 Okay, Colin. Warranties again is mapped, right? Correct. Great. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar, Busting Refurbished Computer and Electronic Myths. This is an Ask Me Anything AMA style event. So we certainly want to encourage you to ask your questions. While we wait a few minutes for people to join, why don't you go ahead and let us know where you're tuning in from in the chat. I am hearing lovely, sunny and warm Detroit, Michigan. It is not sunny and warm for everybody. Here we have a few attendees. We'll give it a few minutes for people to join. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. You're just now tuning in. So why don't you go ahead and use the chat button at the bottom. Say hello. Let us know where you're from. Deceptively sunny Minneapolis. Lisa, a fellow midwesterner. Thank you for joining us. It was from Hoey in rainy Portland, Oregon. I'm not sure if I would trade the snow for a rain right now. I didn't join the snow for being honest. We'll go ahead and jump right in here. We'll thank you, everybody, for being with us. As a reminder, this is an AMA event. So we really want to encourage you to ask questions. You can do so by using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We will be going through the questions and asking them as they come up. Also, we encourage you to use the chat button. Say hello, engage with us. You can also ask questions there. And also, if you're interested in closed captioning, we have enabled that for this webinar. And you can do that by enabling it in the bottom at the bottom of your screen. Without further ado, those are the technical information that I wanted to tell you all. And I will hand it over to my refurbished hardware experts, colleagues, Basta, Matthew, and Kelly. Without further ado, go ahead, Shasta. Hello, welcome so much to this TechSoup webinar. It is always wonderful to have participants that are interested in refurbished hardware, which is one of our cornerstone programs at TechSoup. TechSoup, as many of you will probably already know, has serviced 1.4 million nonprofits around the world. For me, one of the main attractions of our nonprofit organization is our refurbished hardware program, which really is part of the birth of TechSoup itself. It is such a great choice, refurbished hardware for nonprofit organizations, because it not only helps us to save money, but it helps us to be sustainable. As Rachel Carson once said, something to the effect of being more than ever before, humanity is being tasked to really connect with the side of us that is nature, right? And to really do that by not demonstrating mastery over nature, but mastery over ourselves. My daughter is a big fan of Rachel Carson, and she always reminds me that the choices that we make today will impact generations to come. And I love that today we're gonna be talking about refurbished hardware, because as the human race, that is one place where we can invest and we can come together to make a tangible difference to our earth. It is really my distinct pleasure to introduce Kelly Sullivan. First, a little about me, I run the hardware program, and Kelly is one of my endeared colleagues who has really given refurbished hardware at TechSoup her entire life's work. Kelly inspires me every day, because she is just such a, you know, steady, I would say, champion for refurbished hardware. She's a senior program manager of the TechSoup refurbished hardware program that commenced in 2009, which is when the industry was kind of just beginning. Since taking the reins of the entire program in 2015, Kelly has collaborated with our provider partners for more than triple the distribution of refurbished computers and monitors to eligible nonprofits in the US. In addition to leading this multimillion dollar program in the US, Kelly collaborates with TechSoup Global Network to help countries establish in-house refurbished hardware programs, benefiting nonprofits across the globe. Kelly serves as a subject matter expert routinely, representing TechSoup at conferences, and most recently served as a panelist for selling devices online, importance of quality in refurbished devices at the electronics reuse conference. She's deeply passionate about sustainability, reuse, and digital equity. She's a member of the board of Donor Connection and has served as a volunteer for the San Francisco Urban Dharma and Wildfish Conservancy. She lives in California with her cat and dog and enjoys creating fluid art for her business poured in Humboldt. So Kelly is just adorable and you will get to know her and enjoy her as much as I do, and extremely talented. I would also like to, at this time, introduce Matt Young, who is a recycling and sustainability entrepreneur, such a joyful partner and works from his heart to really feed our earth by feeding this industry. He has spent his entire professional career in recycling. Matt graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010 after already spending two years working at an electronics recycling company. Matt then worked at electronics recyclers of different sizes, large, huge, before starting his own e-scrap and refurbishing business, EVR. In 2016, Matt also spent five years processing mattresses at a mattress recycler. So his passion for the earth also spans lots of interesting areas. Finally, Matt serves as the secretary on the board of ISRI, ISRI's electronics division and has actively worked on developing ISRI specifications for electronics reuse for several years. So two real solid experts that will share with us all there is to know about refurbished hardware. Let me introduce you to our topics. Today, we're gonna talk about the evolution of the refurbished hardware industry, understanding the different categories of hardware, the standards, warranties, customer protection and navigating what can be sometimes a little confusing of a marketplace. And then we will end with also sharing some of the future trends in refurbished hardware with you. Matt, would you like to please kick off the evolution in the refurbished hardware industry? And Kelly, you can talk a little bit about our program. Yeah, well, the computer refurbishing business really began as a business in the late 90s. It was primarily people coming and taking mainframe computers, which are obviously much bigger than the computers we had and much more expensive than the computers that we have today that could still support the latest and greatest software once they came off lease. And so a nascent industry was kind of founded trying to remarket, reuse and refurbish those devices. Now, of course, everything is a computer. So the refurbishing industry has evolved to basically your watch, your phone, your refrigerator, your car. And as these different commodities and categories have come, refurbishers have come and shown interest in extending the lifecycle of these devices. The same time in the early 90s, a lot of people saw that the computers that had been previously purchased had tremendous amounts of value in the circuit boards and other precious metals inside, which was the earliest starting of the computer recycling business, which at this point are very interrelated. Yeah, and for TechSoup and how we got involved in this in the early 2000s, one of the earliest TechSoup employees, Jim Lynch, saw a need for not only helping organizations get access to low-cost technology and devices, he also saw that there were a lot of computers heading towards the landfills and he took that opportunity to start the GreenTech program at TechSoup and that afterwards established the refurbished computer initiative, which is now today the refurbished hardware program. And it was really a revolutionary idea because there was really no centralized marketplace that offered refurbished computers and the program started in the mid-early 2000s and as Shasta mentioned, I joined the program in 2009 and have been doing this great work ever since and today we have a very robust catalog, we have multiple partners and we are working towards making it better, making this marketplace better and more accessible for everyone. Wonderful, thank you Kelly and Matt and thank you Andrew for helping us with the slides and for kicking the webinar off as well. It would be great if we could talk through the different categories of hardware. I know you guys have some good insight and how these things are defined and I think it would be very helpful to folks attending for you to do that. Sure, I can run us through the categories Shasta. So there's really about four big buckets for technology, for computers and devices that you might see when you're out there shopping in any marketplace and there's the obvious first which is new and these are devices that are manufactured by the OEMs, Dell, Lenovo, HP, Apple, et cetera and when you purchase something brand new you're gonna expect that this is gonna come in a box, it's gonna be wrapped and it's never gonna have been turned on. The second category that you might find and you might find it on an OEM site like Apple for example, is manufacturer recertified or refurbished and these devices are typically devices that have been sent out to a consumer and it's been opened, maybe they didn't like it, maybe it was the wrong size, maybe it was just the wrong shipment. Maybe it's been used for a moment but for whatever reason it got sent back and I'm sure that everyone here has gotten something that they weren't expecting and they've sent it back and that device instead of going straight into a recycle now is being refurbished, it's getting inspected and it's getting repackaged and sent back out as manufacturer recertified or refurbished then and those devices also carry manufacturer warranties so they're pretty solid and then we have the general refurbished category which is where TechSoup falls and all of our partners fall into that category. So those are devices that have been used in mostly in businesses and office settings, they're off lease devices and they are either acquired through donation or purchased from refurbishers and the refurbishers take them through a series of tests, they clean them and they will add a new image after they've done the data destruction, they'll put a new software image on, new operating system and they get sold in various marketplaces or direct to consumer from the refurbisher and these devices typically they've been well tested, they've been claimed, they come typically with warranties from the refurbisher and they can be anywhere from three to seven years old, sometimes older, sometimes newer and they're really, when you're out there shopping, they definitely wanna read through the descriptions but I'll get into that a little bit more later and then the last category is what we call used and that's gonna be something that you might find on eBay from one consumer to you or Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, it's typically, those are usually consumer level devices, something that you've had in your home or a phone, that sort of thing and they're not gonna come typically with any kind of guarantee or warranty, they're usually going to have the previous users license for the operating system, particularly if it's Windows, it's usually registered to that user and you may or may not get a box, the used market's a little bit more of a gamble. So those are the big buckets. Well, thank you so much for sharing, it's always nice to really kind of define the different pieces. I always find that the brand is important here because then you can rely on a certain quality standard and I know Kelly, you will cover this more in a little bit but I always am happy, Matt, with our provider as a TechSoup because you also work really hard to ensure that as a provider that you're protecting the TechSoup brand which is really always appreciated. So let's go ahead and over to the next slide, perfect. Warranties, consumer protection, this is really a place to pay attention and Kelly will talk to us about the details. So yeah, TechSoup as Matt mentioned, we have our own warranty, we've kind of kicked off, we try to press the trend a little bit and bring a better warranty than industry standard. Right now this year we've raised our standard warranty up to two years and in the marketplace you might find a warranty that's anywhere between 30 days and a year typically. And TechSoup has really worked with our partners and EVR included in raising the bar for the industry and holding each other accountable to make sure that we're bringing great products to the nonprofits that we serve and Matt's gonna go a little bit more into how they work with on preserving these low rates. Right now TechSoup has about a 6% return rate for our refurbished hardware and that's contrasting against industry standard of 11% for new consumer electronics. So that's definitely something to be proud about. Matt, do you wanna talk about how you guys preserve our standards? Sure, so every computer that's gonna go through our internal refurbishing process we evaluate 130 individual points of quality control. So the first thing is that every device is gonna be wiped so the previous owner's information is gone, sometimes clients have a shred drives and then we'll put in new drives into the devices. Our testing process looks at pretty much everything from the webcam on the top down to the keyboard making sure all the keys are working, nothing sticky, all the ports on the outside of the computer are working as you would expect them to be able to. We even look at things like the battery and evaluate how many, what's called cycles, how many times that battery has been charged and that's a really strong predictor of will that battery maintain a charge for a couple of hours going forward or is that a part that needs to be replaced? So a lot of what we're doing is kind of the fixing and the upgrading during the refurbishing process to make sure that they are better than new from a quality perspective when they come out. We also put every computer through an extensive cleaning process, make sure the cosmetics look great so you can, from 12 inches away, won't see any blemishes issues on that sort of a device and a lot of little tricks that you learn over the years and how to make those computers shine when they're coming out of the process. Wonderful, it is always to me kind of interesting. One of the things that I tend to do with some of our corporate partners, et cetera is to say that it's not always refurbished hardware is not always just a, there's a cost to offer it and I just appreciate Matt, you so much and your commitment so much because I know that you are personally committed to reducing that cost so that our sector can benefit and it really comes from more of a commitment to the earth I think then the bottom line here, of course you have to have a profit to make money but I see that in your everyday work and sometimes I compare it to some of the other providers and I think the more as all of us here educate folks and say that look, this is not just, we're not looking for things that are not usable, right? We're looking for things, we're not just trying to make it so you don't have landfill, we're actually trying to create a lot of value for nonprofits that are committed to reuse. So I'm very grateful for that. Next, we've got navigating this marketplace and Kelly is a wonderful person to speak with you about that because she does it for TechSoup at large. She really looks for, is very in tune with the market and continuously looks for the best value that she can provide to nonprofits. I cannot tell you how often she does market research and how much, and Matt can attest how much her commitment is to the idea of adding value to nonprofits to refurbish hardware. Every time I turn, she's got a new idea whether it's reducing the return rate by being really conscious about providing the customer care or her favorite word, white glove service or both Matt and I are smiling because we hear her commitment to the nonprofits literally every day that we work with her. You're on mute, Kelly, I do that all the time. Sorry about that. Definitely, you're right about that. I do spend a lot of time in the web universe looking at computers and the services that others are offering and thinking of ways to be better. How can we be better? How can we bring the most value and the most bang for your buck? Because any of our electronic devices are, they're many investments and we want them to come as we expect them to come and we want them to work as we expect them to work and it's extraordinarily frustrating when that doesn't happen and of course it does happen but when it happens to us, it feels personal. So I try to make it the best experience possible with the understanding that we're dealing with a physical tangible product that can just get damaged on the way from the refurbisher to you. So as far as how I shop, because that's really what I'm doing, I'm just shopping in the marketplace to see the best thing that I can get for the best dollar and one of the things that I discovered when I started this journey was in the marketplace you could find dozens of the same exact product and they'd have so many different prices and it made me wonder like why is this happening and also how do I discern between them because there must be a reason that they cost different amounts of money, sometimes hundreds of dollars of difference and so it made me take a deeper look into the product descriptions and the seller descriptions and the seller ratings to really start to understand the nuances between the products and nowadays a phone for example a smartphone could be a $50 difference just because of the color of the phone and everything else can be exactly the same. So when you comparison shop, if you're looking at a particular computer or device or a car or anything really, it's very important to read those descriptions every last bit of them and to really understand what your warranty is, what your return for refund policy is if you have those options and how long you have with each of those TechSoup, our program is a 30 day money back guarantee. If you don't like it, if you got it and decided that you didn't really need it after all, as long as it's in 30 days, you can return it. That's a really important thing to have really when you're buying any kind of electronic out there in the marketplace, the option to return it for any reason and then as far as warranties go, when you're shopping in marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and even TechSoup, it can be really hard to know because different devices are gonna have different warranties. Our phones have a 90 day warranty. Our computers and monitors have a two year warranty. So it's really, really important. I just cannot impress upon you enough how important it is to look at those descriptions and really understand what you're buying and to shop with a trusted platform or a trusted entity and in marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, you're dealing with a lot of different sellers. So at that point, it's really important to start reading the feedback and what people are saying about their experience with those sellers. And you can also, if you're buying from a refurbisher direct, you can also go onto Google and look them up and look at their Google marketplace ratings and see what people are saying. Take the time to do that because you are investing in something and you want to be able to know that you're gonna get what you're expecting. Matt, do you have anything to add on? Yeah, I think the great part about TechSoup is that it really does a lot of that vetting that Kelly's talking to. You kind of know that you're going to be getting a known entity that's been vetted by such a reputable brand and companies that know they need to keep the brand, as good as it's been for the last 20 plus years. As a refurbisher myself, even five years ago, it was next to impossible to differentiate shopping online between used and refurbished. The programs, TechSoup was truly leading the way on that, having a refurbished marketplace. But five years ago, you couldn't tell the difference on an eBay or something like that between something made by an ISO certified accredited recycler or somebody who were to really get ad sitting out of their basement, packaging that up, not having the resources necessarily to go through and tech that. So I think that it's, the amount of options has certainly exploded and two Kelly's point, making sure you know what the warranties, looking at the reviews of the sellers when you can, even on a site like Amazon, you can click in and it's dramatically different feedback on the five person trying to sell that same computer. So can definitely be interesting sometimes. It sort of goes back, right guys, to the heart I think of the people that are doing it. And I, you know, I'm actually new to TechSoup. Kelly's sort of the veteran of the program and the expert. And I learned from her every day about how, about TechSoup's commitment really to the nonprofit sector broadly, but also to making sure that, you know, we, because we're a nonprofit ourselves, we sort of understand the reality of working with our sectors operating budgets, you know, and we take very seriously, both in terms of the value ads, in terms of the standards that we expect from providers like Matt and holding everybody accountable because we know that the nonprofit reality of every dollar counts so that we can spend our technology dollars responsibly so that we can do our missions efficiently and more effectively. So navigating the marketplace is a really good idea. Of course, I work for TechSoup. So I'm gonna say, just, you know, just go to TechSoup. You're gonna do great, but I do love also the commitment of Kelly and Matt to go through and explain the industry as a whole so that, you know, that's not the case that you actually leave here knowing, okay, I can't purchase from anywhere. And these are the things that I should pay attention to because in the end, what we want is for the sector to do good to enhance social impact. So we're gonna move on to the future trends in refurbished hardware and how we're gonna sort of help to live the Rachel Carson reality. So take it away, Matt. Well, I think as I kind of alluded to earlier, kind of everything is really becoming an electronic. And so the role and the opportunities to buy and use refurbished in our everyday lives is probably growing by the day because, you know, once you get that new refrigerator that now has chip inside of it, you know, that's probably not gonna end on the next time that you'd go to buy a refrigerator or something like that. One of the things though that's always fascinated me is when you're looking either from like carbon or energy, the most intensive part of a piece of electronics lifecycle is the manufacturing. So it takes a tremendous amount of energy and resources to be able to turn the raw materials, which you might also have to be mining, you know, out of the ground into a working good computer that's gonna be operating. And so one of the things that Shasta was alluding to earlier, when you look at the lifecycle of a computer, if someone was originally gonna use that for four or five years and then it was, you know, either gonna be recycled, scrapped or land filled, God forbid, you know, that computer's lifecycle is then over, but by refurbishing that device and maybe getting another three or four usable years out of it, you're basically amateurizing or able to divide that second lifecycle against the initial costs and energy utilized in manufacturing. So the EPA has put out some really awesome data on this. They have a standard called WARN that talks about the carbon impacts of reusing recycling and landfilling devices. And even just on the refurbishing side, a refurbished computer is 20 times better for the environment than had you recycled it to get the metals out and nearly infinitely better than putting it into a landfill where, you know, all of the resources that were used to make that computer are now gone and never gonna be utilized again. Yeah, and I definitely, I wanna add on that refurbished devices have, you know, in the last five years, two years, three, I mean, it's just been, it's kind of shot through the stratosphere and what you can find that's refurbished, it's not limited to computers and computer technology. You can find refurbished tools, you can find refurbished kitchen aid mixers and kitchen appliances, small kitchen appliances. It's just, it's become quite remarkable to me. My first Vitamix blender was refurbished and it was from Vitamix Direct because a friend had pointed out to me that, you know, it's better than new because somebody has taken that and looked it over point-by-point like Matt was saying and inspected it from top to bottom and so the odds of it having a problem are really slim. So, you know, the marketplace is really, has evolved incredibly in the 15 years that I've been doing this. It's been so extraordinary and it does make my heart sing to see devices being refurbished and just sold back out into the market and, you know, how much that's helping the environment. So, love it. Yeah, you do, you do. And I wanted to add, you know, there was a time that we all used to sort of buy appliances or computers, our first computers or our first telephones and they would literally last a lifetime, right? So we know that with a little bit of Tinkerbell magic that our devices definitely have those quality features that can last with that inspection that both of you have discussed. So it is definitely a wonderful, wonderful industry and the heart of the industry to support. You know, another thing that I learned was that a lot of refurbished provide the folks that do the refurbishing folks like Matt, they really, and it again goes back to the heart and the earth and the heart and it translates often to heart with people. So they will be capturing people, you know, it might be former prisoners, it might be retooling people. But the idea, we always talk about, you know, creation of jobs as sort of this American responsibility. But what I love about refurbishers is that often by buying refurbished electronics, we are supporting second chances of human beings. And I love that about the industry. So, so many great things to love. There are a few questions that I would love for you both to address. One is what categories of hardware does TechSoup sell new refurbished used? Kelly, you wanna take that? I sure can. So we refurbished hardware was the very first computer hardware program at TechSoup and the original hardware program at TechSoup with Cisco, which is still going strong. Refurbished hardware was, or refurbished computer initiative was the second hardware ever at TechSoup. And today we have a breadth of hardware devices and products and we do offer new HP devices laptops, desktops and we also offer new headsets and we have mobile beacon internet hotspot devices. We have accessories that are new, mice, keyboards, et cetera. And then we also have some manufacturer recertified in the Microsoft Surface category. So you can find some Surface Pros and some Surface Books in our catalog and those are distributed by Cinex and on behalf of Microsoft and Microsoft does the inspection of those and they back the product by a one-year warranty. And I believe that the HP products are also backed by a one-year warranty. And then we have of course the refurbished line of products and you can find laptops and desktops and monitors and as a matter of fact, right now this week for Cyber Week we're offering in refurbished hardware, we're offering a BOGO deal, select desktops. If you purchase a select desktop, you are eligible to get a free 19 inch LCD monitor accompanied with that and that lasts through the end of the week, Friday afternoon. And yeah, and we recently added mobile devices to the lineup, so we're carrying smartphones now and some tablets, some iPads, some Chromebooks. Yeah, we're getting there. We are definitely getting there. And also right now, I just wanna add that it was kind of a last minute thing. We just had a $90 price drop in the Apple iPhone 12 and you can find that on the homepage. I'll link to that on the TechSoup homepage. Yeah. Yeah, lots of goodies for you guys, not only for you guys in attendance, but we do rely on you to share this with your nonprofit colleagues at large, not just within your nonprofit, but broadly, because we wanna see this program just be used as much as possible for create the awareness of particularly the buy one, get one, which again, I think our providers such as Matt to be really committed to the sector to really care about the nonprofits that we serve and our missions. So please spread the news. We could certainly use that. It could be five emails to five friends and that'll make a difference, not only to us at TechSoup, but also to the nonprofits that could benefit from the Bogo. And then we have one person, Kelly, with a very specific question in chat. Maybe you could provide them with a way to contact either you or Chloe. They wanted to get a clarification on a hardware offer. That would be great. And then any other questions, please type them into our chat or the QA. I also actually wanna take the opportunity since we are in a Bogo week to let everybody know a couple of other things. So as Shasta mentioned, was talking about the mobile devices, I wanna reiterate that the special thing about our smartphone offering is that our refurbisher partner who's offering the smartphones has opened up those devices and those products, not only to the nonprofit for use, but also the nonprofit employees for personal use. And so if you need a new smartphone or a replacement smartphone or your family member needs one, you can purchase those through us and you won't be breaking any rules of you're not allowed to share out technology from TechSoup. And then the other thing I wanted to mention is we are indeed in the Bogo week and I wanted to kind of give a shout out to my refurbisher partners around that because as Shasta mentioned that they are the ones that are offering these great deals and we wouldn't be able to do it without them. And with that being said, we offer, we do a Bogo twice a year. The next one's gonna be in April for Earth Day and that'll be the entire week of Earth Day week which is April 20th. And then we also do two month-long rebates and the next one will be in March. So for the entire month of March, you can get a 10% rebate off select products in the catalog. And this is exclusively for refurbished hardware I wanna add. And in the month of October, so we just closed out one last month a month-long 10% rebate as well. And again, we would not be able to offer these really great deals without the refurbishers being a part of that because it's hard to get bargains out there in the refurbished marketplace and they've worked so hard at being able to bring that to the nonprofit sector. So thank you, Matt, and all of my other wonderful partners for helping with that. 100%. Glad to do it. Looks like we have a Q and A. Is the Bogo offer just for smartphones? The Bogo offer is actually for desktops and it's so, if you go to our website, I think that Andrew put a link in to see all TechSoup Cyber Week deals here. So we have multiple Cyber Week deals. It's not just refurbished hardware, but the Bogo specifically is select desktops and when you go into the catalog, you'll see that they're flagged for this special. Those are eligible. And then when you purchase one of those desktops or multiples, you'll get a 19-inch LCD monitor, a refurbished one to go along with it free of charge. And you'll just need to check your fulfillment emails to make sure that what the instructions are and how you get that free monitor. That's great. Anyone else have any final questions? Okay. Well, I will close with a big warm thank you to Andrew for making Andrew Barron, for making the webinar so easy and technology glitch-free and also wanted to just do a shout out for our broad social media team and marketing team, Susan Tenby, Steve Davidson, for really working with us and accommodating our desire to share this information with you. And last but certainly not least, Kelly and Matt, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. We're so lucky to have your expertise be part of our organization. And it's just, it really, you guys have to get to know these folks to know what a delight and how much heart they truly have. They really live that dream of Rachel Carson's and they really, you know, and it is true what Rachel Carson says, the human race, here's the actual quote, the human race has challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature, but of ourselves. And this really, Kelly has put me to task and Chloe who's part of the team as well by being examples of purchasing refurbished hardware and encouraging employees, creating programs for us to be able to purchase. And of course our non-profits, our beloved non-profits. So thank you for attending and we'll see you hopefully on Earth Day. Don't forget to share this with your friends. Appreciate it, thank you everyone for coming. Thank you everyone for your time. And if you hang out for one more second, Andrew is gonna put a link in where you can find the recorded version of this webinar AMA and feel free to share it on social media or LinkedIn. Maybe a friend can learn something from it that wasn't able to attend today. Wonderful. Oh, the link will be emailed once it's uploaded to YouTube, there you go. All right, have a great day everyone. Thank you so much.