 My name is Jillian. I'm with Pro Bono Net in case you didn't catch that before. And today's presentation is beyond the Pro Bono Manual on Mobile-Centric Strategies to Engage and Support Volunteer Attorneys. Today, we've got a great group of presenters. My colleague, Mike Grunenwald from Pro Bono Net, Barbara Siegel joining us from the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association and Jenny Singleton from Legal Services State Support Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. And today's agenda, we are going to first explore why mobile, why having resources available for pro bono attorneys is important, and talk a little bit about that. And we're going to then go into a review of mobile tools that are, have or are being developed in the legal tech community. And talk a little bit about the development process for those of you who may be interested in taking on development of and creation of mobile resources for pro bonos. And other considerations that you may want to think about in as you embark on this process or are interested in replicating, replicating any of what you see here today. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Mike to talk a little bit more about why mobile is important and walk us through some, some slides to, to support this. Thanks Jillian. Hi everybody. This is Mike Grunenwald as Jillian said I'm the program coordinator at pro bono nets. My primary focus is on the pro bono net platform, which is a national platform of state and partner, state partner sites around the country and in Canada to help engage and support pro bono volunteers. So we have around I believe 26 partner states and around a dozen national partners that we work with on, on websites that help provide information to pro bono volunteers as well as legal aid advocates and increasingly the public. We're starting to see some increased usage of our system for that purpose as well. So I want to talk a little bit about a process that has consumed my life for almost two years now. When I started with pro bono net in March of 2015. It was with the understanding that we were going to redesign the pro bono net platform, which I was all on board for. And so we had already begun the process of applying for grants to move that forward. And around I believe it was in January of 2016 we started the process in earnest. So much of what I talk about today is going to be informed by that process of the last nearly two years of my life, starting with this really fundamental question about why should we care about mobile at all. I'm guessing that a lot of you on this call already know the answer to this question. But if some of you are, you know, on the fence about whether it's worthwhile to try to create resources that are mobile mobile friendly. And, you know, whether it's actually going to be useful to your volunteers. I am here to tell you exactly why you should care and why you should put forth the efforts to to provide resources for mobile devices. So a couple of general points before I get into making the case. One thing is just to distinguish between mobile apps and mobile responsive websites. Mobile app, as I'm sure most of you know is itself a program that is installed on a mobile device. It was distributed to mobile devices by way of some proprietary platform be it the Google Play Store, the Apple Store, the App Store, where you actually go and download this to your specific device. We wanted to talk specifically today about mobile responsive tools rather than mobile apps. Mobile responsive tools are tools that people access by way of the Internet, but they are agnostic with regard to the device that they are viewed on. So if I go to a mobile responsive website using an iPhone or an Android phone or a Windows phone, a mobile responsive site is going to look more or less the same to me regardless of which device I'm using. And the reason for that is that the site has been created in such a way that it recognizes the device that you're using and changes its layout in order to accommodate the width and size of the device that you have in your hand. There are some good reasons why we're going to emphasize mobile responsive over mobile apps. Mobile apps are great. They're really cool. They can make use of a lot of deep functionality in devices, but they're also very expensive. And I should say they're expensive in a couple of different ways. They're expensive at the outset because to develop a mobile app means you are creating a completely new piece of software. Now, you can create a mobile app that leverages a lot of content that already exists on your website by way of APIs and other infrastructure pieces, but the app itself is a standalone entity. And because of that, you have to have the resources to spin up a brand new piece of software, which anybody who knows anything about software development knows this is a time consuming and costly endeavor. Some folks that I've talked to in the community who have developed standalone mobile apps have told me that they upwards of $25,000 just for the startup costs. And that's not including what it takes then to update and keep current with updates to mobile device operating systems, the app, once you've created it. So you have a lot of upfront costs. You also have the ongoing cost of making sure that your app is compatible with the operating systems and the, in the case of Apple, meeting the compliance requirements that Apple has before you can even put your app on their app store. So there are a lot of barriers, particularly in the legal services community, for creating a standalone app. It's costly, it's time consuming. And it also requires that you provide even more attention to your web resources than you might otherwise have to if you use a mobile responsive site. So just by way of contrast, a mobile responsive site isn't a standalone piece of software. It uses basically the same code that your current website uses if it's only desktop friendly, but adds some additional elements to it so that it can work on a mobile device and not just shrink down to where somebody has to pinch and pan and scan to find what they're looking for. So our emphasis and the reason that we went the direction of making the ProbonoNet platform mobile responsive rather than creating a separate app had a lot to do with those kinds of considerations. We also heard, and this again goes more to the general question of why is mobile important, we've heard a lot of feedback from users over the years that we need more tools for lawyers who are using mobile devices. I'm going to talk a little bit about, you know, this isn't just anecdotal. There is very strong evidence that people in the legal community are increasingly becoming reliant on mobile devices, much like the rest of the internet using world has become dependent on those devices. So there's an expectation generally among volunteers where we've heard when they come on board with an organization, they expect that there will be resources that they can access on their phones, on their tablets that are going to just work. That's what everybody expects, it's just going to work. And it doesn't matter where I access the content, I should be able to use it more or less the same way. And it should be easy for me to use and I shouldn't have to go through any contortions in order to actually access it. So this I think is an important piece of the puzzle and then moving on to maybe a little bit more specific evidence for why the move towards mobile is important. In 2017, the ABA released the results of their legal technology survey and found that 70% of the respondents, lawyers, use smartphones in their work. And this doesn't represent, I think there was nearly 90% who said that those who use smartphones also use them at home. They're constantly working, which isn't necessarily a good thing, but they want to be constantly able to access the resources that support their work. 25% report using a tablet as part of their work, so that number is starting to creep up slowly. But smartphones still by far outstrip tablet use. And then, as you would expect, laptops and desktops are still extremely important for legal work. But it's really telling that smartphones account for the highest percentage of use among lawyers. So this really makes it important for us to meet our users where they are. If we put content out there and it's not in a format that can easily be consumed by the people that we want to volunteer for us, we are creating an obstacle for them. They may volunteer once, but if they're frustrated by the support that we provide by way of our technology resources, they may not volunteer again. So it's important to keep that in mind and make sure that we're putting things out there that our volunteers can actually consume. So digging into this a little bit further, among that 70% of folks in the legal community who are using smartphones as part of their work, there's a breakdown of the types of device. And I actually wanted to rotate this so that it looks like Pac-Man devouring the other operating systems. But iPhone accounts currently for 73% of the respondents who use smartphones as part of their work. Android has a respectable segment, and it means that we can't ignore Android, which I think goes back to that original question about should we do apps or should we do mobile responsive sites. The fact that you have two prominent operating systems competing Android and iOS on iPhone means that if you create an app, you're going to have to create it to work on both of those systems. So we're back kind of into the late 80s, 90s where you've got two operating systems competing and the software they create for one doesn't work for the other. We're kind of back in that scenario where iPhones, although they hold the vast majority of the market share, that doesn't account for all of the possible users and nearly a quarter of lawyers are using Android phones. So a mobile responsive site is going to work regardless of whether they're on an iPhone or an Android because that's just the nature of it. They're accessing it through a browser. They don't have to load an application onto their system. Blackberries still holding on surprisingly among lawyers. I imagine there's probably a generation gap in there somewhere based on the lawyers that I've interacted with. I kind of know who's more likely to use Blackberries and not. Windows Phone still has some adherence, but certainly I have a feeling based on what we've seen over the past couple of years that Windows Phone is probably going to go the way of the dodo before too long. We'll just have to wait and see. So in addition then to the types of smartphones, it's also important to look at the types of tablets. I did note that roughly 25% of the respondents to the tech survey said that they use tablets and unsurprisingly among that group, 84% are using iPads. So again though, Android accounts for 10%. So we have to make sure that the content we put out there isn't just friendly to iPads but also works on Android devices as well, smartphones and tablets. And the thing to remember about Android devices is that there are so many variations of them. It's just hard to keep track. Whereas with Apple devices, although with the recent release of three different versions of the iPhone, this is becoming less true, but there's generally a more centralized ecosystem of devices. So that's helpful in the sense that when you create mobile responsive content, you can pinpoint where to test it. But for Android, it's much more difficult because you have so many different versions, so many different sizes. So it makes it all the more important to have something that can adjust according to the device that's viewing the content rather than making it a particularly native thing to a particular system. And lastly, I hope just to put the icing on the cake, Google say us the following. If you haven't made your website mobile friendly, you should. And the emphasis was in the original on their website. The majority of the users come to your site. They are likely to be using a mobile device. It's just a simple fact of life. And then further on, and I'll explain a little bit more about this, they also say that responsive design is Google's recommended design pattern. Now here, they are talking specifically about websites, so this doesn't really go to the argument about apps versus mobile responsive websites. But the context for this is that in 2015, Google announced in one of their proclamations about search engine results that they would start penalizing websites who were not deemed to be mobile friendly in their search engine results. And I believe in the time, this was, and it may still be limited to searches that are run on mobile devices. But if the majority of your users are trying to find you by way of a mobile device, and the vast majority of searches anymore on Google are run through mobile devices, I think it's upwards of 90%. And it's an astronomically high number of searches that are actually being run on mobile versus desktop formats. They are going to ding you and actually reduce your ranking in their search engine results if they deem, and they meaning Google, deem that your site is not mobile responsive. So I recommend that you have a look at Google's mobile responsiveness site, and I'll throw the link into their, sorry, the link to their site in the chat so you all can have a look at that if you haven't seen it. But it was really, it's really illuminating and helpful. Thankfully Google is not, you know, they are, they don't rule with an iron fist all the time. So if anybody from Google is on this call, I do apologize. I don't mean to dump on you. But I mean Google does control, you know, a lot of the content or a lot of the traffic that goes out on the web these days. So here's the link to that site. Have a look at it. It will give you a better understanding of what they mean when they talk about. Mobile responsiveness and the principles that one should follow in order to maximize your search engine results by way of mobile searches. So I hope that that gives you some context for why this is an important discussion and also helps set the stage for understanding, you know, why we went the direction we did in developing these websites to be mobile responsive versus mobile apps. So I'll pause for just a minute if there are any questions. But if not, I'll, you know, I'll launch into talking a bit more specifically about the project that we under talk. No questions at this point. Really great point on going mobile first for design. That piece of it is, I think the hallmark of the work that we've done over the last several dozen or more months was really rethinking what our website was and what our tools were from a mobile first mentality and building them so that, you know, if they work well on desktop, that's fine. But it's more important that we are able to optimize the way that things work on mobile because it presents so many different challenges from desktop. So yes, definitely if you walk away from this presentation with a mantra mobile first from here on out because you have so much at stake in terms of your volunteers and getting access to content. And, you know, you probably know this, but I want to remind you that your volunteers have little patience for things that don't help them and that are difficult to use. So they have little patience in general because they have a little time. But that just makes it more important for us to make these things available in a mobile friendly format. So since there are any questions, I'll just move on and talk a bit about the specific project that we we've been working on at pro bono net. Pop in and say one thing too. And when we do say mobile first we're talking about not only the design element, but the content itself that's being developed. And Jenny and Barbara can speak to this a little bit more later on but thinking through thinking through we've partnered with them on not only the design, but they really brought a lot to the actual content itself that was being developed. And one last thing I'll say is that we find that when you're developing content that's mobile mobile first it. And when we say mobile first we'll talk about some of those principles but it actually has the added benefit to of being a little bit easier to access from a usability and an accessibility standpoint. So that's just a couple other reasons why you may want to consider developing around this mobile first design principle. Yeah, yeah, no I just wanted to thank you for mentioning that because I don't want to give the impression that a mobile responsive site is simply flip a switch and everything that you have on your site will just work beautifully on mobile. There are certain things that you do need to stay away from and I'll try to mention those as we go along. But they go to that idea that if you want things to work on mobile you do have to create content in a way that works on mobile. So thanks for bringing that up. That's a very important point. So just to give a little background on the project that I want to talk about now. There were three different projects going on simultaneously that made this possible. One was an IOLA grants in New York that's centered on redesigning the pro bono net New York site. There was a TIG in Minnesota with state support that Jenny is going to be talking about to redesign the pro justice Minnesota site as well as several of the features again to optimize it for mobile. And then the third but certainly not the least important is the TIG with the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Boston Bar that Barbara partnered with us on to redesign the vltnet.org site which is part of the pro bono net network as well as the mass pro bono.org site which is also part of the pro bono net network. But that gave us the opportunity because we have these three grants all happening at the same time. Give us the opportunity to take a look at just about every aspect of our system. And because the emphasis in all of the grants was on mobile optimization we were able to really focus on making the end user experience on pro bono net work as well as it can on a mobile device. So what you're seeing here on this screen is just a design mock-up of the standard homepage for a pro bono net site and I'm not going to get into too much detail on these because I certainly want Barbara and Jenny to have plenty of time to talk about their work. But I just want you to get a sense of how these things go from being desktop to mobile. So Jillian if you click through this it just shows a few of the features. There's a pop up that shows up when people first visit the site to find out if they need legal help because we found from a lot of feedback that people come to our site thinking that they are legal information sites when they're not. We added some additional elements to simplify navigation and give our admins more control over the information that they put right in front of their users when they hit the homepage. But the reason that this is a mobile first design is because these tabs you see here and these menus these were all designed with the thought that these have to be able to work on a mobile device first. We want to make sure that whatever we build here is going to not just shrink down but also be effective and present effectively on a mobile device. So this is what the standard homepage looks like on a mobile device and a lot of things changed. But the underlying code didn't change I mean the HTML changes the structure sorry the HTML doesn't change the structure of the page doesn't change. But what changes are the rules that define how the page should be formatted. So if you've ever heard of CSS or cascading style sheets that's what I'm talking about here. These are the rules that say this is what the page should look like this is where things should live. So the navigation bar becomes a hamburger menu which is the term for an expandable navigation menu and each of those dropdowns that we showed become expandable menus within that navigation menu. So it's not just you know let's force this into a mobile device but let's make it a mobile functionality so that people will know where to look. And hamburger menus are very common on mobile responsive sites so we chose that format because we figured that most users would know where to go. This is still new and we'll find out after we've had a chance to see how the sites perform and get feedback from users because we're still kind of early on in the rollout process. But that was the idea was to make this really easy and seamless on a mobile device. In addition and I don't think it's shown in the slide the tabs that were displayed horizontally become vertical expandable sections on that page. So instead of clicking from left to right or right to left they actually expand up and down to show the content of appropriate on a mobile device. And all the other content then stacks vertically so that it works nicely in a smaller screen. But one thing we stayed away from and this goes back to Jillian's point about the content. We wanted to stay away from really big images. I mean there's certainly we wanted some imagery on the sites. But one thing about mobile is that big images don't work well on mobile. And so the images we have chosen we've tried to keep them scaled properly so that they do still provide some visual flair to the mobile view. But generally speaking if you get much bigger than this your users aren't really getting much value out of it. So I think different sites are going to make different choices about how they want their images to show. But that was a deliberate choice was to keep that stuff relatively small and then you see that's reflected in the desktop view as well. The desktop view doesn't have a huge banner image. It has basically a scaled image that very similar to what you see on the mobile device. The other things to note actually I'll note that later but I want to keep things moving. So if we move, oh looks like, is there a question? Sorry, I thought I saw something in the chat. Okay, great. Not a question but I'll try to move along a little faster. We also redesigned what are called the practice area templates. And this is something kind of peculiar to the Provononet platform where we have umbrella sites and then we have subsites. We followed the same idea. We stayed away from big images. We made elements that could scale properly and work quickly on the mobile devices but followed many of the same principles. So the hamburger menu for navigation made sure that the elements were able to stack vertically, all of that sort of thing. So moving right along then and I'm really going to speed through these because I again want to make sure I leave enough time. I just want you to get a sense of how big this was, how big this project was. It wasn't just changing the homepage to make it mobile optimized. We changed most of, I think maybe there was one tool that we didn't take a hard look at for mobile because it just wasn't in the scope of our grant. But each, the calendar, the library, our Provononet opportunities guide, our case placement projects, news guides and checklists that Jenny I think is going to talk about a little bit. All of those got redesigned so that they were mobile first. So I'll run through these pretty quickly. Our calendar became much more graphical rather than text-based with drop-down menus and those menus become sliders in mobile. Our calendar becomes tappable, graphical interface in mobile, the events display in a single column very cleanly in mobile. So again, just following all those same principles that people are used to seeing sliders in mobile devices and it actually allowed us to maximize the space. We couldn't fit filter menus effectively in a mobile device, but we needed to make sure that people still had that functionality. So likewise with some of the other functional buttons in the calendar and subsequent tools. So our news tool got the same treatment. The filter menus also became sliders in mobile and it looks like there isn't a shot of the mobile device. That's okay. I think there is one of the library on the next slide. Our library got the most significant revamp to make it mobile responsive. Previously our library is dependent on individual pages with individual folders so that you loaded a new page after new page after new page to find what you were looking for. And now we've replaced that with a dynamic navigation system that expands and contracts based on your interactions with an expandable menu and then the content updates on the right side of the screen. But to make this mobile first we actually changed the format entirely so that instead of having that expandable tree it actually becomes a vertically stacked set of expandable sections. So again, it follows the same principle. We still want people to be able to find content quickly and be able to get there with minimum usage of data and complete page refreshes. So we condensed it all into a single, basically a single app within the website itself. I don't want to take up a whole lot more time. I think I've probably made many of the points that I need to make and I want to step aside and let Jenny and Barbara talk a bit about their project. Jillian, can you maybe just fast forward through these? I mean the Ops Guide, the Projects and Cases tool all follow the same principles of mobile first design, the guides and checklists, the same idea. Things simply work well on mobile whereas before they were just being shrunk down. And then we've also added a new feature that was again specifically, it was really the first tool that was built on our platform with this mobile first mentality and this is the toolkit. And this is just a collection of widgets that stack differently based on the type of screen that you're looking at. So this is the desktop view in the mobile view, the widgets all become vertical and you navigate through them not by refreshing pages or scrolling but actually tapping on buttons that actually dynamically change the content. So that was another one of the principles we tried to follow with the mobile first mentality was when you switch from a desktop view to a mobile view everything becomes taller and longer. And that's not necessarily good news for your users. One thing we know from a lot of research is that people don't scroll on, particularly on desktop screens. If something doesn't appear very prominently above the fold, above the bottom of the screen, more often than not they won't look at it. So in mobile that becomes an even more significant problem because pages can get so long. So it was real important to try to make things compact and make the interactions happen right there in the screen without forcing users to go up and down to try to find things. It's an art and we're still working on refining it, but it's just the idea of following that principle of minimizing scroll to make things more useful on mobile that we're trying to achieve. So I think it makes sense for me to step aside at this point. I definitely want to hear, Jillian, I'll just pass it back to you to set up our other panelists. Sure. So before we get into talking about the process and other considerations, I'd like to turn it over to Jenny to actually show us what this looks like on their site. What you'll notice is that there's a specific design for Projustice MN, but the underlying functionality that we have here is the same. You'll be seeing a desktop view, but Jenny, if you could just adjust the browser, we can easily see live what that looks like, how the responsiveness looks. So Jenny, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you now to walk us through the site and anything that you'd like to point out that's relevant. So I'll go ahead and make you present her now. Thanks, Jillian. So you should be seeing what is the newly designed Projustice website, like Jillian said, and this is our desktop homepage. And before I get to the site walkthrough, I just wanted to talk about some of the, how getting into too much process, just how we got to the point of redesigning our site. So like Mike said, when he started at ProbonoNet, one of his big projects was, or his big project was redesigning the ProbonoNet platform so that it would be mobile responsive. And when I started at State Support in Minnesota in 2014, we were just getting into the implementation phase of a project that we were calling Probono to go. And this was a tool on our advocate website, Projustice MN, that was meant to be a tool that you could access, that volunteer attorneys could access on their mobile phones while they were working in clinics particularly, or other settings where they wouldn't necessarily have access to a laptop or a desktop computer. And so the content design, like Jillian was saying, was meant to be in the form of checklists and guides, so like basically bullet points. So not a lot of text so that it could be displayed well on a mobile device. And then the design of how we presented that content was meant to work specifically for mobile devices. So the way that we implemented that design, which I think was something that a lot of different organizations were doing during that time, was to create a separate URL, a separate site essentially to display that mobile content. So we had m.projusticemn.org. So a lot of sites, if you'll remember, used to do the main site would be Projustice MN, and then the mobile site would be m. And we ran into a lot of problems with that, like I think a lot of other sites did, and we had the same problem with our law help MN site, which is our public-facing site where, first of all, in terms of search optimization and how Google algorithms rank, how they're going to display different websites might touch on this, but if your site isn't mobile responsive, you get dinged. And then also Google takes into account how many people are going to your site through organic Google searches. And if you have two different websites, then you're splitting the people who are going to your website, and so you're not getting as many hits overall for your site. So particularly with our public-facing site, we saw visits to our website drop when we created the separate mobile responsive website. The other problem that we had was that we had people accessing our m.projusticemn website for the settlement guides and checklists. So they would be looking at that, but then if they decided to go look for other information on Projustice, it was just an entirely different experience. It was literally going to a different website where nothing was mobile responsive. It was a terrible user experience, and it was just really hard to navigate if you wanted anything beyond the particular tool that we had made for mobile users. So soon after we released this pro bono to go tool, which is just the settlement guides and checklists, we decided to make the entire site mobile responsive with the help of pro bono net. So that's the project I'm going to talk about. And a lot of the features that you'll see are the same as what Mike previewed in the slides. So our homepage has tabs, which if you go to a mobile site, I've got just a mobile simulator up here. Like Mike said, it goes vertical rather than horizontal, so you can click between the tabs. And then we've also got the hamburger menu to search around for other resources on the site. When we were working on what tools we would redesign and how we would redesign the site, we looked at some analytics, which I think we'll talk about later. But one of the things that we saw was that some of our resources that are in front of our password wall and that are more generally applicable had much higher rankings for how many people were getting to them. So the primary resource was our federal poverty guidelines, which is something, a resource that people would be accessing not just on their computers. You know, a lot of volunteer attorneys or legal aid attorneys who would be in a clinic or some other setting where they were trying to quickly assess income eligibility of clients were using this. And we were also linked to from our courts website and various other websites. So this is really where in Minnesota people are getting that information online. And previously we had just tables, which is what it looks like on the screen right now. But if you were to go to this on a mobile device, which I haven't found a mobile simulator that will do this. But if you go to your mobile device and look up ProJusticeMN.org fed poverty guidelines, we've made it a really neat responsive design where the left hand column that refers to household size will freeze. And then with your finger you can scroll through the different federal poverty guideline percentages to find the level that you're looking for. So we wanted to make sure that this tool that people are already using a lot is user friendly and is something that's easy to work with, which I think makes people more inclined to want to use the other parts of the website. So the other thing that I'll note is the checklists that I talked about earlier. So when we looked at the site redesign, we added some additional functionality to our checklists and guides. And again these are meant to be very brief primers on a particular area of law that an attorney who might not be as familiar with a particular area, so say a private attorney volunteering at a clinic, can get the basic issue spotting questions out there or collect all the information that they'll need to help the client with the case. So previously it was just literally bullet points and now we've added functionality so that you can enter in information and that will stay. So what you're seeing on the screen now is an interview guide for student loans to figure out if there are issues, there are ways to get some forgiveness. So if you type in information here and then go to a different section. So if we go to deferment and forbearance, then we can answer these questions and we have these check boxes. And then if we were to go back to the initial screen, the information that we typed in is still available for people. So not only did we work on making it look good on a mobile device, which I'll show you in just a minute, but we tried to make it more useful for attorneys based on feedback that we had. Once an attorney has finished, one of the guides or checklists and they can click the Save or Print button and it'll create a PDF of all of the answers that they've typed in so that they have that for later. So on a mobile device you can see that again the information content is stacked vertically and again we try to keep all of the text short so that it's not too much scrolling that the user has to do as they're going through the interview. So what you're seeing now is a checklist, which is essentially the same as a guide, but we have these nice little check boxes. Once the attorney finished this section then they can click this box and that section is marked as complete and they can go on to the next section. And that's another nice way to make it a better user experience when you're on a phone is that these sections will automatically collapse so that you're not having to scroll all the way down to get to the next section. So these are some of the principles we tried to apply and of course it's always a work in progress so I'm sure that there will continue to be improvements and added functionality. And I think the only other thing that I'll show is our case placement tool, which was the large focus of our project, see which screen it's on. So we use the case placement tool to allow legal aid organizations to post cases that they aren't able to take and then pro bono attorneys can log onto the website and view a list of cases that are available. And a lot of the work that we did on this tool was basic usability improvements and that goes, I think, that translates to making a better mobile experience in addition to just a better desktop experience. So we did some surveying of folks to find out what features they would like to see added and then use design elements such as this estimated time commitment and using color to call out what opportunities are available for attorneys. And again, tried to make sure that the information would look just as good and would be just as usable on a mobile device. So unless there's anything else that you guys would like me to address specifically, I think I'll turn it back over to Jillian for Barbara to speak a little bit about her project. Sure. So we do have a question from Laura who said, any suggestions for creating an ability to print documents when at a remote clinic location or when on a mobile device we have clinics all over and I'd love for our pro bono attorneys to be able to print. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have a great suggestion. I know that there are some, you know, wireless printers that you might be able to get. But I unfortunately don't have a good answer for that. Yeah, I'm not an expert on this by any means but what I've discovered with some of the more recent updates to the iOS operating system on the iPhone is it's actually very easy anymore to connect an iPhone to a not just a wireless printer but it could be a printer that's hardwired into a wireless network. So definitely there are options available that are essentially out of the box with, you know, with iOS, you just would need to make sure that the printer that you're able to set up the printer. And particularly in courts, I know generally speaking they they they're very protective of their networks. And so you definitely would want to work closely with court staff to discover how you might be able to set that up. But yeah, I would definitely look at that. I'm not sure what kind of options you would have as far as direct printing from from your mobile device to a printer. Hopefully someone else knows more about that than I do but you definitely have options out there and I bet with a little bit of research we'd probably be able to find something pretty turnkey for you. Great. Great question. I think we can, and before I turn it over to talk a little bit more in here input from Barbara and Jenny on the process. Barbara, I didn't know if there's anything that maybe you wanted to comment on just generally about your experience with we're going through the process right now of getting your sites mobile mobile updated as well as well. Yeah, sure. So first I just want to say that working with Mike was fabulous. And that this is sort of a pep talk but that you don't have to be a techie to work on a tech project. I mean I'm, you know, one of those accidental techies with no formal training. You know, I could say well, you know, it would be great if we could do this and do it this way and he would pause for a second and then he would have a great idea about how to do it. So it's, you know, I think some people get daunted by the idea of working on a tech project. But, you know, really you just, you need to have the ideas and then work with people who are really techies, you know, who can help you implement them. Another overall comment I would make is, you know, I think Mike alluded to this, when you, when you're working on mobile design and turning a website into something that's, you know, mobile first and very accessible on mobile devices. It's not just kind of converting your website into something else. You really, you have to think about it differently. And I think mobile optimization really forces you to prioritize. I would say that was one of the big takeaways for us is that, you know, it really, we really had to think and get feedback from our staff and our volunteers about what's the most important thing. You know, I think as lawyers and people who work in human services, you know, we don't want to leave anything out. We want to give people, you know, all the information that they could possibly ever want. And it's, it's not really, it's not really necessarily that useful to the user because it just gets overwhelming. And it's just not possible on mobile. So it's really important to, you know, figure out what's most important to you. And then, you know, just develop that. And I think that kind of discipline makes your content better as well, because you really, you know, you have to be concise. If you can say something in 10 words, it's, it's better than saying it in 20 words and it's chances are it's going to be much more understandable. So, you know, I think the form really kind of influences the content in a very good way. But it's, it's challenging. It's challenging, especially, you know, for, for folks who work in the legal world. The other thing I just want to touch on briefly is, you know, getting how did we get feedback on what kind, what type of content we should focus on. And I'm just going to talk about the guides and checklists a little bit. You know, we started off surveying people and we didn't get a lot of useful information. We sort of got what we expected that, you know, the high priority areas were family law and housing and consumer law, which we kind of already knew. So we, we kind of moved into more of a discussion mode. So we, we had meetings with our staff attorneys and with our pro bono attorneys. We, our program is very pro bono oriented. So we have a small number of staff attorneys and then, you know, a thousand private lawyers on our pro bono panel. And so what really got us useful information was asking our staff attorneys, you know, what do people call you about? And what are those things that, you know, 10 people will call you about in a month that, you know, you wish you, you had something that you could point them to that would, that would be very easy to use. And that, that was very fruitful. You know, once people started thinking about it, they came up with a lot of, a lot of different content subjects. And we did a similar thing with our pro bono attorneys where we asked them, you know, if you were at a clinic, which we run many of those, or if you were meeting with a client for the first time. You know, what would you want to have at your fingertips? And so that was a way to really focus people. And I think that back and forth is really important, because you can kind of drill down to some of the specifics of what they're talking about. So I, I mean, I love, I love making surveys. I think it's fun, but for, you know, really helpful information for this type of project, I really recommend the kind of dialogue approach. That's, I would say that's really helpful to hear that input, because from our perspective, when Mike was leading this, what we do generally with tech projects and this was no different is you gather the initial feedback from partners. And then you use that to incorporate ideas into an initial design. And then you build the tools and then you go back to the, to you, the partner who hopefully is informed also by what's going on in the ground and refine that based on additional feedback. And you continue to do that, but you'll collect additional data either through surveys or analytics or doing usability testing. Generally, that's how that works. So that's, that's helpful to hear a little bit more on how you, how you went about gathering that, that important information to help guide, guide this information. I'm not sure, Jenny, if there's anything from your experience before we get into other considerations that you, that you'd like to add. Yeah, we had a similar experience to Barbara where we had had done previous surveys. I think we had done like four surveys, user surveys of pro-justice within the past several years. So rather than doing another survey that none of our surveys got very, very many respondents despite offering enticing things like target gift cards for some others. So we went the same route as you kind of talked about, Barbara, and that we had one-on-one conversations with key users of the site. So we talked to several of the pro bono coordinators at big law firms and just like sat down with them at coffee. And then we also used one of our, we had two focus groups that were organized through our state bar association, has a pro bono council that's made up of the various players in the pro bono community on both the legal aid provider side and the pro bono side. So we got, you know, half of a couple of those meetings to have, you know, those in-person conversations with people and had some questions that we asked them and then had a couple of worksheets for them to work through about where they would go to the site to find certain information and when they would use a mobile device, those types of things. But yeah, sitting down with people and having kind of a captive audience was how we were able to get our best information as well. Great. And I want to segue in, as we round out about the hour to talk about some other considerations for undertaking a mobile project. Specifically, I was interested in talking a little bit more. In our experience we've seen, I think there are two key aspects. One is developing a robust content strategy. So what you both were alluding to around really looking at what's most important. So I think that that encompasses the beginnings of a content strategy is identifying what's most important and prioritizing that on your site and then doing marketing and outreach to get the word out. We found that you can build sites and you do get, you know, depending on how you build it, you can optimize it for search engine. But there's also something to be said, I think, about getting the word out. I'd be curious, Barbara or Jenny, if you had any comments on content strategy or doing marketing and outreach around your sites. I may defer to Jenny. We're, you know, within a few days of actually launching our site. So we've kind of held off on our marketing. So we don't have a lot of feedback for this project. You know, from when we first created Mass Pro Bono, I can definitely say that it's really important just to get out there and let people know it. You know, you can never do too much. You know, even with our office, you know, we always find people who've never heard of us and we think how could they never have heard of us? We've been, you know, doing outreach and we've been out there for 40 years, but you know, it's a big world in a big city in a big state. So it's, you can't do too much. Yeah, and in Minnesota, we kind of did the traditional route where we had articles in the local kind of bar association magazines. We were, had a little article in the October edition of our bench and bar magazine. We did news blasts, you know, with our own email list. And I should have mentioned earlier, but with the project, we were partnered with our state bar association with a legal aid organization and with a pro bono organization. So they reached out to their networks. We reached out to specific sections within the state bar association. And then I think the more unusual type of marketing we did was we had a webinar where we did a walkthrough of the new features of the website. And my office produces trainings for the legal aid community in Minnesota. So it was kind of in our wheelhouse already and pretty easy for us to set up. But we got continuing legal education credit for the webinar. So depending on your state's CLE rules, you might be able to do that. And then we offered the webinar for free. And I don't know if it was the fascinating content or the free CLE credit, but we got over 60 people. And sure was the content. Definitely, definitely. But it was a nice way to make sure that people within the network knew about the new site and knew about the updated tools. And then it's also something nice that we have that recorded webinar that we can send out to other people. If anybody ever has questions about pro justice, so kind of a nice little marketing thing that we have. Great. And I think I think one of the other and this is coming on to our last our last little little slide here, but one of the other considerations is how this. I think we've talked a lot about pro bono. Your website and making that mobile responsive but how you can integrate that with other mobile efforts and other mobile tools that are going on. I know that Barbara can speak a little bit to that. So Barbara, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you to talk a little bit about some of the other mobile initiatives and how you're integrating that with your, your website initiative. So go ahead and you present her. Is that okay. Sure. All right. So I'm going to talk for just a minute about mass legal answers online. And I saw that the person who actually created this site and manages it is on the call. So Rochelle Han, I could probably do this better than I am, but I'll give it a shot here. So you may have heard of this project that it started actually in Tennessee with a law firm and eventually got adopted by the ABA, but it's a pro bono website where people there is an people can join, log on, post a question. The question shows up in a queue and then pro bono lawyers who are licensed to practice in the state can log on and take questions off the queue. And this, this site from the get go, at least once the ABA took it over was mobile friendly. So, you know, we've kind of pitched it as something that lawyers can do when they're sitting around in court or just, you know, have some downtime somewhere. It's easy to log on and just answer questions right there from your phone or your tablet, whatever it is. It's not a chat. So it's asynchronous, you know, you don't get, you're not back and forth right away. It all goes through the website, but, you know, you can still do back and forth. There's just a little bit of a time lag between the questions and answers. And Rochelle just gave us some statistics about the site, which I'm going to put right here. It's been operating for about a year, and we had just a phenomenal number of questions, most of which are getting answered. In terms of subject matter, it's, you know, it's kind of the usual suspects, although there are some more surprising ones. Like our Department of Child and Children and Families issues, but, you know, we've got over 170 lawyers who are taking questions. I think similar to the experience in other states, we've got a few kind of superstars who answer a lot of questions. But still have a, you know, a good, almost half of the people who've signed up have answered questions. And just coming from a pro bono program, I know that's a really good percentage. So that's one of the really new and exciting tools. And one of the ways we've integrated it with Mass Pro Bono is we publicize events. So Mass Legal Answers Online has had some of these blitzes where lawyers get together. And sometimes it's a group of law students with a lawyer who's kind of, you know, guiding them through the process or it's newer lawyers and experienced lawyers. But where it's kind of a social event, so people come with their laptops and get on, you know, go online and try to take questions from the queue. And so, Rachelle came up with this title, Pizza and Pro Bono. This will be the second one of these at the Boston Bar Association. We've had them, you know, with other groups, groups of lawyers, groups of law students. And so, you know, we would put this in the calendar on our website and also just, you know, soliciting volunteers that way as well. So, you know, I think all these web-based mobile friendly tools kind of feed off each other. So that's the main one I wanted to talk about. So with regard to free legal answers, what does the staff time look like in administering the site and recruiting volunteers, that type of stuff? Maybe Rachelle can chat and put an answer in the chat box about that. I think the overall thing is more time than you think it will. But let's see if we can get that, because our program doesn't run this. We're kind of on the edges just helping publicize it, letting our volunteers know about it. A lot of our volunteers will take cases through us and do mass free legal answers online. It looks like Rachelle is responding with 7 to 10 hours a week in managing it. Great. And Rachelle, you're unmuted. If there's anything else you'd like to chime in on? Yeah, I think probably other people on the call are running the programs too. I know Minnesota has a very successful one. I think you could do the basics in less time, but if you have more time to spend, then you'll get better answers, more internal engagement. I think it originally advertised as being 3 hours a week, and that's that, and that hasn't been our experience. This is Jenny in Minnesota, and we, like Rachelle said, we have a program similar to that. We don't use the ABA platform, but we were on the Tennessee original platform and moved to our own Drupal site. But the other staff attorney in my office, that's probably maybe half of her job. And she looks at all of the questions and she responds to any questions that haven't been answered after the time limit, which is kind of fuzzy, but usually around two weeks. If a question hasn't been taken, then she'll respond with either a resource from our law help site or a referral, if a referral to like a legal aid program or something like that is appropriate. So she spends quite a bit of time on it, but I think it varies. Like if you're not going to do a response to each question that doesn't get answered, then it would obviously take a lot less time, I think. And I asked her just for the most recent stats, and they look pretty similar to Massachusetts. In October, she said we had 128 questions, and that's a little bit lower than average. And we typically have about a 50% response rate for questions. And then when we redesigned the site to go from the Tennessee platform, which is what the ABA is based on to our Drupal site, which was designed with the mobile-first design concepts as well, we had a pretty significant uptick in questions asked, because I think particularly clients are really accessing things from mobile devices, which I'm sure we all know, but we saw a really significant increase in questions. And why did you end up going for building your own Drupal over using the ABAs? We wanted the ability to do more customization than we were going to be able to do through ABA. So ABA is definitely more cost-effective, I think, definitely the cheaper solution, but we wanted to do some customization that wouldn't have been available. And then as we redesign our law help site in a Drupal platform, in the future we'd like to incorporate and integrate legal advice online as well with that. So we thought that would be an easier integration if they were both Drupal sites. And does either your Drupal site or does the ABA site support multilingual access? Our site does not right now, and that's, I think, kind of intentional, because we just don't have the multilingual attorneys to answer questions who are signed up. So if we had attorneys who spoke enough attorneys who were answering questions who could speak other languages, and Minnesota, the main languages are Spanish, Hmong and Somali, then I think we would look at that. The ABA is looking into translating the site into Spanish. But again, as Jenny said, it's the issue, it's not the questions coming in, it's the answers going out. We've got Nicole who mentions that she runs Illinois's free legal answers, and she devotes 20 hours a week to the project, but that they have a little bit higher question volume than Massachusetts, they average about 225 client questions a month. We have a couple other questions here. I do want to note before we turn it over, I did enter into the chat box for folks. If you want to share other mobile tools that people that you like to use, please go ahead and share those in. I know that there's been a lot of movement in our community. For example, a lot of the forms, projects are moving to be more mobile optimized as well, so a lot of great movement. One of the other questions that we have here is what kind of start-up cost does setting up a website like this for pro bono volunteers cost? It's good to give a range, also what kind of ongoing cost does it require annually? I can give just a rough idea of that. With pro bono net, generally in the past we've packaged together the pro bono or advocate site and the public-facing site, and the pricing is dependent on generally the size of the state because the model has been state partnerships. I think the total start-up, and this is really rough because like I said, there's a lot of variables, but it's probably around 20,000 to get started completely from scratch. As far as ongoing, that's another one of those things where it depends on the size of the user base because we are a nonprofit and we're trying to scale the costs for our partners based on the impact that our sites can have in their particular jurisdictions. That can really vary widely because the annual costs are not so much about developing the software piece of it. It's kind of the ongoing administrative and infrastructure costs. That can range, I want to say, 5 to 10 maybe annually, but like I said, there's just a lot of variables around that. Certainly if you're interested in talking about it and getting more details, certainly follow up with us after. That's just not just the tech component, but also guiding folks through the content strategy, the different pieces that help to make, going through best practices, et cetera, that help to make something like this successful. Yeah, and Jillian, that kind of goes to Laura's question about what are some benefits of partnering with a resource like Prebononet instead of creating your organization's own mobile resource, and do you recommend an organization link in or create their own resources? Obviously, Laura, I'm biased, but Jillian touched a little bit on this, that because we're a nonprofit and we focus a lot on the network piece of it and the impact piece because we're a mission-driven organization, the technology is important and we do handle the technology development and the infrastructure, the maintenance, the bug fixing, and we also distribute enhancements across the network. So if like in a project like the TIGs that we've done with Minnesota and Massachusetts, once those are all completed, and they're actually already beginning to be distributed out to the entire network free of charge. So that model, I think there's a great advantage to being part of that model. And it's not just technological, it's also in terms of the expertise because the folks that Prebononet hires have a lot of background in legal services. I'm actually a lawyer by training and a techie because I think it's a hell of a lot of fun, but I'm really interested in using technology to increase access to justice. So that's what got me into this and why I'm excited to develop the technology to support your work. So I'm obviously making a sales pitch here, but I think there's a really important piece to that because it means that we're really partnering with you. We're not just selling you a product. So I think there are some advantages to creating your own if you have the expertise and the financial support to do it because you have total control over the platform that you end up developing. But I think there are a lot of advantages to going with a network that's established and has tools that have been specifically built to support your community, particularly in this era now where it's not enough just to have a website. I mean, you have to have support for mobile, you have to have support for multimedia. Increasingly, we're starting to think about how AI artificial intelligence comes into play with our platform and we're starting to look at how can we integrate that into not just the front-end experience but also to make the work easier for the organizations that are supporting the content on the site. So, you know, end of sales pitch, but I think there are some pretty important advantages to it. Just to add on to that a little bit, if you end up developing your own, make sure you go with something that is community supported that has the developers behind it. In Washington state, we replicated the Tennessee, went with the original Tennessee code and then we're stuck with a program that had a single coder that really didn't want to continue on that and we're reevaluating whether to go to a Drupal-based platform or to ABA-free legal answers. The dev time really added up and ate into our budget. So, making sure you've got a community-based and people working on it will help you stem those costs and share the costs amongst the entire community. Yeah, the sustainability question is extremely important with these projects. Getting the site, you know, standing up the site is one thing and it's a great accomplishment but keeping it up to date, keeping the content fresh, making sure that you can adapt to new technologies, that requires an ongoing commitment and having that community support is really important. Great, so I'll pause here to see if there's any other questions or comments. These have been really great questions and I wanted to also, while we're waiting for that, thank our presenters for our panelists for such a great presentation. I learned some new things today and thanks also to SART and CAT at LSN TAP for partnering with us on this presentation. I'm just pausing here to see if there's any questions. SART, any closing comments as well from your perspective? I'd just like to remind people that there's a lot of interest in. There's a lot of growing capability. I think Mike's final comments there about how do we add AI? How do we add video? How do we make this a more rich experience that provides more things than our traditional clinic would is really the future of where this is going and I'm excited to see that over the next year or two.