 Hi everyone, this is Susan Hope Bard with TechSoup. Thanks so much for joining us today for our product review. It is the end of the fiscal year and we thought we'd bring you some highlights of our most popular products. Today's event will be recorded. It will be placed in the module for June 27th in our course. You can watch any of the recordings for the past few months in our course TechSoup 30 or TS 30s and you can simply go to the date that you missed or you want to watch again and you can click on the live event. We also have the survey and any resources that we've provided to you in addition to the recording. We are asking that you do complete the survey at the end of today's session to let us know what we can do differently or what we can do better to meet your needs. This is a half hour program and I'm going to be sharing my desktop with you. I'm going to go through a short PowerPoint. The PowerPoint is also on the course in the first when you click open the course. It's the very first module. You can download the PowerPoint. You can save it. You can modify it or share it with friends. So I'm going to go ahead and share my desktop. As I mentioned, I'm going to do a quick review of our popular products. I guess the first thing to really address is who can get TechSoup technology. So just to give you a brief overview, all nonprofits with 501C3 status, this includes museums, zoos, historical sites, also public libraries with an IMLS listing or public libraries with 501C3 status. Essentially, if you have 501C3 status, we can connect you with tech donations. And if you have questions, we do have resources that can help you and I will chat that number and that email out to you shortly. These are all of our corporate partners. And keep in mind, like you as an individual, our donor partners choose where to direct their donations. So I'm going to highlight just a few of these donors today and I'm going to look at the top donation programs. The first one is Microsoft donations. We're going to delve a little bit deeper into Microsoft, but there's things like Microsoft Office 365, Office 2016, Windows Server. Really Microsoft is kind of the hallmark of TechSoup's initial foray into offering products to the nonprofit and library audience. Also Adobe. Adobe has some amazing design software such as Creative Cloud, Premier Elements, and also Acrobat 11. Intuit is also a very popular product. And this is QuickBooks for the Office or Mac or QuickBooks online. We also have security products, including Symantec. And we will be hosting a webinar about endpoint protection on July 27th. So we hope you join us for that. And we also have Norton software and something that's very near and dear to our hearts. Jim Lynch, we'll talk a little bit later today about our roundup of articles, but he really started the refurbished hardware program. And we'll talk a little bit about the new and refurbished hardware program today. As I mentioned, Microsoft donations were really the start of TechSoup and it's really the hallmark for TechSoup and what we're most well-known for. You can get donated versions of Microsoft Window, Office 365 and Server. You can request up to 50 licenses per fiscal year. You can also get Microsoft Office Standard, Professional Plus through TechSoup as well as Office for Mac. Symantec donations. You can get Symantec Enterprise and Symantec Norton products for eligible nonprofits and charities throughout the U.S. And you can use these products to enhance the security on your network computers. We also have TechSoup Boost. TechSoup Boost is really a subscription service that curates some of the best and brightest software and hardware that you can purchase for an annual subscription. Discounted hardware, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, hotspots, projectors and more, we offer things such as, in this slide, there's some refurbished products and we do have a very special RCI refurbished special program. And the best way to explore your hardware options is to go to techsoup.org slash hardware and you can see the many products that we have. To take a look at our refurbished computers, these are just a sample. They're high quality, competitively priced desktops, laptops and other hardware. And many come with one year warranties and most come with Windows 10 pre-installed. So you can see here, TechSoup has partnered with really the industry leading computer refurbishers. And we call it the RCI program and it offers new and refurbished hardware from folks like Dell, HP and Lenovo. And all the products are designed to meet your standards, right? The regular standards of corporate users, folks like you in the nonprofit world, not just individual consumers for home use. So our partners guarantee that all of our hardware is in really good working condition. It's gone through testing, repair, restoration and cleaning before it comes to your office. And our partners offer standard and extended warranties, which is important. And also one year extended warranties and troubleshooting assistance. So they do accept returns on damaged products subject to their approval. And they come with things like pre-installed software saving you as a nonprofit or library time and money. And most of the desktop and laptop computers, as I mentioned, include a Windows operating system, Microsoft Office Suite and some type of Microsoft security software that's pre-installed. And when you look at the admin fee here, it actually includes the shipping and handling. So the admin fee is for the product itself and also for the shipping and handling to your workplace. New hardware, we have a great partnership with Dell and your organization can save up to 45% on Dell products. And that includes laptops, desktops, servers, printers and more. And your organization can save and also the employees and volunteers at your organization can also save on their own Dell purchases. So you essentially have, there's an admin fee of $10 and it gives you access to special coupons that gives you a discount on the products and those discounts change quarterly. So as I mentioned, your organization or your library, you can save on the Dell laptop, desktops, TVs, gaming systems, accessories and more. Another program we have is JourneyEd and here is the place where it used to only be available to academic institutions, but JourneyEd.com partnered with TechSoup to make these discounts available to you and these discounts are on more than 5,000 software and hardware products. So as I mentioned, most of these were only available previously to student schools or others in the education workplace. Some of the things that you might see on the JourneyEd, here's some sample products and prices and pricing. So we have like tablets. We have Camtasia. Camtasia is a product that you can use to create videos. It's really great for screen capturing to show how tos. We use that here at TechSoup. There's also projectors. So JourneyEd is a great place to access discounts on products that you might not find in our catalog so that admin fee helps you access that information and those products. IT Assist is another subscription program and what this is designed to do is it's supposed to help you manage your IT services and it's really customized to the individual organization depending upon their needs. So IT Assist serves only nonprofits and public libraries. They be there to manage your system backups. They offer live support, whether you call in, they monitor your security and performance. Essentially, you can find out more about IT Assist and really find out the cost that it would be for your organization, whether it's a small, medium-sized or large nonprofit. You can find out if that's a competitive price by going to www.techsoup.org slash IT Assist. So this is a product that can help you manage your IT because if you're like many nonprofits, some of you wear many, many hats and you may be the CFO and you may also be your main IT person. So these are folks that can help you manage that. There are lots of ways for you to find the products that I highlighted a few moments ago and I just hit the high notes of our product donations but you can go to www.techsoup.org and there's really two ways that you can browse or search. You can look on the left-hand column in the product catalog and you can search by donor or company so you can look for Microsoft or Adobe or Intuit or QuickBooks Made Easy. Just it's alphabetized. You can simply click on the donor or company and then find it and look at all of the offerings or you could look at the category. So if you're looking for communication software, you can look by category. You can also use the search bar. If you wanna type in a very specific product that you need, you can see if we have that. So when you do a search in the search bar, the search will also include products. It will also have articles and other resources including recorded webinars or blogs or how-tos. So a couple of things to mention, like if you were looking up QuickBooks Made Easy, you could also then go to the articles and how-tos. There's plenty of articles for you to understand how to better use that product, some tips and tricks. And then there's also some recorded webinars that you can go to and watch. So you can help to learn to use that new technology or to use it better. If you browse by the donor partner, a couple of things to note is that when you go into the details, you'll find out a little bit more about eligibility and restrictions. As I mentioned earlier, each of our product donors has the flexibility to determine who is eligible for their products, much like you when you donate to your synagogue or church or a nonprofit that you're making a donation to, you can designate where that donation is used. Our donor partners do the same thing. So you can find out about your potential eligibility for that product, in other words, how much you can get and any restrictions on that product. So some of our products are the fiscal year runs through June 30th, which is coming up. And within that year, you have a certain number of licenses or access to that product. And these are all under the eligibility and restrictions page. So we urge you to make sure you read that and also read all of the details of the product. We do have very sophisticated and helpful customer service reps, and those folks would be able to answer your questions and help you find the information you need to make your decision. The other thing I mentioned was that you can browse by category. So this is kind of like the solution. Like what are you looking for? Okay, I'm looking for computers and electronics and I need a mobile device. So there's lots of flexibility in terms of how you can search for something. If you need graphic design or web design, you can look at that category up and you can see the products that are offered in that category. And perhaps more importantly, to keep you up to speed and abreast of all of the new products that we do bring onto our catalog, sorry, you can actually subscribe to our monthly newsletters. So that's a curated list of tips, resources, articles, which Jim will speak about in a moment. They're free, you can opt in and you can opt out at any time. We have a monthly newsletter, we have Twice by the Cup, which comes out twice a month and we also have a product alert which tells you about specials on products or new products that have come out. So if you go to techsoup.org slash subscribe to our free newsletters, you can select which newsletters you'd like to receive. And as I mentioned, at any point in time, you can opt out of these newsletters or alerts, but it can help you keep abreast of new things that are coming out or new ways to adopt the product. And we also announce other events like our webinars or any other resources that we develop like courses and techsoup courses. So I'm gonna stop sharing for a minute and I am going to turn it over to Jim Lynch who is going to speak about a curated list of really great articles that are coming out for fiscal year end and things that may be interesting to you as a nonprofit or library. And after that, I'll check to see if there are any questions and then the two of us can hopefully answer all of your questions. Jim, take it away. Okay, hi everybody. Jim here, I'm gonna turn on my screen share here and show you the stuff we have going here in terms of content that's brand new. So there we go. All right, so here's a fun new thing that we've just launched. Probably the biggest humanitarian crisis so far in our lifetimes, believe it or not, is something called the refugee crisis. It has effects and it's a crisis in the Middle East and Europe mainly and affects 65 million people and we've partnered with TechSoup and Microsoft to provide some resources for organizations that are working on that stuff. So this is a fairly short announcement that we have and probably most importantly, what this new informational site provides, what refugee response offers. One thing that we have in here is that we have a place for you, if you would like, to send us any news, any information we might not know that would be useful to other charities anywhere in the world, United States or anywhere else. And the email address for that is internationalpartners at techsoupglobal.org. So if you have any leads for information or content that other charities might use to address this important thing, we would love to hear from you. So what's next? Here's a new thing by our content director, Janice Bernie. It's our first piece on here and Janice is a pretty seasoned professional in marketing and communications and especially digital marketing. And so here's a piece that she's done. It's the first of a two-part series. I think the next part is gonna be coming in probably in July sometime. And she basically kind of boils it down on kind of her, how she does her work here at TechSoup in terms of our digital strategy. And I mean, there's basic stuff here. Of course, figuring out your story, I think that everybody is pretty adept at that. The real problem is getting it out in several different forms, video form, email form, social media form, all that kind of stuff. And in a way that it's compelling and original and kind of like that. Who, what, how and why. So audiences king, audience is everything in the world of content, as you probably know. She has a little tiny section here on how to think about that the way she thinks about that. Communication audit is something that she's very adept at. And that's basically taking stock of all the stuff you have going and trying to find out where you may be a little thin. You might not have good social media coverage or not doing it very well or you might be sending out lots of emails that get caught in spam filters. There's a lot of different things. And then next she recommends developing your marketing narratives. And she breaks this down, this is getting into kind of the weeds in this, but she breaks this down. Probably this is the best part of the article from my point of view. Internal narrative is kind of interesting. Most people probably don't do this. This is first I've ever seen or heard of it. It's a kind of thing where you take stock inside your organization of what you guys do and what your strengths are and why people should be interested in you. And then your external narrative is putting together your value to the different audiences you have. So quite a bit, quite a bit in this piece. So I really recommend you just have a look at it and see what our Janice Bernie recommends for your communication strategy. Moving on. All right, so fundraising. So our fundraising columnist are Michael Stein. He does a column for us every month and this is his latest one. Just went out and are just going out in the newsletter tomorrow. Email deliverability is pretty much the lifeblood in the main channel for communicating with prospective donors out there in the world. People still do direct mail, of course, but sending out lots of emails is something that takes a little bit of skill. And the one thing, kind of the central thing I love that he talks about in here is how your emails become spam. That's pretty important. And he links to something called the non-profit email deliverability study, which is a super important thing. Tons of charities are sending out just, stuff that gets caught in spam filters that never, ever, ever is seen by the people you're sending it to. And so basically Michael goes into the six tactics he calls them to improve your email deliverability. Really, really useful piece here. I think that charities of all kinds can really learn something from this guy. He's really been in this business for about 20 years and consults with some major, major non-profits that you probably have heard of, but I probably won't mention because he asked me not to. But anyway, this is a good one. This is a great, great piece that I hope you like. What else do we have? Oh, by our own Susan Hope Bard. Check this out. He's talking about summer vacation. Hardly, if you're gonna be around in the summer, this is actually a pretty good time to take stock of your IT. So technology planning is something that a tiny, tiny fraction of charities do. The thing it does really to have a technology plan is it actually opens the door for grant fundraising, grant, grants-based fundraising. So lots of funders are very concerned that organizations that receive grants from them are high functioning and can really deliver on the grants and having current and practicable technology plans and is one of the ways you can demonstrate that to prospective funders and current funders. So we have this, I think it's four modules in our, let's see, is it four or three? In any case, we have an entire soup to nuts course in doing this. If you go through all of the course, which I think costs $99, you'll come out the end with a full-blown technology plan. So it takes a while to go through that thing and it's pretty useful. I've been through the whole thing myself and it's pretty great. We put this together in cooperation with Idealware. Those guys really know what they're doing. So there's that. And then this is a piece by our Nick Mediotti who is a former technology journalist with PCWorld. And came to us and is now our marketing copywriter. And so he talks about a bunch of things that charities might consider before really moving a lot into the cloud. Almost all of us now use cloud tools. I mean, Gmail, for instance, is a cloud tool. But if you get heavier into the cloud, he goes through several different things that you can have a look at that you might not have thought about. For instance, like a cloud services security credentials and record. So he explains what that is and how you can kind of check them out on that. This is the piece. This is the part that I like best. Number three, who owns the data you upload? Very surprising, incredibly surprising because lots of cloud companies retain ownership to it. The data, the stuff, the documents, the critical crucial data that you upload to the cloud, maybe on your donors, on your clients. It might not be yours, it might be theirs. So you wanna check that out. There's various ways to do that. He mentions kind of the gold standard for a place that is very clear about not owning your data or tampering with it. And all of that, that's Microsoft 365, Office 365, which actually has the best terms of service about that, the clearest language about that. So you might have a look at that to see what kind of like the best terms of service you can get are. And then he talks about more things which kind of get into somewhat technical things because he's been a technical writer on cyber security. And of course, the holy grail of all this cloud stuff is that you have to have good login security for your staff and for yourself. He talks a little about something called two factor authentication that's taking, that's a thing where you log into a website and then it basically sends something to your phone to make sure that's a you kind of thing. So there's some security things that you can do in and around. And most cloud services have that feature now that you can use. So there it is. He has some tips and tricks and all kinds of other articles that he eludes to at the bottom of this article. So I like this one. So I think I'm out of time. So let me turn it back over to Susan. Okay, Susan, to you. Thanks, Jim. Thanks so much. Actually, the last article that you were describing and Nick's article about security is actually a very well placed and it's a really great article. I encourage everyone to check that one out. I have chatted out all of the URLs where you can go to get each of these articles and read more about them. Also, a few of you in the chat, thank you so much for letting me know that you didn't have all of the slides. I have, there's a handout that's in the module for June 27th that you click on it. You can view or download the PowerPoint and it has all of the slides and it also has each of the URLs for the products or the newsletters or any of the content that I described during the presentation. Thanks, Jim, for the roundup of articles because we did have a lot that were published the past two weeks in light of the end of the fiscal year. I didn't see any questions that came into the chat box. It could be because we were chatting out so many tips for everyone, but if you do have any questions, please do chat those in before we sign off. We, oh, no questions yet. All right, it looks like then, I think we can wrap it up. It is 101. Thank you for your time today, Jim. Thanks for the great wrap up with all of those articles. I'm glad we were able to get all of those in before the end of the fiscal year. And of course, we will start back again with our Texas 30s after the 4th of July holiday because we are closed on Tuesday. So we'll start back up with our next event that will be on the following week. And we will actually be starting a series of discussions about how to create different events in your nonprofit. So whether that's an in-person event, a Facebook event, a live streaming event, or something with social media. So you should check those out. You can look for those in the course on the right hand column. There's a list of dates and you can click on the date. You can read a little bit more about the half hour mini webinar we offer about that particular topic. So I thank Jim for all of his expertise and his roundup of articles. And I thank each of you for your attention and your time today. We hope you have a great week. And we also hope you have a safe and happy 4th of July holiday. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.