 Yes, what do we think? Yeah, it looks great. Yeah, the chat feature is one place to add a little comment, questions, the Q&A feature, a little bit easier for us to track your questions and you get that direct answer. Sometimes questions can get lost in the chat specifically. So just keeping in mind those two options, but either way, we'll try to, we'll definitely get to your questions. We should have plenty of time. So I'll take it away. Okay, I did mean Q&A everybody, not the chat feature, I apologize for the confusion. Okay, let's move on to the next slide as we kick this off. So we're going to be discussing a couple key terms and how they apply to you and your organization and how you interact with what TechSoup can offer you. So let's keep on rolling. First, our panelists today, we have Rebecca Brown, one of the supervisors for the TechSoup client services department. She'll be manning our chats, our Q&A, to make sure that any questions you have are answered in a timely manner. And if you have follow-up questions, she'll take care of you there. Kelly Garrett is an associate manager also in the TechSoup client services department. That is the theme. We're all in the TechSoup client services department, by the way. Associate manager, one of our key leaders and a knowledge expert when it comes to eligibility. I'm Cory Abboud. I'm the manager of TechSoup client services. And I'll be leading the presentation today. Let's keep on rolling. Okay. So I mentioned we're going to be discussing some terms and how they apply to your organization's account and how you can interact with us as far as the availability of products and offers that your organization can receive from TechSoup. So some basic terminology here. We have the term qualified. Qualified is typically seen within your TechSoup account. And it's also on the same thing. It's where you can see your account details listed. And it means that TechSoup has completed our review of your organization and confirmed that your organization is eligible by having 501C3 status as a public charity or as a public library. Validated is typically seen in an offer that is provided by nonprofit portals such as Google for nonprofits. Seeing Validated indicates that either TechSoup reviewed your organization and notified the offer provider that you are eligible for the nonprofit program or a validation token was used as part of the process to verify that TechSoup has confirmed your organization's eligibility. Which leads us to eligible. Eligible is typically referring to an organization's eligibility for a nonprofit offer or program. Eligibility for offers is determined by the provider in accordance with their philanthropic goals. So each one of our providers will have their own ideals and set of goals for which they'd like their products to be used. And so in accordance with their philanthropic goals they'll set up their program through us. Obviously given that the goals may vary from provider to provider, the parameters of these programs may also vary. Information such as budget, location or the size of your organization in some cases and your organization's mission are all factors that play into how eligibility is determined based on that philanthropic focus for each program. While all validated organizations are eligible for at least some offers, not every organization meets the eligibility criteria set in place by all the providers, okay? So let's move on here and I have some examples to show you because that's a lot to take in folks. And so if you want to see your organization's eligibility there's some quick easy ways to do that on techsoup.org. So each of these links and this slide deck will be provided to you afterwards. So no need to scramble to write anything down. I'll show you what each one of these will look like. So first a baseline page, the eligibility requirements and restriction page on techsoup.org. So now let me pull this browser over. That's what it's going to look like. And so from this page, you can view the requirements set in place as far as eligibility for each one of the programs offered through Techsoup. For example, Adobe, some of these get very granular. We'll just take a brief look at this one. It really does give you an overview of exactly what requirements are needed to be met in order to be eligible for their program. Okay, the next tab here, if you already have a registered account with Techsoup, it's a little easier because we can pull in the information you've registered and provide you upfront what you'd be eligible for. So let me go to that tab and show you what that would look like if you already have a registered account. Okay, so I've got a couple organizations here. Let's just do this. Okay, so as you can see, the programs that are clickable here, these links, these are things for which my organization would be eligible for. If it's grayed out, those are things that we would not be able to take part in, okay? The next one, if you've not registered your organization, I would suggest going here. This is the eligibility quiz. And so let me pull that back over and it looks like this. So you just go through, let's say you're a five-on-six nonprofit, you pick your location, it'll refresh like that. Oh, because I'm logged in, I apologize. Let me log out, okay? Let's go back here. Let me get this one more time because I do want you to see this. Okay, so if you've not registered, you're not logged in. This is the way you can check your organization's eligibility. Again, hypothetical if you've not yet registered because we need to vet your information, we need to review all the data and complete what we need to do on our end to get a finalized eligibility assessment. But this could give you an idea. So let's go with Alaska. Organization type, let's say we are civil rights activities. And within that type, there are these subtypes and we'll do elimination of prejudice or discrimination. And let's say we have a budget of a million. Okay, and so once again, we're back at this page where if based on the information you provided, you'd be eligible, these are the options available to you, the hyperlinked options here. Okay. So let's go back to the slides here and keep on going. Okay. So what factors impact eligibility? There's several. So primarily, first and foremost, tax exempt status. So to be eligible to participate in our programs, you need to have 501c3 status. And there's a couple of ways that you could have obtained that. You can get formal 501c3 status by receiving, by applying for, going through the process and receiving an IRS letter of determination, stating that your organization is in fact deemed to be a 501c3 public charity. Okay. The other way you can do this is you might not have your own 501c3 status, but you might be part of what's called a group exemption, which is an organized group of organizations that all share the 501c3 status derived from a parent organization. It's very common with churches or other large national organizations. Many times there might be a group exemption in place. And as long as you're included on that list, which is stated to the IRS, you're considered to have 501c3 status through the parent organization. Okay. The other way is that you might not have formal 501c3 status if you're a public library. Many don't. Many also do have 501c3 status. But if you don't have 501c3 status, but you're still listed in the Institute of Museum and Library Services Database, we can then make that assessment and you could be eligible for various programs through TechSoup. Okay. Primary mission and activities. There we go. Defining what your organization exists to do. Why are you, why is your nonprofit around? Who are you trying to help? What's your goal? What is your mission? And so we do have examples of these here. I believe I got a tab going with that. Okay. Organization types and subtypes. As you may recall, when we were going through the eligibility quiz, it had me enter a type and then a subtype. This is a listing of many of those that are available to you when you go to register your account with TechSoup. So you see, we try to have something that covers, that runs the gamut of possible missions and activities that organizations provide. Okay. Nope. There we go. Okay. So primary mission activities are something that corresponds to what we call an activity code. And so what we would do is, for example, if your organization, you are friends of the local library and primarily what you exist to do is support that library through fundraising, getting donations to keep the library healthy. What we would do is, we would look at your mission statements, assess that that is in fact, your primary focus is fundraising in support of the local library. At that point, we would assign what's called an activity code that corresponds exactly with that mission. And again, just like tax exempt status, there is eligibility that's based on that activity code. Because again, each partner might have a different philanthropic focus for their programs that they want to offer through TechSoup. Another element is budget. This is one where not all programs will have a budget requirement, but some do. For example, as we saw with the Adobe listings, they have a threshold of 10 million. And again, that corresponds to where they want their services or products targeted based on their objectives and philanthropic focus. Another aspect is location. And so we do work with nonprofits all around the world. We have acceptance certain embargoed countries. So it's important that, if you are working from, we have TechSoup Canada, for example, if your organization is based in Canada, you would register with the TechSoup partner that runs the Canadian programs. The eligibility will be based on location in that way. Okay, let's go here. I'm going to pass the mic to Kelly, who's going to take over for the next couple of slides, and she's going to talk to you about some specific religious organization eligibility requirements. Hey, everybody. Thank you, Corey, for that great overview. Hopefully that's really clear things up for you all. In the chat, just so you know, the links that we looked at, I did ping those into the chat. So if you wanted to follow along, they are in there. And again, you will automatically get this recording and slide deck sent to you after this meeting. To the email address you registered with TechSoup events might be different than your regular TechSoup login. So just keep that in mind if you don't see it. And I did also put in our link to our archives for the recordings and the slides. So we've got it everywhere for you. You'll be able to come back. So now we've kind of gone over the overview. I'd like to dive into a little bit more specific situations about eligibility. One big question we get from organizations, specifically religious ones like churches, places of worship, things like that, is are you, am I eligible? As Corey kind of explained, we are, we do require organizations to be 501c3 public charities recognized by the federal IRS or a public library that's in that IMLS database. So that is a requirement. It is not something we can bypass. It's not something we can grant an exception to. And a lot of places of worship are concerned that we're not recognizing automatic tax exempt status that religious organizations have. I'm not gonna read this whole statement to you. You can reference it when you get the copy of it. So it's something you can come back to. But basically, most places of worship are eligible and they're usually eligible through their own independent 501c3 nonprofit status or they're covered by what's called a group exemption. A lot of denominations, their headquarters or regional, either national or regional will register with the IRS as a 501c3. And then they're given a group exemption, which means all of their affiliated organizations get an official subordinate status by the IRS, which that allows them to use their parent organization's EIN number, which is the tax ID, which we use to help identify tax status. And then they can register and go through that path because they are technically a 501c3 under this umbrella of the group exemption. So if unfortunately, religious organizations that are not part of a group exemption or don't have their independent status are not eligible. And we do hear from a lot of folks that being tax exempt and 501c is the exact same thing for churches. And that's not actually accurate. Our wonderful legal team helped craft this explanation for folks that are curious what the differences are. And there is a link there in case anyone in here is a place of worship, curious about group exemptions, curious about what the differences are. Main thing though is that churches automatically are tax exempt. That extra step to gain the 501c3 is what a lot of donors want because it just guarantees there's certain aspects that are being honored. Where's the money going? How is it being used? Things along those lines that other 501c and non-501c3 organizations don't quite meet up to. It's the hardest tax exempt status to acquire. And it just, you have to make sure you're meeting a lot of different criteria, which is a guarantee that most are donor partners or offer partners, as we call them, really wanna see. So it's something that TechSoup requires and our partners require because it's just guaranteeing that all the boxes are checked off of the type of organizations we're looking to work with. They're doing good out there, which most nonprofits are doing good out there, but this is just that extra guarantee that we get from the government. Next slide, please. So that covers religious orgs. Again, we do work with you. This next one is, now we've talked about group exemptions. Oh, well, if I'm affiliated with an organization that has C3 status, can't I just join with their information and use their account or register with my own information but use their EIN tax ID? A lot of times these are fiscally sponsored organizations or programs. What a fiscally sponsored organization or program is, is it's usually at separate entity that has partnered up with a 501c3 nonprofit and they are being sponsored by that 501c3 nonprofit and that allows them to access a lot of different donation programs around the world and the country. Unfortunately for TechSoup and our partners, we do not work with that kind of relationship. We do need to make sure that, you know, the fiscally sponsored organization is once again meeting all those requirements that guarantee that our partners and TechSoup are donating discounting offers to organizations that are meeting our requirements. So until a fiscally sponsored organization or program is able to acquire its own independent status or gets fully brought into its sponsor, like say it stops being a separate entity, they join, it's now a department in there. That's totally fine. If you're part owned and operated by that organization and you're not a separate entity, totally eligible. But if you're a separate entity, it's basically being sponsored. Unfortunately, you're gonna have to go through the, you're gonna have to go through the process of getting 501c3 status to be eligible for TechSoup. And that goes for our partners' programs too. Like if you go to Microsoft for nonprofits and try to register, you're not gonna be validated for that. Same with Google for nonprofits. Anything that's off the TechSoup.org website has the same requirements as when you're registering with TechSoup. So usually a good idea to start with TechSoup, see if you get qualified. If you do, that means you're probably gonna be able to go to other programs. But as Corey showed you, maybe go and check first if you're eligible and then go from there. If you're curious about this, we have a great article that's listed right there under learn more about fiscal sponsorship eligibility, breaks it a bit more down. And later on in this slide, I do have a link on how you can contact customer service. If you do wanna follow up us about any of this or have any questions specific to your organization, we can definitely assist you. Next slide, please. And that's what I've got right here. So requesting an organization type review. So if you go in, you see you're not eligible and you go and you look and see what your organization's type and subtype is. And you're like, I just don't think this is accurate or I'm really confused why I was putting this or this makes sense, but I kinda wanna ask some clarifying questions. You are more than welcome to reach out to our customer service. The client services is part like we handle customer service. So it'll be someone from our team that you work with. I always recommend going to our contact us page. It is linked at the bottom of techsoup.org pretty much on every page, there's a contact us link. That has the current how to contact us stuff. We have been playing around a little bit lately with different schedules to try to see how we can accommodate all of our members with our own limited resources. TechSoup is a nonprofit as well. So sometimes we are a little understaffed during the busy times. And so this is the best way to make sure you're getting in touch with us is has the current hours, current contact methods. And right now we do have phone hours or phones you can call us from the, sorry about that. We do have phones available Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific standard time. And then after that from 11 to 4 p.m. We do have a live chat option. And on Fridays we have our live chat option open from 7 to 4. Again, all that information is on the contact us forms. You don't have to remember all that. Just go to our contact us page and you'll see what's available. And it has instructions on how to get in touch with us. And just so you know, we don't have AI. Everyone you're talking to is a real person. The chat is going to be a real person talking to you. It might take them a minute to get online with you but sometimes without assumption that we've got the resources like Amazon or somebody that's got an AI function, we don't. So just keep that in mind. It's a real person that's gonna give you live support in real time. Going back to organization type reviews. Again, if you, you know, make sure you look at it. You know, if it makes sense, it makes sense. It's just one of those things that as we kind of mentioned in a previous slide, you know, you're not gonna be, no organization is eligible for every single nonprofit program available. It's totally dependent on what every company that's partnered with us wants to focus on. We have some partners that, you know, for why we're only donating to, you know, specific types of organizations, they really want to focus on homeless shelters, for example. Now, does that mean they dislike any other type of organization? No, they just budgeted a certain amount that they could donate or discount per their fiscal year and they decided their resources were best going to go into the program or into the organization types that they're looking at. Again, that doesn't mean they dislike you or they wanna go out like or they've got an issue with you. It just means that's how it's gonna match up with their philanthropic focus and meet their budget that they've budgeted for their donations and discounts. So just keep that in mind. If it looks accurate, you're not eligible. You're still welcome to reach out to us. But a lot of times, you know, nothing's gonna change and it isn't a comment on you or your organization. It's just how we make sure all the different resources get around. And on top of that, TechSoup does not make that call. We let the partners know what types of organization types we have and they tell us what's eligible and not eligible. So it's not TechSoup going against it. It's just the company's focus on what they wanna do. So keeping that in mind, still always welcome to contact us with any questions. You want us to double check. Absolutely can do that. No hard feelings. And you know, we do have an eligibility team that we can always check in with. If we're not, if we're kind of on the fence about stuff, we do make sure we do a thorough thorough review before we make a determination, but things change. You know, if you registered in 2014 and it's, you know, 10 years later now, you might have changed what your mission and vision is and we might be able to change some stuff around for you. But, you know, never hurts to ask, always welcome to. And that is all I've got about organization type reviews. I believe next slide. Yes, so two other things to keep in mind. Is that if you're not eligible for TechSoup, say you're a 501C4 or a C13, a different type of 501C3, maybe you don't have it. Maybe you're just a place of worship that is automatically tax exempt. It hasn't even gone through the IRS for anything. That's fine. We still wanna try to work with you. We still wanna support our members as best we can. So as we've got a list here, we've got several different things that will allow you to still work with TechSoup, learn from us, communicate with other organizations. You're in an event right now. So this is something everybody can join. Courses is another great option. You know, they do cost a little bit of money, but they're really well priced. It's the best in this sector. And that's a great place to go if you wanna get any learning. Even if you can't buy a product from us, it's still a great place to go to for training, information. You know, we've got Google for nonprofits courses. We have, you know, fundraising courses, a lot of really cool stuff that anybody that's in the nonprofit sector, even if not eligible for the programs, they're still, we'll probably find that useful. Forums is a great place to connect with your fellow nonprofits, questions, comments, concerns get posted there, make connections. You never know. Articles and how-tos can be useful, just like along the same lines of courses. Same with blog. The blog's a great place to go because we do put a lot of different content out there. You know, I just recently saw one that was about, you know, how to optimize marketing and fundraising techniques in 2023. Really cool different blog stuff that comes out periodically. And we try to make sure it's relevant and available for all types of organizations out there. The other thing to keep in mind is our terms of use policy. I'm not gonna read this whole thing to you. I'll just give you a little gist of it. But the idea is that since we do have these eligibility restrictions and we do actually do a thorough review of your organization to confirm you have the right tax status or your public library, what your organization type is, who registered you, you know, is with your organization, things along those lines, that means that, you know, we've made your organization eligible for certain things. We don't want organizations sharing their account, buying things for other people, like, or basically your accounts for your organization and nobody else. If you've got programs and departments, they're welcome to be added to your account and request products and services as much as they'd like and are eligible for. But if your friends with the nonprofit down the street and they just don't have the bandwidth, you know, register with TechSoup and you're just gonna get them an office, you know, standard for them real quick because they just need it, that's not allowed. We do need every organization to come and register themselves. They do need to request products only for their use and for their employee volunteer, or, you know, if you've got a class or something, it has to be used for your mission, your vision, your activities. It can't be just given out, sold. A popular question I get is, hey, I'm having an auction. I wanna raise money. I'm gonna buy five laptops from TechSoup and then I'm gonna give them away for the auction. Even though that's going towards your activities and helping fundraise for you, that's really not allowed. You can't resell the stuff, you can't give it away, even if it's a charity program. And there is some, there's a few programs that have a little wiggle room for that. There's some like, I believe it's the Dell catalog. That's one that allows friends and families to use the nonprofit rates, stuff like that. So just make sure you're checking out that eligibility page Corey showed you. That's broken down by program. The nice thing is that all that information on that nonprofit eligibility restrictions page is also on the product page. So you go to TechSoup.org, find your product, click on it. On the right-hand side, underneath where the admin fee is and add the cart button. On the right side, you'll see an eligibility tab. And if you click on that, has the exact same information. Also, you'll start off in the description. A lot of times it will call out, if there's a friends and family plan that you can access. So make sure you always thoroughly review your product pages and the eligibility stuff before you check out. We have a pretty strict no refunds and no return, like no exchanges policy. So important to keep this terms of use in mind. You don't wanna be breaking it. And then you also wanna be keeping in mind, checking all of the product page information before you move forward with getting something and then realize, oops, I bought this for so-and-so and I can't give it to so-and-so and now I can't get my money back. That's the worst. You know, you're trying to do a good thing and then it just doesn't work out. So keep that in mind. And again, you can always contact customer service. If you've got any concerns, you're not sure. You know, any feedback you've got of, hey, I read this and I thought it said that. We love feedback. We always take it. We can, again, that's what we're there for is to support you and answer your questions. And that is what I've got to say about that. So that's the end of this presentation. We've still got 30 minutes left. We were happy to hang out until 11 a.m. if everybody's got questions. Again, you've got that QA option to post your question for any quick answer. I see folks have been asking questions in the chat, which Rebecca's been helping answer. So now's the time. We'll give it five minutes. And if it gets quiet, we will end a little early here, but thank you so much for joining us. Again, this is our first time hosting our own little webinar for our office hours and it's something we'd like to do in the future. So keep an eye out. We will continue having these meetings. And Cory or Rebecca, I'm not sure if you guys wanna add anything along this topic. Well, just that if you're unsure about anything related to eligibility, reach out to us. We're happy to help you with any questions you have. Okay. Any questions? Well, thank you, Marcia. I see that someone said that this is quite helpful. Thank you. Really glad to hear it. Patty asked, will the content of the chat be saved and forwarded? I don't believe that the webinar chat transcripts get saved. I think the Q&A stuff does. So if you have a question you wanna be able to reference back to, that's how we recommend going to the Q&A function. It should be right next to the chat. And if you click on that, you should be able to do it. There is no audio, unfortunately. You can have to type in your question. Again, the Q&A place is probably the best spot to put your question. We'll hang out and wait for you if you need to ask something. And again, if something pops up or we end, and then you're like, oh shoot, I meant to ask this, go to that Contact Us page. We've got a live chat that's open right now and our phone line is open for another 30 minutes as well. If you do wanna speak to someone in person, give us a call. I'm happy to drop that in there again. I'll show you where that Contact Us page is. Yeah, let's show them the contact us. Everybody's clear. But the link is also now in the webinar chat channel. So you can click on that as well. But see, it's down here, Contact Us. Pretty much every, it's pretty much on every page for TechSoup.org. It's not on the events.techsoup.org page. So just make sure you're on our main website. But you'll see, we've got chat support. We've got our phone number listed right there if anyone wants to call us after this. If you need to mail us something, we've got our mailing address, all that good stuff. Let's see here. I see someone asked about breaking us up into NCs. You're trying to set up our own account domain because you're being broken up into entities. I would recommend reaching out to, we have a great team that's separate from customer service. It's called, it's our cloud service provider team, CSP. They are wonderful and they do have a great free consultation form. I'm gonna drop that into the chat as well. So if anyone, I've seen a couple of questions asking about Microsoft stuff. So that is right there in the chat. And I think recommend going there. They have their own separate chat. So on that, if you go to that URL, there's a form you can submit. You can request a callback. They set up, they send you a calendar link where you can actually pick the date and time. Really fantastic. It says, cloud service provider team, it's only Microsoft stuff. They do not answer anything about other cloud products. It's not for you to go for QuickBooks online or anything like that. It's specific to the Microsoft cloud stuff. And they do help, they can assist with Microsoft nonprofit registrations. And if you're looking for new domains, they're probably the best person. Yeah, so the chat save file, it's a webinar, so it's a little bit different. I'm not the expert here. Aretha, who's on the call, you might be able to see she has, she's our webinar expert. I think she stepped away, but I will definitely double check with her. If we can do it, we will. But I've been in a couple of webinars and I've always heard that the chat wasn't able to send it. I'm here, Kelly. No, we do not send the chat out. If you're not able to save it yourself, that is a Zoom platform issue. So I apologize. Can I reach? Yes, so we can definitely, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for all the thank yous. And yes, you can access. We also have a YouTube channel. So we have our past webinars archive that you are welcome to access on our website. We also have a YouTube channel. So if you look up TechSoups, we'll find it, lots of great videos out there. I maybe look at the date of when stuff's uploaded. We kind of keep everything around. So if it's something from five, 10 years ago, you know the tech world, it's probably not the best. It's probably not the best idea to look at something from 10 years ago. It's probably best to look at the more recent ones. That's a great resource as well. We also have on our website, if you click on the help tab at the top, that takes you to TechSoup support. Really great articles and answers a lot of stuff, a lot of information about eligibility. You can find right there in the rules and eligibility or just type in qualification in the search bar or eligibility in the search bar, things like that. So go. So yeah, welcome to reach out at any time. I'm gonna give it a couple more minutes here to see if any more questions trickle through. Thank you everybody, really appreciate the love. We are in this because we love nonprofits. We're always, we like to help you. We wanna see you all succeed. So when you give us a call, keep that in mind. Nobody got into this job, not wanting to help out. So you're welcome and we appreciate it. It's fabulous talking to y'all on chats, and on phones and things like that. It's always a pleasant experience and the sector is just so lovely. You can't go wrong in the nonprofit sector, in my opinion. I'll give it until 1040s, that's two more minutes. And then if we don't have any more questions, we will let you all go. And if anyone asked to be reached out to, we will do that today. Some people send us private direct messages. So we will make sure to get back to you if you asked for a contact. We try to be really good about getting back to folks within one business day when you do reach out to us. But again, we're nonprofits. Sometimes it's more like three to five business days since we ourselves have our own resources and stuff we have to manage. So keep that in mind too. Okay, one more minute and then we'll wrap it up here. It looks like nothing else is trickling in, but we'll give it one more minute. Oh, I just have someone ask, when is the next one? We don't have it planned just yet. Probably, we might have one next month, but probably July, since it takes a little bit of time to gather all of our things we need together for a presentation. So I would say keep an eye out for July. We do send out, if you're signed up for events, you do periodically get notifications about upcoming events. So you should see marketing about it. If needed, you can also periodically check the upcoming events catalog, which is listed on our techsoup.org. If you click on community at the very top, the dropdown option, you'll see upcoming events and webinars. That's probably how you found us today, but just want to reiterate that's where you can go. And then under resources where, if you want to show them Corey really quickly, the resources is where you'll see past events and webinars archive. So that's where you can go for, this is where this will pop up. Usually it takes us about sometimes up to 24 hours to get it uploaded here and to send it out to you all, but you will get it within the next day or two. You will see it here and you'll get the email followup. No problem. Thank you again for everyone for your kind words. We're going to wrap it up now. So keep an eye out for our next one. Leach out to us at the contact us page if you need. And hopefully you all have a great day and a fantastic upcoming weekend. Hopefully you all have a three-day weekend like so many people out there. So enjoy it if you do and thank you again for joining us. Thank you.