 Hi, thank you for joining us for this TechSoup special webinar, Technology Solutions for Larger Library Systems. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer. I'm going to be your host, but I'm really not going to be around that much. It's going to be some great speakers here today to let you know more about technology solutions for libraries. Just to let you know a little bit of housekeeping and how you can engage in the webinar today. You are on mute currently right now, but if you would like, you can ask your question in the Q&A section. We prefer you use the Q&A feature that way sometimes when you're in the chat room, things kind of move up. And if you use the Q&A, we'll be able to see the question at the end. We'll answer all your questions at the end. For those of you who registered for this event, you will get the replay of this event within 48 hours. If you've learned something new today, why don't you tweet us at TechSoup or hashtag at TechSoup.org, excuse me, at TechSoup on your Instagram, Facebook. If you need the closed caption, use the CC button located right down at the bottom of your screen. And again, welcome on behalf of TechSoup and our over 100 partners that help us provide hardware and software at a discount for nonprofit organizations. We want to say a big thank you to our libraries. We can do anything without our libraries. And through this pandemic, libraries have had a constant comfort to the communities around the globe. So we appreciate you. But I'm going to turn this over to our speakers, Ashley, Jonathan, Jamie, and Rick, who's going to go into a little bit more. Actually, I'm excited to hear what you have to say. And so over to you. Thanks so much, Aretha. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Whether your library is new or you've been using TechSoup resources for years, we're grateful that you could attend our webinar. My name is Ashley Hendershot, and I supervise the major market development team at TechSoup. Along with my associate Jonathan, who's covering the chat for any questions that you might have during this webinar, we assist multi-branch nonprofits and libraries to both register each of their locations for TechSoup so that they can maximize on their eligibility for solutions provided by our donor partners. Having a TechSoup account is free, and we support 501c3 nonprofits of many kinds, including churches, foundations, associations, PTAs, and many more. Our team was specifically curated to support national and multi-branch nonprofits to simplify their registration and qualification process while working with TechSoup. Managing multiple accounts for your library system can be a daunting task, but our team is here to assist you. Let's talk a little bit about TechSoup's approach. For over 30 years, TechSoup has brought transformative products and resources to the nonprofit sector. Through our engagement with nonprofits, we've been able to successfully determine their needs and get them access to resources at discounted rates so that they can put their savings back into their communities that they serve. Here's a little bit about of our TechSoup donation program. TechSoup has over 80 donor partners providing solutions in accounting, security, business planning, cloud computing, fundraising, grant writing, website management, telecommuting, training, analytics, web and graphic design, and much, much more. Each of our donor partners who participate in the TechSoup donation program get to set the limitations of their offerings by budget size, calendar year, or fiscal year. With these limitations in mind, we encourage library systems with multiple branches to be sure that each of their branches are registered for individual TechSoup accounts. This will allow each library branch to have unique eligibility when requesting solutions from our donation program and not limit the other branches within their system from obtaining resources needed to support their community. Why does TechSoup charge admin fees? As I mentioned, TechSoup has been providing the nonprofit sector with discounted technology solutions for 30 years, but TechSoup is also a nonprofit. We negotiate with our donor partners to offer software and hardware opportunities of highly discounted rates, sometimes at a third or a fifth of the regular retail cost, and we charge admin fees to continue our donation program and keep our lights on. Charging admin fees has also helped TechSoup to expand the range of solutions we are able to provide and who we provide them to. This quote has allowed us to offer technology solutions to nonprofits across the globe. Library eligibility. Unless they are a 501c3 organization, library systems are not eligible for TechSoup accounts, but individual library branches within those systems are eligible. As long as they have 501c3 status independently or you can register with their FSCS numbers found in the IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. If a library does have 501c3 status, they'll need to be verified on their website. Library support organizations such as Friends of the Library, Library Foundations, Consortium of Libraries, Library Cooperatives, and Library and Networks must be 501c3 nonprofits also to qualify for TechSoup. Let's talk a little bit about purchase orders because I understand libraries use them pretty often. As governmental entities, we understand that libraries often require purchase orders to get payments issued for products or services that they request through TechSoup. Purchase orders are important tools because they serve as legally binding documentation of the goods and services that are ordered with a promise to follow up with payment. We're happy to assist your library by signing and returning purchase orders and creating invoices for your donation requests. But payments would need to be received and cleared before TechSoup can fulfill any requests made through our donation program. The only exception to this rule is for Mobile Beacon for bulk orders of 55 hotspots or more. And we will dive a little bit deeper into Mobile Beacon offers shortly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Founded in 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest transparently operated private charitable foundation in the world. The foundation offers grants to purchase computers for public library patrons and provide technical training and support for library staff in low-income communities. Thanks in part to a grant from the foundation, TechSoup has connected libraries with donations and discounts since 2002 and served libraries with free content, webinars and newsletters since 2008. We believe in the mission of nonprofits and libraries and we're proud to say that well over half of U.S. public libraries are currently using the TechSoup donation program. We also have a specialized page dedicated to support of libraries on TechSoup.org titled TechSoup for Libraries. Our TechSoup newsletters. We currently have three newsletters available within TechSoup and first and foremost is the one specific to libraries. This monthly publication gets libraries learning resources as well as keeping them up to date on relevant technology news. Our other two newsletters are called by the cup, which yes does offer soup recipes but also includes different technology resources and our other newsletter is called the new product alert which informs subscribers of new additions to the TechSoup online catalog as well as updates on replenishing products that have been out of stock. We offer discounted and donated products and understanding the unique needs of nonprofits has led TechSoup to develop relationships with top technology providers to get them access to tools that they need to continue their mission. We've amassed an amazing collection of solutions to not with nonprofits in mind and we can't wait to share some of those exciting offers with you today. Now let's take a little deeper look into the most popular TechSoup offerings for libraries. Microsoft is one of our most popular donor partners getting your public facing computers at your library access to donated versions of operating systems, office licenses, access and servers. Microsoft provides these offerings through a two-year allotment cycle and during its two-year cycle an organization can request up to 50 of each donated desktop product or Cal, up to 25 licenses of Windows server standard and up to five donated licenses of other servers that are not Windows server. Office 365 and cloud implementation services. TechSoup vets nonprofits for Office 365 solutions but libraries must go through a different channel to request cloud solutions. Microsoft has an academic channel where libraries can request Office 365 A1 at no cost and we'll be happy to provide a link to that resource after the webinar. Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of creative design applications for designing, developing and publishing graphical video, audio and interactive content. This offer provides access to discounted rates for the Creative Cloud all apps plan for one user. You'll receive a 60% off rate for Adobe's current rates for the first year and 40% off every year after. After you request this offer through TechSoup you'll pay Adobe $19.99 per month or $239.88 for the first year for the discounted membership. Applications available within the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription include Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Dreamweaver. TechSoup also offers Intuit QuickBooks. Intuit offers accounting software that helps organizations manage essential financial tasks like paying bills, creating invoices, producing reports and tracking expenses. Your organization can choose QuickBooks from your for desktop for one user or three or a yearly QuickBooks online subscription with annual renewal directly through TechSoup at non-profit rates. Features such as payroll are also available from Intuit directly with additional fees. DocuSign, in an unpredictable pandemic such as the one we've all been facing since last March being able to work remotely has been vital to keep productivity alive. Having virtual tools like DocuSign allow you to move projects forward and this has been an amazing access to the non-profit sector. DocuSign lets you create virtual envelopes, request attachments and helps you get documents signed digitally so that you can keep socially distant while being productive. TechSoup also has managed services like digital marketing solutions. We've partnered with TAP Network to offer customized digital marketing solution plans to help nonprofits and libraries to build their brand. TAP Network specializes in building campaigns within your budget and they specialize in multi-channel marketing and offer expert guided customized campaign solutions and digital marketing services to help you design your goals, build your plan, launch your marketing campaigns and manage your digital marketing needs. These cost-effective solutions are designed to help you build your brand and achieve your specific campaign goals. Website services for nonprofits. These are also offered by our partner TAP Network who can help you determine your nonprofits website goals. They offer free website assessments to help you strategize and leverage the right tools to engage your followers and funders. TAP provides these services that you need to optimize your website and scale your online initiatives with less effort and greater impact. And now I'd like to introduce Jamie Williams, the hardware program manager at TechSoup who will share some hardware resources. Thank you Ashley and good morning folks. My name is Jamie Williams and I'm a program manager here at TechSoup and I help manage and oversee many of our hardware offerings. So there's an awful lot to tell you about our hardware offers but as we don't have too much time this morning I'm just gonna give you guys a quick run-through of the kind of products we do have available. And if you do have any questions please feel free to ask away in the Q&A chat. I will either answer as many as I can during the webinar or we'll follow up with you guys afterwards. So taking a look at the hardware offers at TechSoup back in 2006, we recognized the need across our library and nonprofit members for low cost computers. With the help of our now retired colleague Jim Lynch whom some of you might know as the former head of the TechSoup Libraries Division we partnered with Microsoft and a number of major refurbishers across the country to set up what was called the TechSoup Refurbish Computers Initiative. Through this program we were able to offer extremely low pricing on refurbished computers exclusively for our members and every computer did come with a free copy of Microsoft Office and Windows. Over the years, the program has grown immensely over the last 12 months alone especially due to the increased need for computers through the pandemic, we distributed over 32,000 refurbished computers and monitors gifted in these machines, these perfectly usable machines, second life and keeping them out of the landfill. So as Ashley mentioned earlier on it is always our imperative to identify and supply the kind of technology that our members need and since first launching the hardware offering back in 2006 we've since teamed up with major manufacturers across the globe to provide you guys with deep discounts on a variety of different kinds of hardware. So staffing off with computers in addition to the refurbished offerings that I have mentioned our members can access discounts on a variety of new computers and monitors through the likes of Dell, Lenovo and HP. Through those three programs in particular most of the discounts come through either providing you guys with access to a private store that is created exclusively for our members. It's a self-service experience where you will visit the HP all and over website. All of the computers they are automatically discounted for you guys and you can just place orders as you please. And through the Dell program in particular we offer coupons that offer you discounts that stack on top of any existing promotions that they already have running. And through each of those programs for those that don't have large IT teams at their disposal you will be assigned a technical business advisor and you can reach out to those guys at any time and they will help you essentially identify what products are best for your needs and they can even help you put together some special non-profit discounts if they're not already available through the private stores. In addition to computers we do have a variety of net we're going to quit my don offer to libraries. We offer very deep discounts on lab scale enterprise equipment from Cisco and for the most small to mid-sized organizations that don't need such enterprise-grade equipment we also provide equipment from the likes of Moraki and Linksys which is a bit more of a base foundational set of equipment and a lot more easy to implement and maintain. One of our most popular offerings among libraries in particular over the last 18 months is one that's generously provided by one of our oldest and most valued partners, MobileBeacon and they provide internet hotspots which many libraries are using to establish internet lending programs among their communities. Among our other offerings are open box headsets from headsets.com printers and supplies from hp.com brand new wireless keyboard and mice from Microsoft and a variety of other miscellaneous accessories and devices including desktop hard drives refurbished Samsung smartphones and USB flash drives that if you wish you could even get printed with your library's own branding. It's really been a joy for me working with TechSoup and helping serve our library members over the years and I hope we brought plenty of value to you. If you would like to check out what other hardware office we have available please visit techsoup.org or slash hardware. That's all from me and I'm more than happy to pass the rings over to our trusted friend from the MobileBeacon team, Rick Lindholm. Thanks, Jamie. And good morning and good afternoon everyone depending on where you are. I am the sales manager here at MobileBeacon and we provide unlimited 4G internet access to libraries, schools and nonprofits. I believe it's our 10th year as a partner with TechSoup. These hotspots can connect up to 15 Wi-Fi enabled devices and they are used to connect your smartphones, tablets, laptops to the internet from any location in the 4G area. I travel quite a bit and I always have three devices with me my cell phone, my iPad and my laptop that I am always connecting to off that one hotspot. So I never have to pay the hotel internet access fees. So imagine when I go to a lunch or to a meeting and I have other people that are meeting me and now they're just sharing off that same device. You can see the coverage area on our website. The last thing I want you to do is to buy a large amount of devices for you to say there is no coverage. Please start with one or two through TechSoup and then you can always come back for more. All of the devices come with a one-year warranty and you can also have content filtering applied free of charge. We also give you the ability to block and allow which means say you have a two-week checkout period and the device is not returned, you can go in there and block the device so it can no longer be used. Once the device is returned, you can go back in there and now allow data again. Next. The way we process works is when you are ready you would go to TechSoup, search mobile beacon and there you will see our offer from one to 11 devices. This is per branch per fiscal year. You will pay TechSoup an admin fee of $15 per device and within 24 to 48 hours they will email you a fulfillment email with the instructions and code you need to apply on our site. There you will pay mobile beacon the $120 for the year of service which is the $10 per month plus shipping which is based on the number of devices you take. If it's a bulk order and we define a bulk order as 55 devices or more, TechSoup will help with the processing of that order and really takes a lot of the legwork out of it for you so that you don't have to enter each branch on our website. You would send me an email saying you have a bulk order I will then introduce it to TechSoup and we will take the process from there. This is quality internet access that we're providing and is the same network offered by others. Download speeds average between six to eight megabits per second with peak speeds of 25 megabits per second. Next, TechSoup over the last 10 years has received requests from libraries for 23,356 hotspots since the program began. Those requests came from 13,205 individual libraries or library branches. Who wants to be next? You could please reach out to me. My email is simply rick at mobilebeacon.org and don't forget all of that is for $10 per month unlimited. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks so much, Rick and thank you so much Mobile Beacon for providing excellent wireless service to the nonprofit sector. Also TechSoup provides validation services and we are a trusted philanthropy arm for multiple industry leaders offering their validation services with nonprofits. We vet those nonprofits for services provided by Google, Okta, Facebook, Airbnb and more. Having a TechSoup account is not required in order to take advantage of these special offers but it does help speed up the validation time that it takes to review your nonprofit for the qualification process. Now we'll talk a little bit about specialized training options for your nonprofit or library. TechSoup offers monthly webinars just for public libraries and nonprofits. In addition to weekly more general webinars on varying technology topics such as Excel tips, how to use into a QuickBooks, digital storytelling and more. We also have a webinar archive where you can view past webinars on varying technology resources. Missions accomplished with TechSoup services. Our mission is to help you with your mission and we have multiple technology solutions to help you achieve your goals. TechSoup offers specialized services to help you implement technology solutions to achieve those goals and move forward with the projects. Our specialized services include help desk which allows you to set up tech support on multiple levels as needed by your nonprofit or library. You can request one-time fixes or monthly support or yearly support at discounted rates and these services can help you to set up ongoing virus protection and backup maintenance. We also offer cloud advice and implementation services to help nonprofits to optimize moving their data to the cloud and assist them with email migration to Office 365. We also have a program called Consultant Connection which was developed to provide organizations with access to a network of verified trusted consulting firms who have experience helping nonprofits with technology, fundraising and marketing. The Consultant Connection program makes it easy to find consultants who specialize in and are referred by nonprofit organizations. TechSoup also offers specialized courses. Expert developed courses designed to deepen and expand tech skills for nonprofits and library staff. We're excited to bring online learners a new collection of powerful courses that combine great skill sets and content from Microsoft with TechSoup, steep understanding of how nonprofits use technology. The current courses available include tech planning and this course will help you get out of your technology doldrums so that you can access your organization's technology infrastructure and address your current and future needs. We also have digital skills with Excel and this course is designed to give you a deeper understanding of Excel use and will help you to increase the efficiency of record keeping for your nonprofit. We have email marketing for nonprofits and libraries and this is a five-part bundle. We are working with TAP Network, our partner that I mentioned earlier to offer a five course track designed to help you get a deeper understanding of how to integrate email with online and offline marketing channels to successfully integrate marketing campaigns. And we have a course on Google Analytics and this is designed to ensure that your nonprofit or library understands and optimizes its impact with Google through such features as articles and understanding behind the scenes analytics of Googles by using Google by the visitors to your website. Let's connect. It's been wonderful sharing TechSoup resources with you today and we would love to connect with you to assist you and your library branches in maximizing your eligibility for TechSoup solutions. Please feel free to reach out to our team at the alias on screen MMD at TechSoup.org so we can help you both register your library branches or help you place bulk donation requests to get your library's access to additional resources through TechSoup. You can also reach out to us for additional information on any of the wonderful donors that we shared with you today or for those Mobile Beacon hotspots that Rick shared about earlier. And while I'm talking about Mobile Beacon, before we let you go, congratulations. Because of the generosity of Rick and Mobile Beacon, we've chosen one lucky participant today at random to receive a Mobile Beacon hotspot with one year of service for free. Sally Greer of Southfield Library, you have been specially chosen and we'll be reached out to you after this webinar to get your information so we can get your prize to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a pleasure sharing about TechSoup resources with you. And if anyone has any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat or unmute yourself so you can ask them to us live. They're unable to unmute themselves, but feel free to. Oh, I apologize. I sit in the chat room. That's okay, that's okay. You guys did a great job. I learned so much to listen to you all today. Any questions for us? Please type in a chat room and congratulations to Sally. Am I correct? Yes, congratulations, Sally. I will get that out to you soon. Awesome. There's no luck there are any questions, but I do have a question. Sure. And maybe I'm gonna start from the top with Jamie. There are a lot of products that are available with TechSoup and you mentioned Dell, but I saw one time there was in Apple laptops. I'm like, oh my God. There were Apple laptops at like half of the price you would buy from the Apple store. That's amazing. Absolutely. The Apple products we have, they are all refurbished. We haven't quite yet set up a brand new program with Apple, but it is in the works potentially. But yeah, we do have more than one Apple MacBook Air I believe available through the refurbished program. And we also have some Microsoft service tablets as well as the docking stations too. So there's plenty of different kinds of product types to fit everybody's needs. Beautiful, beautiful. And then Rick, as I mentioned to you earlier, I didn't know how the mobile beacon work if you had to have like service with AT&T or T-Mobile. So you're mobile beacon and what does it look like anyways? Because I was just curious. It's very small, it's the size of a cell phone. So yeah, and technology changes so much. Like we're constantly getting new devices. So it's just amazing the different features every time they change. But that device is the source of the internet access. So that's the hotspot that is providing the internet if you did not have internet already or just think of it too as internet on the go. So you may have internet at home but you may travel quite a bit or you may just for work-wise or to have an extra device especially as a student, college student and how much you could get done on that one device and how many you can connect to that. That's amazing. And it's $10 a month. $10 a month unlimited. That's a steal. It really is. Right. It really is. And so my question also for Ashley now, everybody, all of us have went to the library as a child and we know how important libraries are. So how long has TechSoup worked with libraries? Has it been like 30 years? How long have we worked with libraries? I think we've had specialized curated library, you know, newsletters and as I mentioned earlier since 2002 or 2004. And so we have been supporting libraries for many years but I think that the purchase order processing does get to be a daunting task since many libraries are used to having a net 30 purchase order process. And unfortunately TechSoup can't process purchase orders that way but we are happy to create invoices so that they can get payment cut by their city of origin or, you know, who's their financial backer. But yes, TechSoup has served libraries for many years. And I heard you talk about 501c3 or if you don't have a 501c3 and friends in the library, can you kind of tell us what that means, what that's about just for those of you don't know? Sure, so 501c3 libraries, you know, will have 501c3 status through the IRS independent and libraries that have FSCS numbers, they technically are governmental entities and they are kept in a database in the, let's see the, the IMLS, the internet museum and library database, I believe it is and they can use their FSCS number to qualify for TechSoup. And that's the way that we qualify them when they do not have independent 501c3 status and consortiums of libraries, friends of libraries, library networks, these are all library support organizations. And as long as they each have independent 501c3 status with the IRS, they qualify for their own TechSoup accounts as well. Okay, because sometimes I've gotten mail and it says from friends of the library, I'm picking it's just the library. So there's support organization for the library and they can share the donations that they acquired through TechSoup with the library that they are the friends of. So it is a wonderful network of supporting libraries. That's awesome, that's awesome. So if there are no more questions, I think I've got all my questions answered. I want to thank you all for being here. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Jonathan, who's been behind the scenes. Ashley and Jamie, thank you so much for doing this webinar. We're gonna post a link for the survey in the chat room. Let us know what you thought about the webinar. If you wanna hear more about the libraries because I'm sure when you hang up or you let your computer down, you'll probably be thinking of more questions that you wanna ask. But thank you all. As I always tell everybody why you're taking care of yourself here in the non-proper world, make sure you take care of yourself. Everybody have a great day, bye-bye. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you for your generosity, Rick. Take care, thank you guys for including me. Absolutely.