 Thanks for joining us today for our Feed More Tech Talks event. Our special event today features a conversation with Manish Misri, Chief Technology Officer at TechBridge, is a nonprofit equipping other nonprofits with technology like TechSoup. They allow nonprofits to expand their impact of their missions for millions of men, women, and children who lack access to shelter, food, employment, education, health care, and financial literacy. So I'm Susan Tenby. I've been working at TechSoup since 2000 when we launched. And my job title, what I do is I'm the director of global community. So what that means in practice is I oversee our social media, our forums, our community-based events like this one, and the panel and topical meetups, which we are calling TechSoup Connect. So that's what I do. I've been at TechSoup, as I mentioned, since 2000, always in the online community area. And a little bit more about TechSoup. So the TechSoup Global Network has been equipping nonprofits with the solutions and services that they need to build a more equitable world for over 30 years from discounted tech products and services to articles, webinars, courses, and work. We deliver the training and tools nonprofits need to be better, stronger, and faster for transforming their communities. So together with our partners, we have about over 100 global partners in our network. We've reached over 1.3 million nonprofits and NGOs, and we've delivered over $16 billion of tech tools and services to the sector. To date, we are in 236 countries and 39 languages. With the help of our global network partners, we help nonprofits and NGOs all over the world do the important work that they need to do and connected each other. You can learn more about the TechSoup Global Network at tsgn.org. And so with that, please next slide. I'd love to introduce our very smart and established and respected guests today. Being part of the global network means that we cross paths with many smart, passionate people like today's guest expert Manish Misri. Manish Misri is the Chief Technology Officer at TechBridge. TechBridge is a group of technology-minded people-focused problem solvers. We believe that the best way to eliminate generational poverty is by helping to grow the impact of the nonprofits with their boots on the ground. Today, as I mentioned, I'm going to be interviewing Manish about solutions for improving your organization's inventory management. With that, let's dive in. So Manish, welcome and I'd love to start with why TechBridge chose to focus on hunger as one of its four pillars. Thank you, Susan. Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. It's a good question. Food security is our basic need. It's hard to believe that in US, the richest country in the world, there are more than 38 million people, 12 million children, who are food insecure. When we think about food insecurity, the general misconception is that it is just the people in abject poverty who are dealing with homelessness, who are food insecure. But that's not the case. It could be your normal people who are running into hard times, making hard choices between paying a utility bill or putting food on the table or paying a medical bill and putting food on the table. And the pandemic in the last two years has only exacerbated the situation. Hunger in America, though, I believe is not a food scarcity issue. It's a supply chain management issue. And that's where we as Tech come in with our mission to break the cycle of generational poverty through innovative use of technology. We use technology to empower organizations under four pillars, the hunger relief being one of those. And we work with hunger relief organizations in the front lines to efficiently serve those struggling to put food on their tables. We believe the first step in the journey out of poverty is to ensure that vulnerable populations have a stable source of tech bridges, supply chain management and inventory management systems help serve a big role towards reaching that goal. Thank you for that. And so as I understand it, Techbridge has built an inventory management system. With that system, what are the biggest challenges that you see that food organizations are facing? How did you learn about those challenges? And what is your inventory management system doing to solve those challenges? Many food organizations have historically relied on manual data entry, collecting data on paper, on spreadsheets, keying those into their workstations. However, this approach leads to misinformation, lost inventory, manual recounts, all of which is cost and time intensive. Human error and lack of timely data of placing orders or getting orders fulfilled reduces inventory visibility and can lead to catastrophic situation cases of food recalls. And that's where looking at those issues, we at Techbridge decided to build the supply chain and inventory solutions to help food banks and food bankries with their inventory management. Can you tell me a little bit about those solutions, the supply chain and inventory management solutions and how do nonprofits who are maybe not so technical deal with them? Because I know that there's often a fear of adopting new platforms because what I hear from talking to all these organizations that have worked in food security is, I'm not a techie. So I don't want some big complicated platform. So could you tell me a little bit about the platforms themselves and how nonprofits would deal with that kind of issue? Yeah, absolutely. So Techbridge equips food banks and food bankries with cloud-based supply chain and inventory solutions that streamlines the management of food inventories and improves interactions with corporate donors when collecting those food surpluses. We have three main applications, namely donor express choice and agency express, which allows distribution of this donated food from corporate America to feeding America network of food banks and then to local food pantries and soup kitchens those food banks serve. One of the biggest challenges that the food banks had over the years was that of supply and demand. Food from corporations was being donated to food banks that they really didn't need. For example, a food bank in Idaho doesn't really need potatoes because they get them from local sources or a food bank in Florida doesn't need oranges coming from some corporate donor across the country. What our choice system did was, in collaboration with Feeding America and some economists from University of Chicago, we created this marketplace that allows food banks to bid on donated food similar to how eBay works, except that food banks use funny money, what we call shares, and the food banks with the largest means, typically the food banks with the highest poverty level in the areas that they serve, get the greatest or the largest amount of shares to use to bid on the donated truckloads of food. This ensures that the right food gets to the right place and is just not allocated to a food bank from a central location. Food banks also have the opportunity to become donors in this ecosystem, which allows them to take their surplus food and make it available to the entire network. The choice system also allows two or more food banks to collaborate and bid on a truckload of food as a group and share transportation costs, which could be a barrier to bidding in some cases. That's super interesting. So it's like it's a bidding model like eBay. Okay. That's super interesting. I didn't know that this very fascinating. Okay. So what are the benefits that a non-profit would get from joining an inventory? Let's say there's a non-profit who works in food security is very used to the inventory that they use, which is a whiteboard behind them. How would they benefit from using your platform? Absolutely. Just by having visibility into what the inventory is, it would reduce the headache of getting to a food bank and not knowing what they have and what they could potentially order. So Techbridge's Agency Express application is an online inventory and shopping tool that allows food pantries and soup kitchens to look at the inventory at the local food bank and they can use that to order food. Before the Agency Express access to inventory and the orders was done over fax and phone, which was struck with the human error causing unhappy customers. Agency Express provides near real-time inventory at the food bank and allows agencies to place a pickup or delivery order. The data gathered from these orders can help determine the trends for the types of food that are in demand at different times of the year, the seasonality of a food. Say, for example, we can look at data and determine the spike in demand for, say, Gatorade in summer or, say, a spike in demand for Turkey in November. And these trends allow food banks to know what types of food that they should be procuring and reaching out to their donors for procuring around what sees to meet the demands of the agencies that they serve. That makes perfect sense so that they have more transparency into the data to see the trends and also to eliminate food waste. I'm reading in the chat that someone was saying that they use an Excel spreadsheet. So this kind of adds an extra layer. It's a lot more kind of it has the data intelligence behind it, which is easier if it's done by your platform versus personally by an Excel internally. So living on, that's okay. So living on how can small food pantries start using inventory management and participate in the ecosystem? Where can they direct their questions when they run into problems? Like how can they get started with this if they're just using Excel? Yeah, if you belong to a food bank. So if you're a food pantry or an agency that belongs or is in the area that the food bank, the one of the 70 food banks that currently use our agency express platform, then it's just a matter of getting signed up with that food bank. WeTechbridge also has their own standalone inventory management system that pantries can use to track inventory and track the distribution of food from their location. We also work with food pantries and food banks to build custom solutions for your particular needs. So it all depends on what exactly food pantry is looking for to get to become part of that ecosystem. And we have multiple options to get you started. And one final question before we move into the demo that we're going to do on cloud and then we're going to open to Q&A with you after I'm seeing a lot of questions roll in for you right now. I just have one final question before we jump into cloud them. As I mentioned, we'll jump back into Q&A for you. So user adoption can make or break the rollout of a new tool or platform. So how can food banks and patries successfully train their staff to easily adopt the new technology? In the 21st century, if you want to get anything done right, it needs technology. And user adoption is the key for any technology platform being successful. But as technologists, we also have to be conscious about the audience and make sure that the technology being rolled out is not overbearing to the folks on the ground. Usability should be our top priority when building such systems. Volunteers at soup kitchens and food pantries and churches may not have the technical know-how of how to navigate a complicated system. And it is essential that we keep that in mind when building those systems and make sure that they're very intuitive when rolling out these systems, having regular training sessions with the staff and making sure to turn those training to turn those staff into training assets to train the end users would serve us well highlighting the benefits of the platform and the time and resources it's going to save should be a motivating factor that food banks and food pantries should adopt to get a buy-in from everybody to start using this system. That we just wanted to bring up the fact that we listened. We're here today because we're committed to feeding our communities. And many of us, for many of us, it's getting harder and harder to keep up with the growing demands and costs. So we spent the last year and a half interviewing dozens of organizations just like yours that feed people from the large food banks to the smallest food pantries to volunteer organizations of two people that are after school programs. We talked to over 60 organizations multiple times to learn about what your unique problems are and to make sure that the people in your community do not go hungry. And what we heard is that your nonprofits, the nonprofits like yours, want to connect with other organizations just like yours. They want to connect with each other and learn from one another and learn from your unique challenges. We heard, for example, about the questions around food inventory management and that's why we brought Lanishier. So using specific templates and spreadsheets and those type of client records was important to you. So that is why we brought all those learnings together and we launched Quad. Next slide there and what Quad is TechSoup's newest initiative. It's a space where you can come together with your peers and other stakeholders to work on the issues that are most important to you while saving resources on the tools and training that you need to feed more people. With that, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Erin, who some of you may recognize from your Quad meeting and he'll tell you a little bit more about TechSoup's Quad. Thanks, Susan. Yeah, when you become a member, you're going to be joining a dedicated community space of others just like you. This is where your crew hangs out to offer you advice, share best practices and give you the encouragement you need to move forward. As a member, you also get access to templates, how-to guides and events with experts that understand the unique challenges you're facing as a hunger relief organization. Plus, you'll get a dedicated member support. Me, to ensure you'll be getting the most out of your membership. As a nonprofit ourselves, we've been serving other nonprofits like yours for about three decades. We've learned a thing or two and how to best provide best care in the community. We'd love for you to experience that firsthand. And as member support, I'll help guide you on getting products and advocating for you. And we'll also have a consultation call. The Look Quad members really are the huge savings on tech products and services of the TechSoup catalog. Plus, there's unlimited access to our over 170 courses for keeping your staff and volunteers on their A games. And all of this is for $200 a year. That's less than what most nonprofits pay for tech solutions, trainings, and services. So we can take a closer look now. Oh, actually, if you don't mind going back to that, yes. Okay, so it got that squared away. Okay, we can move forward, Sarah, about that. Here are some of the dozen products that you would be able to request through Quad with their fees removed. This includes Adobe Acrobat, of course, Norden security books online, Windows operating systems. All of this is, as an example, $199 and immediate reimbursement for the cost membership of Quad at $200. Okay, next slide. Then here are some of our services that we have, some of the more popular ones. You get access to these services as well. Below in our conversations with the SUNIT security orcs, a lot of these types of services came up as being most popular, including Salesforce data management assessment, digital marketing consultation, and website security and hosting. I've also listed an example of the cost savings of all of these here, too. But over the course of the years, we are most known for our product catalog with products, but a lot of it was a dude yourself. A nonprofit comes to us, gets these products, and they have to figure out how to manage the products and how to utilize it, install it, get it to the next version. But over the course of those years, we've understood that we've had to have wraparound services to go along with those products. So we have the courses and services to help manage and help you understand how to utilize those products. So with that in mind, these are fantastic services, self-desk services, managed IT, of course, to get you to understand how to scale for growth in terms of technology, tech implementation, and of course, very popular Office 365 support as well. Okay, next slide. Then here are a lot of popular courses, too. Like I said, we have about 170 courses. They're all robust and built out with multiple tracks. Tech planning is very popular. We heard in our conversations with these Food and Security Orchards, of course. They still use Excel. Pen and paper is used as well. But I will tell you that this Digital Skills Excel class, I think is a three-track course. It's extremely popular and will get you actually really utilizing and maximizing how to use Excel. And as well as email marketing, Google Analytics, a lot of the organization want to understand the data that they have collected and how to utilize it, how to present it to their funders, how to understand how they're managing their patrons. As well. And below are some other popular courses, too. Grant Writing and Management course, Google Ad Grant Seminar Series. That's very popular. Cider Security Grant, courses, bundles. All of those three cost a total of $330. With the quad membership, the admin fees will be removed. Okay, next slide. I mean, here's a screenshot of what the quad community space looks like. I would recommend utilizing this as well as a wrap around service to the courses and services to help you use the products and get some information here and use the products that you have to make impact on your programs and your communities. So in the middle, we have the conversations. To the left, we've housed all of our digital content. So that includes, again, templates, how-to articles. We'll have video interviews and guest presentations as well as webinars. Just a lot of different content to enhance the experience in the community space. And to the whole point of this is to get you answers from your peers. Start engaging in conversations around all the challenges that you're dealing with. As we talked about in this presentation, inventory management, tech adoption for your volunteers, volunteer management as well, fundraising, all the essentials that you need, all the pillars that you need to excel and move forward and make impact. And of course, to the right are the trending topics as well. If you're a quad member and we've had a consultation, there's anything in the community space that I think is relevant based on their conversation, I'll tag you in it. So you don't have to continue to hunt around for specific topics. You can if you want, but my whole point is to help add support in that area and tag you where needed. Okay, next slide. Here's another screenshot of the community space, specifically the digital content area in terms of articles and templates. You'll see that we're rapidly building out more and more content in here. Again, templates for food and security, document management solutions and resources, articles as well, framing current topics of the day that are relevant to food and security. Okay, next. And here's another screenshot of what some of our housed public good ad house presentations are. We've included that as well in the community space in our digital content area. Okay, next. Then here are some current members. This includes many along the spectrum of food and security. We have food banks. We have community service orgs that have some aspect or some program dedicated to delivering food. We have faith-based organizations. We have unique food platforms like Fresh Food Connect. They provide a platform that allows organizations to redirect excess groceries that they have and people that have gardens in their yards. They can use Fresh Food Connect to direct that food to people in need as well. We have action for healthy kids. They're an awesome organization. They work with families and schools to create a curriculum for children to create healthy habits and help them understand nutritious foods and how to access it. So a lot of different organizations along the spectrum making impact regarding food. Okay. Yeah, and that is it. If you have any questions or if you want to join, please let us know in the chat and we can set you up. And now it's time for Q&A. So for Manish, first question. How does TechBridge work with nonprofits? So TechBridge is a nonprofit. We are a nonprofit ourselves. We are a technology consulting firm that works exclusively with other nonprofits. We focus our products and services under four pillars. We talked about hunger relief, but we also have social justice pillar, hunger as a support pillar, and workforce development. So depending on what a nonprofit's needs are, we work with them. So we do a technical assessment. We would have our business analysts and project managers go in and look at what your needs are, make a short-term plan and a long-term plan, give you a roadmap of what you should be implementing, what technology solutions you should be implementing and help you create that vision for the next five years and help you with your grants and fundraising and then help you build those systems. So there are many ways we work with nonprofits, and depending on what pillar that you fall under, we also have products under each one of those pillars. And I can go slightly into some of those, say for the social justice pillar. In America, for non-criminal and civil cases, you do not have a court-appointed lawyer. For this reason, we've built our justice server platform that allows legal services organizations to match pro bono attorneys with their low-income clients. This provides a free or low-cost legal assistance to prevent families from falling into deeper poverty. Much of the legal work that we support includes housing and foreclosure disputes, family law in cases of child custody or domestic violence, employment, income maintenance, healthcare needs. We also work with homeless support organizations. We have this product called Home Bridger that is an ecosystem of providing partners a client intake system and a data sharing system which will allow the ability to share data amongst all the partners, giving them a guide for predictable pathway out of homelessness. Under our workforce development platform, our pillar, we bridge the opportunity gap for middle-class jobs. We focus on workforce development to change the trajectory of those who are unemployed or underemployed by equipping them with technology, financial, professional skills, and help provide financial stability and path for a lifelong success and self-sufficiency. There's a lot. I know that you guys do a ton and it's super. It's all very helpful for nonprofits, but I do want to make sure I address the audience questions. Sorry, but I'm going to move into the next question if that's okay with you. Okay, thanks. So the next question is for you again. Right now, I use a pen and paper base. I generally inventory on a monthly basis and deduct as I release items to clients. I'm not sure what the question is. Okay, yeah. I'm not really sure what the question is on that one. So I'm going to jump to the next question. Does tech... This is from Ben Arledge. Does TechBridge work with organizations outside of the Feeding America network? Absolutely. Okay. And the next question from Kelly. What is the food bidding system called? What organizations are eligible to participate and how do they join that system? So it's called the choice system. It is available to the 200 food banks that are part of the Feeding America network. Only the Feeding America network? That's great. Okay. And the next question comes from Catherine Fleming T. Legish. Must the food bank be a member of the TechBridge system? They do not have to be part of... I'm not sure what you mean by the TechBridge system. They can become part of the system. Okay. I think that some of the confusion is coming from the perspective that a lot of your solutions are geared towards Feeding America food bank members, those that operate warehouses and have intense inventory needs, versus a lot of the people in the room right now are food pantry. So if you could probably speak to how you work specifically with food pantries, I think that will help with the questions being asked right now. Absolutely, Justin. So the food pantries themselves, we have an inventory management solution that is available to any food pantry or any food bank, whether they're part of the Feeding America network or not, which they can utilize to track their inventory. It's an online cloud-based solution that you can receive inventory into the system, track dispatch of inventory to your end users. We also build custom solutions as we have done with other food banks and food pantries to meet their custom needs. So it all depends on what your particular needs are to see and fit you in the right solution. So if our out-of-the-box solution meets your needs, which is our inventory management solution, that would be a way to go. If there is something that you would want a custom solution or a custom mobile app or a custom portal to be built out, TechGridge does that work as well. Thank you. And a follow-up question on that is, what is the cost associated with your platform? We knew that one was coming. Right. We try to keep it minimal. So typically for food banks, we charge a service fee of $350 a month to use our platforms. Okay. And the next question is again for you. My food pantry is managing our inventory on paper and spreadsheets and then updating the inventory on a weekly basis. How can I start implementing a real-time inventory management for my organization? So you would need to find an inventory management system that meets your needs because I would imagine doing it once a week is you're not providing your real-time inventory to your end users for reporting. So looking at an inventory solution, that is not too complex because I would imagine it did not be too complex. Looking at our solution that we've built, keeping food banks in mind would be a way to go. A follow-up question on that from Kelly Ciri Muglu again, is could Manish elaborate a bit more on that inventory system? Is there a way to scan items? How does it work? So it does not have scanning ability right now. It is basically an online application where you have, say, a truckload or a vehicle coming into your warehouse. You enter everything that you're expecting that's on the vehicle. You receive that into your warehouse. You then have the ability to track your damaged goods. You can track loss. And then once you have your food in the inventory, you can then dispatch it out and track your dispatches and distribution to your end users. Another question for you is how does an organization join? How do they become part of the tech bridge network? And again, another question on cost. So maybe just repeat the cost and the way that they join. Again, so you would have to reach out to info at techbridge.org to get with our sales team to understand what exactly your needs are and what platform or what pillar you would fall under to meet your needs. And typically for food banks and food pantries to use our systems, we charge $350 a month. All right. And one more question from Justin, who just unmuted himself a few minutes ago. What's your funding model? What's techbridge's funding model? We work as we have an earned revenue piece and we have a donor revenue piece. So we subsidize the work that we do for our consumers from the revenues that we generate from our fundraising tools. And but we do also have an earned revenue piece where we have our customers paying for the custom work, subsidized rates for the customers compared to what's out there in the market to work on those custom solutions. And thank you, Manish. And thank you, everyone, for being part of our community.