One, it's an instant website. Two, it's a project management Wiki type thing that Jay was talking about earlier. Absolutely right on point there. Watch as I edit this. Think about putting up a website about two or three years ago. If you wanted to put up a website, how would you do it? You'd have to hire a webmaster. You'd have to learn HTML. You'd have to learn some JavaScript to make it look pretty. But with this, all you have to do is know how to write an email. If you can write an email, you can update this site. Watch as I hit Edit Page right here. I'm going to type and say, Hi, how's everyone doing here? And I hit Save. Instantly my website is updated. Whoever hits this, you know, sites.google.com slash sites slash samples site 45, if you hit that, you will get this site instantly updated with the latest content. No more waiting for a webmaster. No more needing to find a webmaster. You can put up your site yourself. We've got themes so you can make your site look pretty with a click of a button. Let's talk about internal websites. Of course, if you're an organization, you sign up for Google Apps. You have the ability to make sites only accessible within an organization, so only accessible within 350.org for example, within Google.com, whatever your company is. We also have the same extensive sharing that you're used to in documents. You can share with certain people. You can make sure anyone in the world can view this site, or I can take off this check mark and nobody can view this site except for the people I say. Now, last thing I want to touch upon is the power of sites when it comes to editing a page. You saw me create that document earlier, right? Sure, I can take that link of the document, and I can drop in that link here and anyone who clicks on it. So I'm going to take this link. I'm going to pop it into here, and the next person who clicks on that link will get to the document. But at Google, we thought you can get better than that, and you can get prettier. So here in this Insert button, let's insert a document. That same exact document you watched me open up right here. I think I called it Sample Document. I can now embed this document directly here. Let me hit Save. Once you hit Save, that same document you watched me create seconds ago, minutes ago, is right here embedded into your website. Think about it. You can put proposals in here. You can put anything you want. So if that's not interesting, or you don't find that useful, think about this one. Two more quick examples to show here. Hit Edit. And watch as I really edit this, and it's really very, very seamless. So hit Insert, and let's say you created a presentation with our presentation editor. I didn't go through our presentation editor, but it's the same real-time collaboration that you're used to with Google Docs. My internet has seemed to go down here. It's back. So a presentation that you created. I create this presentation for nonprofits that I usually give. And once you say nonprofits, etc., you can start sides. Let's say you make it medium-sized. Watch as this presentation is directly hit. I just hit Save. It's directly embedded into my website. Whenever you give a pitch, whenever you give a presentation, you can directly embed it with only about three clicks of a button directly into your Google site. And folks can now go and click here and say, and go across and just go through a presentation. And you can kind of get a sneak peek at some other presentations I gave at this point. Now, one more demo that hopefully will help you out. So creating forms is great, right? Creating forms is great. Creating sites is even better. But why can't we put those two together? Well, at Google sites we said, hey, why not? So if you go to Insert, you go to Spreadsheet Forms, you go down to Forms, you watch me create that t-shirt form minutes ago, right? Watch when we hit Select here. Hit Save. Spreadsheet Form is here. And I'm going to hit Save again. Next time anyone hits the website, they can see the form directly embedded on the website. Google sites can be your internal site and can be your external-facing site. You can use it to collect sign-ups. You can use it to embed calendars, embed maps. I didn't even talk about embedding calendars or maps. You can embed presentations, embed documents, embed spreadsheets, and even embed forms. Great way to kind of collect sign-ups in a one-stop shop. I don't have time to talk about themies or anything, but that is essentially the beauty of Google sites here. And just for those skeptics out there, let's show up a couple of real sites that are being used out there. And these are all Google sites that are slightly customized to look a lot better. I clearly do not have the UI skills to make this site look better. But with a couple of clicks, InRelief.org pulls in their own – this is a Google site you're looking at. We have built-in search on the sites. They can put up widgets like 29 days, 128 a day, et cetera, do countdown widgets. They have blog widgets that pull in from their blogs. They have feed readers that they put in. So InRelief is able to do this almost for free. This is another site that's a highly customized Google site, but all of this is all within our options for you to do. This is called Puddle Play. This is just a children's camp website. And this is it right here. And this is again built on Google sites as well. And everything is there. You can easily add pages to Google sites. I didn't have a chance to do that. You can create a page, add pages to the sidebar, all within clicks of a button. So hopefully I've covered a bunch of things there. I apologize again for going through so quickly. I've talked to Kami about doing a whole separate session about this to talk more about this. I would love to do that at some future time, but hopefully I can answer some questions later if you have any specific questions. Thanks very much. Kami, wonderful. Thank you, Ronald. That is a fantastic overview. Yes, it went fast, but remember this is being recorded so you can go back and watch it and hit pause and think about it. But I am going to take Ronald up on that offer of doing another session just to focus on one or a few of these tools. What I would like to do now is stop showing. Okay, there we go. And move it back to John and have him talk a little bit more about, talk deeper about how he is using Google Apps specifically with 350. And then we will hopefully have some good tenants for Q&A. So John. So yeah, I mean at 350.org we do rely on Google products pretty much day in and day out everything from the Google sites which we use for our internal Wiki. We use Google Docs to collaborate. We work on big email blasts that we send out. I really could go on for hours and hours here, but I will just run through a few, I think some more unique examples of what we do with Google products. This first example is a demonstration of one of the interesting ways that we use Gmail. Whenever you email info at 350.org or you respond to one of our general email blasts, it goes into a shared gigantic group inbox. And everyone on the 350.org team has access to this inbox so that we can all respond to the messages that are most appropriate for a given team member. And this saves us a ton of time in terms of having to forward email to different people or having multiple conversations that are redundant going on in different silos. Since it's all in one big transparent inbox, we can all work that much more efficiently and collaboratively. Here in the screenshot you can see that's me selecting my name from this big drop-down menu of everyone else on my team because I was the one who was most appropriate to answer this particular inquiry. The next example demonstrates how we use the Google Maps API. One of the great things about Google is that it not only enables you to use Google product on the Google website, but it enables you to use them on your own website. Ron demonstrated a number of the embeddable widgets that are available to you. And you can even take those things a step further and just customize them a little bit. So here on this page you see a map of over a thousand events that we're organizing for this upcoming day of action. And there is literally no way that we could organize such large scale events and operations without harnessing tools like this. So Google is obviously most famous for its search functionality. And one perk of having Google for nonprofits is that you can use Google's custom search to search your own website free of charge and free of advertising. This means that people can easily use Google search on your site to find exactly what they're looking for in just a few seconds, or I guess .31 seconds to be precise. And this last example is maybe a bit more advanced, but it shows how with a bit of work you can use free tools like Google Spreadsheets for all sorts of things. A little while ago we found that we needed a way for people to easily find the phone number of their political leaders to make advocacy calls. And this should be easy, but it wasn't. There was no sort of centralized database where people could easily find this stuff. So one of our partner organizations developed what's known as the Google Gadget, which is a little box that you can embed in your website. And this Google Gadget enables people to easily find the information the phone numbers by selecting their country from a drop-down menu. And what's especially cool about this is that the whole thing is powered by a Google Spreadsheet. So if we need to update the information, say if the Prime Minister of Albania changes his phone number, we can easily jump into that Google Spreadsheet, make an update, and then when our Albanian supporters select Albania from the drop-down menu, they get the updated phone number very easily. So it's a pretty specific example, but I think it speaks to the fact that the possibilities are endless when it comes to harnessing these free or cheap tools for really efficient collaboration in the 21st century. So yeah, that's it from my end. Wonderful. So much information so quickly. I wanted to let you all know that we have some resources in the PowerPoint that you received this morning. You'll see that this afternoon. So these all link out to different training modules and videos and other information specifically on Google Apps and Google Docs. So what I'm going to do now is move to the question and answer part of this presentation. And we've got several questions that have been submitted already. So please, if you haven't yet submitted any questions that you have, do so via the chat box. This first question will be for John, and it has to do with training. A question from Mike, I hope John will address how one goes about integrating all these various components to make a coherent infrastructure what kind of tech skills are needed. So John, can you address that question? Absolutely, and it's an excellent question. Okay, so John has dropped from the line. He can answer that call or answer that question when he gets back in. So we will move to the next question, which will be related to Google. And some questions have to do with Jessica's question. What are the limitations with using Google for nonprofits for free versus cost? Is it based on income or member use? So I guess I'll throw this to Jay. Can you address that question and let us know what the costs are involved and what some of the benefits are? Yeah, absolutely. So currently the free version of Google Apps for nonprofits is only available to US 501C3 nonprofits with less than 3,000 employees. And so we don't monitor the number of employees. Technically we monitor the number of people who will be using Google Apps. So if you plan to switch more than 3,000 people over to Google Apps, then we give a discount of 40% to implement your instance of Google Apps. But if you have less than 3,000 people, it's free. For those organizations based outside of the US, there is a version of Google Apps called the Standard Edition. And you can see all of these at the Apps Editions drop-down at google.com slash a, just the letter a, to learn more about this and compare them. But the Standard Edition is free for anyone with less than 50 users. So if you have a small organization based outside of the US, you can still get Google Apps for free, but you'll just need to do it using the Standard Edition. Another is a question, and I don't know who is better to speak to international nonprofits. Any news on support for international nonprofits in terms of getting an educational Google Apps account? So I can take this one. This is Jay. We are actively pursuing the ways to expand our nonprofit in-kind donations among those Google Apps for nonprofits, Checkouts for nonprofits, Google Grants, etc. And our GEO offerings, the premier edition of Google Earth and the Maps API are available in a lot of different countries. And those can be found by using your favorite search engine and looking for Google Earth outreach or visiting google.com slash nonprofits. And Google Grants, which is our name for AdWords donations for nonprofits, is also available in several different countries. Unfortunately, Apps is only available to nonprofits for free in the US at this time, but we are working on solutions to scale these offerings internationally. Now this one, this will be for Ronald. It's an interesting question. So what is the value of Skype, excuse me, Skype over Google Apps? And we talked a little bit about Skype earlier. It's got video conferencing. It's got file sharing, and you can chat. And I know there's a bunch more that Google Apps has to offer. That sounds great. Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It's a very good question. It's funny, Jay and I were just talking about this over chat ourselves actually. I think the value of Google Video Chat and Google Docs and everything is that it's one integrated system. You can share a file using the same sharing menu through Google. When you upload a Google Docs, you can upload any file into Google Docs actually, not just a document. I can upload a PDF for example, or even a PowerPoint file. Anything I wanted to upload a file that we don't have, you can upload it and share it. And it's all the same sharing controls. So you can share it with a group of people. You can share it with one or two persons or make it accessible to everyone in the world. Make it a public document. So that's one thing. The other thing is that everyone in your organization, if you want to video chat with them, would need to go get a Gmail account or a Google Apps account, etc. Skype I guess may perhaps be more prevalent around the world as just a chat tool. So you may possibly be more likely to find somebody who would have a Skype account more so than a Gmail account. So that's also another thought. At the end of the day it's all about whichever channel you're most familiar with. With Google, it's all about having all this one cohesive package. I hope that answers the question. If it doesn't, I'll be glad to take a follow-up question. So there's a couple of questions on chat that I didn't see get addressed. I can answer those in one-liners if you want, Kimmy. I'm going to move on to the question because John's back on the line. And then I'll call you up in a second. So John, if you could address that question about integrating the various components. John Absolutely. And I don't know where I got cut off, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself to some of you. Kim We didn't hear anything, so started speaking. John Okay, great. So basically it's a very good question because especially after seeing this whole presentation it's an overwhelming amount of information in a number of tools. What we do is have a short orientation with new team members that basically just breaks down which tools we use for what purposes. And we have a schematic, a diagram that demonstrates how the different tools integrate. And people generally seem to get it pretty easily. Sometimes there's some initial confusion about which tool to use for file transfer and sharing, things like that. But people get up to speed fairly quickly. We do also have the advantage that many of the people we work with around the world are quite young and so they have sort of, I don't know, maybe a natural fluency with this stuff. But because these products, especially Google products, are so user friendly we find that people are able to get up to speed quite quickly. Great. Now this question for Jay. We're having trouble switching from paid-to-non-profit addition. The different department seems siloed. What's the best way to go about doing this? Particularly if we have specific questions for customer service. John Sure. So if you're already using a paid version of Google Apps you can visit google.com slash a, go to App Seditions, nonprofit, and there get started. So that, if you click on get started it will take you to a place where you're supposed to register your domain name. What you can do is click on the link below that which is either group members start here or returning users sign in here. And it says enter your domain name. And there you should be able to easily switch over from the paid version to get the Google Apps for EDU upgrade. And there's a slight lag because they need to confirm 501c3 status. And once our team is able to do that they'll be able to enable your account to get that Apps for EDU upgrade. Also if you're already a paying customer you'll have access to Google Apps support team and you should be able to contact your representative and ask them any questions about making the switch. Great. Thank you. And this one is for Ronald. And then also Ronald wanted to address one of the questions that you found in the chat that you thought was relevant. A question from someone in Second Life. They're interested in learning more about the training modules and what they include. I was just about to chime in on that. Fantastic. We actually just launched the training modules for education for teachers. And I think the education space and nonprofit space are the same where folks are really starting to integrate technology into the core of their work whether it's teaching or whether it's the nonprofit work that they do. If you go online and go to edutraining.googleapps.com and I guess I'll pass this on to Camille later. That's edutraining.googleapps.com. We actually put in over 600 pages of training modules where you could go through step-by-step of how to create a form for example, how to create a document, how to collaborate with users, how to share properly, how to use Gmail. Like it goes on and on. And it's a very, very comprehensive training center. And the teachers that have used this so far have had a lot of very positive things to say. The other thing is that we constantly are releasing features and those features you can subscribe to our Google Docs blog or Google Apps blog and you can search for those online and we will be posting up new features there all the time. A couple of quick things. I saw a person named Richard mentioned whether or not they can use their own custom domains for mapping to Google Sites. Absolutely. In Google Sites if you go to Share Men's Sites you can change a C name properly to point from your, like if I said, ronaldsorg.com or something or .org or .edu could actually remap to a site without the user even knowing they're going to a Google site. And the other one was about Google Spreadsheets and how you can share only parts of it. We have a concept of publishing the spreadsheet where under the Share menu you have Publish. You can publish out certain sheets that you want shown and certain sheets that you don't want shown. So if you've got some columns that you want to show in one sheet and some that you don't you can simply hide them and publish that sheet or you can have them link to another sheet and see and then publish only one sheet at a time. So there's a lot of flexibility there. Thanks Ronald. I know that there's been some questions about how do we get the newsletter and how do we get help setting up. So some of the things that Ronald just said will help you get set up. We'll include that link. We'll also include a link to where you can get the newsletter that Jay mentioned earlier in the post event message that I'll send to you later this afternoon. There's quite a few questions, kind of confusion I think for people who might be brand new to this idea of like do I need to have a Gmail account to use these files, to use the Google Docs, and when can I get some of the things that are offered on Google Apps that I can't get as a Gmail user. So Jay could you address that kind of like if you want to get started what do you do? Sure. So I think it's going to be a bit different for everyone. If by getting started you mean just learn more about what's out there and if Google Apps is right for your organization. I would suggest visiting google.com slash nonprofits and following the links for apps, or also if you want to dive a little bit deeper into the trainings to see what's possible with the Google Apps suite to visit that link that Ronald mentioned which we'll send out in the post webinar briefing. And so in terms of support also once, so part of the education edition of Google Apps which nonprofits receive, so the naming there is a bit confusing. So not 501c3 nonprofits that apply for the nonprofit upgrade are actually receiving what we call the education edition. And that comes with full 24-7 support. So any issues that may arise with implementation or ongoing issues or any bugs that you find, you'll have access to our support team who can help you address those issues. But just to be clear, if I wanted to use Google Docs and I don't have a Gmail account would I be able to use it? Ronald, I'm not sure about editing. I'd like to ask Ronald to chime in on that. But anybody can view Google Docs. You can definitely edit anonymously. So we have the concept of anonymous view and edit. So if I share a document out there and you want somebody, you have to set up the document under the share settings to say anyone in the world can view an edit which is what I showed you earlier where it says public. You can say public for viewing or public for editing. You have to be careful with these documents because when you say public for editing it really means public for editing so anyone can get in and edit. The best way to go of course for everyone is to sign up for a Google Apps account so you have a trusted set of folks that you have. I can't emphasize how important it is to sign up for a Google Apps account because you can then give out custom email addresses to everyone in your organization and you own their accounts as the domain owner. For example, if Jay and I were working in a company and we both had Gmail addresses and Jay left the company then I don't have all the documents that Jay used to own and he has it in his own personal Gmail account. I have no control over those. I cannot say, hey Jay, give me your password. But with Google Apps account Jay has an email address that is within an organization and when Jay leaves we still own that account. The organization still owns that account and they can go in and retrieve any documents or kind of set up any filters that they need to set up whatever it is. So it's very, very important. And also if you assign user names for all of these folks in Google Apps, in a Google Apps domain, you now can verify who they are. And with Google Forms there's actually an option for a domain person that says automatically collect their user names. So everyone in your organization like all 3,000 of them or more could be submitting to a form and you can see exactly who submitted to that form without them actually needing to put in their name. So it's little perks like that, that you have once you own those accounts. And I'll chime in here to say that if you're pondering using Google Apps for your organization or maybe you need to get some buy-in from other people in order to make that switch for your whole organization, I would suggest signing up for a free instance of the standard edition of Google Apps in which you can have up to 50 users and play around in there to see what it can do and how it can work for you. And feel free to really push the limits there because you're not going to break Google's infrastructure. And if you've just signed up for the standard edition then your whole company isn't running on it, but it allows you sort of a sandbox to figure out what's possible. Wonderful. And with that we are going to wrap up the webinar. I'd like to thank the three presenters for all this great information and I hope the folks out there listening are walking away with more information and feeling not frightened but inspired to go check out the different products that Google has as well as the different applications that John mentioned earlier. I do apologize for the many, many of you who didn't get your questions answered but please post those to our community forums. Here's the link and my co-worker Becky will send that short URL out to you via the chat. We have a couple more webinars coming up in the next few weeks, social media decision making on September 21 and the donor management solution on September 30. So watch out for those and when we have the registration ready you can sign up for those. So we'd like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout 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. So thanks again everyone for participating. I hope you learned a lot and thanks again to the presenters. This is really, really great information and apologize for making you cram an hour-long presentation into 10 minutes Ronald but we'll definitely be checking in with you again. So Jay, John, Ronald, thank you so again and for the folks helping on the chat. Have a wonderful day and we'll see you again soon on TechSoup Talk. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.