 Okay, hello everybody and welcome to Collaboration, Organization, Cooperation and Technology. This webinar is brought to you in cooperation with WINGS, Worldwide Initiatives for Grant Maker Support, and we will be hearing a little bit about WINGS from Daniela Santos in just a couple of minutes. And just a little bit about myself. My name is Kyla Hunt. I'm the webinar program manager here at TechSoup, and I will be your facilitator today. A little bit about the staff here, our presenters here at this webinar. Today we will be having Briggs Bomba from Trust Africa speak a little bit about his collaboration efforts with the Zimbabwe Alliance, and we will then be hearing from Michael DeLong from TechSoup. He's our community manager here, and we will be talking a little bit about technology tools that will be able to aid you in online collaboration. And then also assisting with chat. Today will be Becky Wiggins, so if you see her name pop up in that chat box, that is who will be answering a lot of your technical questions that you may have about connecting to go-to webinar. Again, any of your questions that you may have, go ahead, type those into the questions pane. We will be keeping an eye out on them, and we will be reading them audibly to the presenters later in the session. And so again, we will be first hearing a little bit about who Wings is. We'll then be hearing from Briggs Bomba about the Zimbabwe Alliance, followed by Michael DeLong about online collaboration tools, and then a little bit about from Q&A from the participants. So, Daniela, why don't you go ahead and unmute yourself and tell us a little bit about Wings. Daniela, are you on? Hello, everybody. Yes. Hello, everybody. I'm Daniela Santos. I'm the Program Manager for Wings. Wings is the Worldwide Initiative for Grandmakers Support. We are a network of networks, and we are global. Our mandate is global, and we are the only truly worldwide network that represents and serves the broad community of grandmakers, foundation, and philanthropy support organization. Our mission is to strengthen philanthropy and the culture of giving to mutual learning, support knowledge sharing, and professional development. So if you'd like to know, if you don't know about us, would like to know more, please visit our website, WingsWeb.org. We'll have a lot of news coming up next month. Okay. Thank you, Daniela. I really appreciate that. And then before we really get started with the content of the webinar, what we wanted to do, what we wanted to do was go ahead and start and provide the poll, a little bit of a polling questions, just to get a feel for who you are. So the first question is, are you involved in any collaborative efforts? And it's a very simple yes-no question. And so far, looking at who has responded, it's about 100% yes. So that's actually really good. I think that then hearing a little bit about further collaborative efforts will be really helpful. And then hearing a little bit about polling will be, or a little bit about technology tools will be even more so. So I'm going to close this in five, four, three, two, one. I'm just sharing that. And it does look like about 89% of you out there are involved in collaborative efforts and 11% are not. And just going ahead and hiding those results. Let's go ahead and go to our second poll. What is your primary interest in joining this webinar? The first option to get more insights for my current collaboration to prepare for new collaborative efforts, to reflect on past collaborations and just general interest in the topic. I'll give you guys just a couple of moments to fill those out. I'm going to close it in five, four, three, two, one. And let's take a look at those results. It looks like 20% of you are wanting to get more insights for your current collaboration. 40% are wanting to prepare for a new collaborative effort. And 40% just want to get more information about the topic, you just have a general interest. So thank you guys. That's really going to be helpful in just allowing our presenters to correctly speak to your needs. And so with that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and give the control over to Briggs. And I'm going to unmute him so he can speak with us. Just give me one moment while I do that. All right, Briggs, you can go ahead and show your screen. Briggs, are you there? Hi, everyone. Hi. Okay, can you hear me? I can't. Yes, can you hear me? I can. You sound really good. You can hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you. All right, so I'm going to be talking today about Zimbabwe Alliance. This is a collaborative, it's a donor collaborative initiative which has been in existence for a little over two years now. So the way that we work is that this is an initiative that is hosted by Trust Africa. And Trust Africa is a pan-African ground-making organization which is headquartered in Dakar, Senegal. So I'm going to sort of go back into, sorry, so I'm going to just give you a bit of an overview of Zimbabwe Alliance. And this is a collaboration of like-minded partners. We work within a human rights framework to promote vibrancy with society and democratic transformation in Zimbabwe. The Alliance itself brings donors into society together in a spirit of collaboration with the idea of being to leverage limited resources and increase collective efficiency and also maximize impact on the ground. Our background, as I said, is 2009 when Zimbabwe was coming out of what was one of the worst ever economic crisis for any country. Inflation was over 500 million percent. Total collapse of the economy, more than 90 percent unemployment. Political tensions were very high, but you still had people who were here trying to figure out how to make a living and how to build a better future. So in an inclusive government which brought together the key protagonists in the political conflict was created, we saw an opportunity, we saw an opening resulting from the lowering of political tensions and the potential that was there for some kind of economic stabilization for us to come in and support civil society in playing a crucial role to ensure that the opening gap that we started to see will be widened into democratic momentum and would see its success with democratic transformation in the country. And the reason why collaboration made sense at that particular time was really around how a number of groups could respond in a timely manner without having to invest each individually in the infrastructure that you need to start to making grants in ZIM and pursue other strategies that we're looking at. So a collaborative effort offered the best framework for a timely intervention, particularly for funders who were new to this marble question. So there's always a question of how different people meet, you know, how people, there was a time when a lady by the name Nombonis Ogasa from South Africa came to Washington D.C. on a hunger strike. She was on a hunger strike, 21-day hunger strike to raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe and the plight of Zimbabwe refugees in South Africa. And I worked together by that time I was working in Washington D.C. in direct of campaigns for an Africa Solidarity Group called Africa Action and I worked together with Miss Cynthia Ryan who is the principal of the Schooner Foundation to host meetings for Nomboniso. We took her to Congress to have briefings there with people who were working on Zimbabwe meeting with different actors and stakeholders in Washington D.C. And her examples of solidarity was quite inspiring to us. We had all been involved in different ways with the Zimbabwe question, but here was the lady who was putting her life on the block escalator to bring attention to what was happening in Zimbabwe. So after Nomboniso's visit, Cynthia and I kept thinking about how we could do more but also how we could do more together. This event had been better. So that searching and thinking ended up resulting in us organizing a dozen or so funders in Washington D.C. to come to a convening which was specifically looking at the challenges and opportunities of funding in Zimbabwe. That convening was hosted by the Wallace Global Fund and then at that convening we also made sure that there was representation from trust Africa so the Executive Director actually came from that car to attend that meeting. And then from that process it became clear that if we cleared a collaborative framework we're going to be able to respond quickly. We're going to be able to derive quite a number of advantages from that process and then that's how the collaborative itself began. And currently we have Trust Africa based in Dakar Senegal. We have the Skouna Foundation based in Boston in the U.S. We have International Development Exchange based in San Francisco and with the Wallace Global Fund who are based in Washington D.C. We're at a point where we are because of the opportunities that currently exist in ZIM the countries just heading towards a watershed election and everyone sees this as the most defining moment for a generation so just about to have another convening so that we can expand our numbers have a convening and then also discuss the opportunities that are there at the ground. So the way the collaborative itself works is that these different funders pool resources together. Trust Africa hosts these resources as a fiscal agent but also Trust Africa serves as the management for the alliance so the technical things around grants administration around managing the program work that's undertaking or pushing forward the work of the alliance on the ground that's all done at Trust Africa. And then everyone participates in everyone who's a member who's putting resources into the collaborative pool participates in the steering committee and that's where key strategy decisions are made, police ensuring that we are all moving together that's done at the steering committee level but it's a process it has taken a bit of an evolution for us to actually come up with a clear sense of the government structures that we even used to have a management committee at one point early in the game but then we realized that we just a steering committee and a single institution playing the role of management was working. So we coordinate since we're all scattered all over some are in Cape Town some are in Pretoria, Dakar I'm in Harare right now with people in Washington DC San Francisco so a lot of our coordination actually happens electronically and then we create a few opportunities where we're able to meet physically and the approach that we take to making a difference in this map involves convenings so we seek to set the agenda for change by convening people on critical issues of the day or in a way we feel that there are gaps in understanding it could be the context understanding the context so that people can come up with context sensitive responses we've been taking the initiative to facilitate that space creating those convenings and then usually from there we also identify initiatives local initiatives to support through grant making and then our focus is also around capacity building for the differences of society organizations that we're working on and also advocacy so you can summarize our approach by two words change and sustainability so on the change side really we are pushing democratic change social economic change and then sustainability which involves our capacity building we are looking at the sustainability of CSOs and one of our early motivations when we're coming into ZIM or into Zimbabwe we realized that it wasn't just a question of a shortage of resources but it was also a question of those who were not being served by available resources so we've made a particular focus on reaching out to traditionally marginalized groups such as your cultural activists we've worked filmmakers, poets artists of all sorts women's groups especially in a patriarchal setup like ours and community based in grassroots groups and their youth groups as well so in terms of some of the projects that we've worked on the flagship project that we are actually working on right now in ZIM is actually the setting up of an NGO center that's basically creating an infrastructure in terms of physical space resource centers your reference libraries computer work stations your meeting space that people can use industrial printers basically creating an infrastructure where traditionally incapacitated groups are actually able to access this infrastructure and these resources and this IT equipment in a way that helps them have greater impact on their work we are an alliance so this collaboration initiatives that are alliance oriented actually send a piece of our work so we look out for initiatives that go beyond the individual so we've been supporting coalitions and common platforms where civil society organizations are actually able to coordinate strategies and also share perspectives in terms of key processes that are happening constitutional reform elections we've been doing work with cultural activists doing work with community activists also one of the major projects we did was around democratization of local government and then another very important area of our work has been in the area of promoting the Zimbabwe diaspora re-engagement for participation in the country's reconstruction and democratization some of you might be aware that the crisis that I talked about at the beginning those hyperinflation, the collapse resulted in it's estimated that more than 3 million Zimbabweans left or some say a third of the country left so there are a lot of Zimbabweans now in South Africa, in the UK, Australia, New Zealand some in the US and all of us so part of our efforts is to support initiatives that organize the diaspora for contribution to processes that are happening back home on the development level but also on the political level and then the collaborates to framework itself at one point like peeling an onion there are so many layers to eat and for us the outer outer layer which is what brought us together was really this common geographical focus on wanting to make a difference in Zimbabwe but beyond that we had to come to an agreement on a shared perspective of what is actually wrong in Zimbabwe so the characterization of the crisis itself and we've had to invest quite a bit of time to have the same characterization of the crisis because for some it's easy to even personalize the crisis and then for others you're looking at more structural issues so investment of time in developing a shared perspective on the context and the dynamics that are shaping the crisis in Zimbabwe has been very a critical process without that it's just impossible for us to be able to move to other layers so there's been also once we come to an understanding shared understanding of the perspective then we also need to have a shared strategy basically at least a discussion around what's the best way to respond to this so all of those meant quite a lot of back and forth and facilitated processes that allow all of us to come to the same page and so it's been an ongoing shared learning process but the collaborative itself has created a safe place for us to put all our thinking on the table and then move from there and then in terms of what this has meant to the partner Zua on the table I agreed a few lines here from and for him you're saying the collaborative itself prevented a duplication of efforts mark these groups that are on the table but it also gelled in with South Africa's approach it reaffirmed the approach around collaboration dialogue, consultation and then South Africa was already working on a similar process in Liberia and the experiences on either side have been feeding into each other so South Africa collaborates with Humanity United on a major civil society project in Liberia so there's been another platform for learning, sharing experiences and that has worked and then South Africa is a Pan-African institution as I said we currently have projects I think in 35 countries on the continent so already there's a well-developed network across the continent which is important when it comes to solidarity movement building, the advocates that I refer to so the collaborative framework allowed South Africa to avail itself or to offer itself as a service to other grandmakers who want to come into this space but who do not have that kind of background and then for Cynthia Ryan the principal of the Schooner Foundation the benefits have been both political and philosophical Schooner Foundation is a small family foundation so it says as a small family U.S. based foundation they never had this stuff they never had this stuff the due diligence required to understand the complexities of the ever-changing situation on the ground not the means to find the best local organizations doing the work as well as not having the mechanism to find the groups that are not registered there's a 541C3 so South Africa is a fiscal sponsor or anchor for the Alliance it is a 541C3 organization so it has also allowed groups like Schooner Foundation to put in small resources but because of the partnerships with the other Alliance members these are leveraged for greater impact even if you put in 100,000 others are putting in more money and then you're actually able to become part of a process but you know producing much greater impact so there have been challenges obviously and I think part of it is it's even a cultural clash in a way where for small groups they tend to be small don't organizations whereas some of the bigger groups actually believe that the best way to proceed is larger grants so even issues around where do we focus your more professional civil society organizations that have technical capacity or the hard work of pulling up and supporting those on the margins so there's been a bit of those clashes but I think an open process and a commitment to more like a consensus driven process at the state and commit level has been able to help with that so we also had a tough experience early in the process when one of the anchor organizations for the collaborative itself had an internal crisis that was debilitating but they had key responsibilities in the alliance so we ended up losing quite a bit of momentum and to recover some credibility as well with a number of stakeholders so what one group ends up doing is if they're prominent actors in the collaborative will end up affecting the others as well so that's been one of the challenges so I have he is saying now I figured how to move this thing so like all collaborations we had to learn about our individual and organizational cultures approaches and principles what to compromise and what not to compromise what to prioritize and what to believe for later in many ways it has been an opportunity to deepen our understanding of ourselves particularly of our identity and principles Cynthia says we learned that it was necessary to have a paid stuff managing logistics and communications and being the link between the different partners we learned a difficult lesson when a crisis at one founding partner organizations affected several others and I want to say very beginning we actually thought that we were going to do this without some kind of a secretariat to the project we just thought that the founding partners would be able to come together and then share the different responsibilities and tasks among themselves but then we realized that all these different groups already have their own mandates so once you have that to try and save time for the collaborative workers it was just not practical so we ended up investing in actually developing a staff complement to run the collaborative but also trust Africa ended up fully integrating this and then I think for all of us on the collaborative despite the challenges one would say it has been worth it for trust Africa they used to have a number of grants in ZIM but all are now connected they are much more harmonized under the plan of their alliance and they are also leveraging their resources together with others and for groups like SCUNA they feel that it has added value to the grants that they are making and the benefits of having different actors with their own perspectives, sharing ideas, tactics, strategies balances out some difficult process of letting go of total control over how the money will be spent in the process trust and respect for others with different views, points is fostered and developed so it has been worth it how are we doing on time because the remaining slides this is really sorry there are really just examples of the projects some of the projects that we have partnered and then right at the end is a sort of accomplishment we feel like we have been able to secure civil society's voice in key processes advancing democratic transformation I think we have been able to get platform social society groups to dialogue coordinate strategies and collaborate we have been able to have rapid response work in the case of attacks on human rights defenders extending welfare support, even involving paying bail for people who are basically political prisoners and political detentions we have been able to build solidarity in the region and internationally contributed to that and very importantly we have been able to help bring back the Zimdiaspora for which these are actually people who were the most educated, they are the ones who had opportunities to live so they are skilled experienced so we have been facilitating a process for them to come back we are actually working right now on a project where former students of these schools that are now dilapidated but these students are now in Europe in the US through the work that we are doing with the development foundation of Zimbabwe they are playing a role in contributing to the rebuilding and rehabilitation of their schools and also issues around capacity building for rural and urban cancer representatives to identify and engage in democratization of local government so I will leave it at that and do I need to do anything to hand over power to you? I will take the control over in just one second. One question that I was going to ask Briggs that came in which is can you give us some tips on how to overcome some of the cultural challenges when it comes to collaborating? One of the things is actually being able to, you know, a preparedness to engage openly and compromise. Know what you can compromise on because if we were all going to the hard line on where we are coming from it was just not going to work so knowing that compromise on certain things is actually not a sign of weakness but it's facilitated to the process to give and take so that's and then the second thing has also been consultation processes with people on the ground because sometimes we found out that it's easier for the collaborating partners to come to an agreement on an approach if it is if it is substantiated by testimony from the ground so that consultation process with people on the ground in terms of what is the best way to move on. This has actually helped us where some are feeling like no, no, no, we should focus on these areas but then people on the ground, their voice has been very important so that consultation is key. Great, thank you Briggs, I really appreciate that. With that I'm going to go ahead and give Michael control so he can go ahead and get into his section which will be focusing on a lot of technology tools that you can use to help with your collaboration efforts and in that sense I do have a question from Helena asking in terms of key learnings have you used specific tools to plan, monitor and or evaluate collaboration and so Briggs be thinking about that and we will come back to that question after we hear Michael's section so thank you very much, that was a lovely, lovely section and Michael take it away. Hi, this is Michael DeLong, online community manager for TechSoup, part of TechSoup Global Thanks Kyla for having me here today I'm honored to be on this panel and thank you Briggs for that fascinating presentation. TechSoup Global, founded in 1987 as a CompuMentor, helps nonprofits globally get and use technology to heighten their impact. Through its websites, events and community building initiatives TechSoup Global also helps companies and foundations optimize their philanthropic impact. TechSoup has distributed 8.7 million technology products worldwide in partnership with 47 donors which include Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, Symantec and many others. 167,000 organizations have received product donations from TechSoup with 37,000 of those outside of North America. You see here on the slide it says that 38 countries around the world have been served by TechSoup but we're excited to announce that we can now say this is 39 as we've recently added the Philippines as part of the launch of TechSoup Asia in partnership with Microsoft. To learn more about TechSoup global and its partners and initiatives visit www.techsoupglobal.org So I'm here today to talk about online collaboration tools and online collaboration is quite important to my own team which is the online community and social media team. As a distributed team, we have team members stationed around the US from Seattle to Los Angeles and have members who frequently travel around the globe. TechSoup Global itself has offices in Warsaw and London and many of us work cross-departmentally within the organization and with partners all over. When collaborating online, one important tool to consider is a project management tool. My own team recently has adopted Huddle as a project management tool which is a new product available through TechSoup in North America. As donation programs differ from partner to partner availability in your own area may vary. Huddle is a collaborative online service providing online file sharing and management collaborative communication, project management tools and more. Non-profit organizations and foundations can benefit from Huddle by sharing and editing documents inside and outside the organization managing projects and tasks and communicating via whiteboards and discussion threads. A project management tool is a great way to stay organized and accountable and to keep all of your information in one place. One of the features I personally love about Huddle and some of the other project management tools I've used is that it integrates well with whatever email setup you're currently using whether that's Outlook or Gmail or something else. It's handy to push messages out from the tool into people's inboxes and it's even more convenient that they can respond from their own inboxes back into the tool without having to log in. Moreover, all of the communications related to a particular project wind up in a single place which really makes searching for information mercifully easy. A San Francisco Bay area non-profit I recently spoke with the emerging arts professionals network has found project management tools like Huddle to be invaluable. I recently spoke with the managing editor of their blog who uses the write board and calendar functions to set up a fairly airtight process for suggesting, assigning, submitting and publishing work with auto reminders sent to each of the writers. As all of the fellows are busy with their own full-time jobs having a tool to keep everything organized and easy to see is crucial for the non-profit. An editorial schedule is just one way to use project management tools collaboratively and could also be used by non-profits and foundations for a variety of uses including fundraising events, planning, grants tracking, program management and more. A last great feature I want to call out with the calendar and the project management tool is that under a particular umbrella project you can create multiple related projects and view those in a dashboard. Whatever deadlines and tasks you have assigned in those individual projects will aggregate to the master calendar in the dashboard view. This is another invaluable tool for keeping distributed teams on the same page. So I'm going to demonstrate a little bit what that looks like. Huddle is a fairly new tool for my team so we haven't gotten it completely set up but I'll give you an example of what this might look like. So we used Huddle recently to help plan our annual digital storytelling challenge and as you can see here there are a number of different deadlines and tasks assigned in the calendar and this one here is with a weekly meeting which is assigned to everyone in the working group. So if I go to one of the other workspaces that's under the related project of the community and online social media team I can go and create a task and assign that a due date and then you'll see that when I go back to my dashboard view what I get is the deadlines from various projects rolled up into a master view in the calendar so that's very useful for keeping everybody on the same page and creating a calendar that can aggregate a number of different deadlines across projects. So there are dozens of project management tools out there all with different sets of features so choosing the right project management tool for your own team can be a bit daunting and it's a decision that should be made carefully and with thorough research and testing. A recent article on TechSoup by Laura S. Quinn of Idealware outlined six important features to consider in a project management tool. The six areas include planning project managing tasks sharing and collaborating on documents sharing calendars and contacts managing issues and bugs and tracking time. If you want to read the full article I've created a short link here which is http colon forward slash forward slash b-i-t dot l-y forward slash t-s dash p-m. In the same article Laura goes on to say almost everyone we spoke with desired a single project management super tool that included all of the functionality they cared about. However no one was using something they were actually happy with in this capacity. In fact there was little agreement on which functions should be included in such a tool. So it's unlikely that one package will meet all sophisticated project management needs or all of the areas listed above. This quote highlights just how careful your decision making process needs to be when you're choosing a project management tool that's right for you. When the online community and social media team is choosing their own project management tool we've gone through a number of tools that just didn't seem to stick for us. So we created a page in our wiki which is another online collaboration tool which I'll get to in just a minute. And we listed out all of our must have features and some of the top contenders for us based on research. And from this we developed a Google dot spreadsheet which is yet another important type of online collaborative tool. So we could see how the tools compared in different categories. Now I would really recommend this type of online collaboration decision making process. These types of tools like wikis and document sharing tools allow stakeholders to view and edit documents all at one time and it will tell you when someone else is looking at the document and it even allows for chat within the documents for any important decision making that might pop up on the fly. Besides Google Docs another popular online document sharing and editing tool is Windows Live Skydive. Now this past winter at TechSoup we were working across several departments to launch the Microsoft Global Impact Map which you see a screenshot of here on the slide. And I've included a link as well if you'd like to visit the Impact Map. It's a recent project that's pretty cool that TechSoup Global has worked on. At any rate we were working across many departments and had to organize a complex system of sourcing, editing, and publishing stories and we were using a really wide variety of resources both inside and outside of the organization. So the shared spreadsheet and bio-sharing capabilities of Windows Live Skydive really helped make the process smooth and easy to manage and track. There's some other files sharing and online document resources which include Dropbox which allows for the transfer of large files including video and audio and they have both free and paid accounts. And there's also Evernote which is a great tool for creating living documents that can be shared. So in my role as online community manager at TechSoup, I work with a large core group of dedicated volunteers and they live all across the country. So these volunteers oversee the TechSoup Discussion forums where folks from the social benefits sector come to discuss technology and get their questions answered by peers and experts. The TechSoup Discussion forums are an engaged online environment that is flexible and consistently adapted both in terms of the technology platform as well as the policies around community behavior. In setting the policy and in keeping the forum volunteers up to speed on all the latest technological enhancements, I have found Evernote to be an invaluable tool. Evernote allows me to create living documents that are easy to share and can be accessed from just about anywhere. I have the client downloaded on my iPad and my phone and both my work and home laptops. And it can also be simply accessed online via a web browser. So as changes in policy and process take shape during the online discussions that I have with the core group of forum volunteers, I can go in and make updates to existing training documents in Evernote that reflect these and they're easy to share with all of the volunteers. And the documents also allow for multiple privacy settings in case there's any sensitive information in there. You can share with everyone or with everyone who has the link or you can set up special permissions for just those people whom you want to see the documents. So earlier I mentioned Wikis as an online collaboration tool. A wiki is a website that can be edited by multiple users online using a simple interface that's very easy to learn. Wikispaces is one of TechSoup's donor partners and we use Wikis quite a bit at TechSoup. There are a number of ways Wikis can be used to collaborate online. One example is to create a wiki that over-arches an entire team, working group or even an organization. So while the online community and social media team has recently adopted Huddle as our project management tool for larger campaigns and projects, we also maintain this team wiki that you see here as a team hub and collaborative brain which keeps all of our information organized yet accessible. Wikispaces might also serve a more singular purpose within an organization yet remain a collaborative space for those with commissions. A great example at TechSoup and a personal favorite of mine is the TechSoup Global Editorial Style Guide. This is a really great example of how a wiki might be used to set policy and structure around a specific topic in a non-profit or foundation yet act as a living document that is much easier to update and modify than a binder or a handbook. Another way a wiki might be used is for a specific project. So this is the wiki we used for our recent annual digital storytelling challenge. We had started off using the Huddle project management tool, but we moved to a wiki as we were working with more than 30 partners all over the world. The wiki created an easy access way for all of those stakeholders to pull relevant information without having to create their logins. This model is a really good example for when you might have many stakeholders who will need to get information quickly, but may not necessarily be adding new information to the project or making their own edits. When TechSoup partnered with Connecting Up Australia and TechSoup Canada last year for a tweet chat that we produced, wiki was a really perfect way for us to collaborate across different time zones and to keep our information organized and easy to pull off the wiki into tweets in real time. Whatever type of online collaboration tools you choose, there are some key lessons and considerations to keep in mind. One is to save some time for real time. Many of the tools we've looked at today are asynchronous, but whether it's in the flesh or still online, you really can't be making a human connection. When you can't meet in person, there are a multitude of audio and video conferencing tools to try for virtual meetings. Tools on TechSoup include GoToMeeting, which is by Citrix Online, none of TechSoup's partners, ReadyTalk and Better World Telecom. Other products include WebEx, Adobe Connect and the recently popular Google Plus Hangouts. With Google Plus Hangouts, you can meet with multiple members of your team face to face in real time with little more than an internet connection and a webcam camera and of course you do need to set up a profile on Google Plus as well. Last consideration is the importance of adoption and adherence by all stakeholders or team members. While there are many tools out there to use for online collaboration, it's good to pare it down and keep it simple when possible. The danger of using too many tools is that you wind up searching for information all over the place, which becomes very time consuming. So if you can set a strong policy and keep everyone on board with the process and tool from the outset, it really saves a lot of headaches later. One of our teams here at TechSoup, the community-driven innovation team, uses the idea of non-negotiables. One of these includes the project management tool they use and when new members come on board, there's a clear expectation set that they must use that tool. And I just wanted to tie this back to something that Brig said earlier that struck a chord with me. Of course he was talking on a much more macro level, but on the micro level it's the same problem of the duplication of efforts. So setting that clear policy around which tools are used and how can really help contain that information and keep duplicative work from being done. And so with that, I'm going to wrap things up. Thank you so much for your time today, and back to Kyla. Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate that. I'm going to go ahead and take control back so I can get my little questions slide up. All right. And so if you do have any questions, you can go ahead and type those into the questions pane. We did have, again, that question that came in near the end of Brig's presentation. I'm going to go ahead and unmute Brig's again. And we did have another question come in that was similar to it, which was wondering if Brig's used any online collaboration tools in his collaborative efforts. So, Brig, if you wanted to go ahead and take that question. Yes, we have. One of the big projects that we did was to develop a video, a short video for Zimbabwe Alliance. Unfortunately, I didn't send a link ahead of time, but it's on YouTube. For anyone who wants to get more information if you just YouTube Zimbabwe Alliance, it comes out. It's a video profiling our partners, the work that we're doing, and a little bit of history for the country. So we did that project, and it's scattered all over the world basically as we are, and we used Basecamp in terms of sharing schedules, the files that we wanted to share. We also used Dropbox for large files sharing. We've also used Google Docs and we would not function without Skype conference. So all of our steering committee meetings are basically done via Skype, which colleagues know cost us nothing. So that has worked, and then things like meeting wizard for scheduling our meetings, coordinating affineability, we also have, like we have Cal that we use for putting all our files related to the project online, and all guys in the steering committee are able to access those files online. So I wouldn't say we are that heavy on these tech tools, but yeah, I'm seeing more and more how we would not have been able to function as efficiently without Skype, without having used Basecamp for our video project, and then, you know, those other things. Thank you. Okay, great, thank you very much, Briggs. And I'm not seeing any other questions coming at the moment, and we are almost out of time, but I did go ahead and put my email address in the chat box. So if you are, if you do have any questions after the fact, you can go ahead and email me at k-hunt at techsuitglobal.org. And let me just double check if there are any questions that have come in before I get wrapped up here. It does look like, I believe we have answered most of these in a general way. And so, again, thank you everybody for being here today. And again, if you do have any questions, then we will be sending that YouTube link that Briggs talked a little bit about out to the rest of the audience. And so, Briggs, if you could go ahead and email me that YouTube link after the fact, that would be great, and I can go ahead and send that on. And again, we will be emailing this recording out to everybody after the fact. And so, again, a little bit about who TechSoup is, TechSoup is a nonprofit, a lot like a lot of you who does try to provide technology and technology resources out to everybody who needs them to complete their mission. And again, I do want to thank Briggs and Michael and Becky for all helping me out with today's webinar. And, of course, I want to thank Daniela and Wings for their great efforts in allowing us to provide this webinar series. So, again, thank you everybody for expecting that recording of this webinar within a week. And I will be talking with all of you again shortly, hopefully. So, thank you very much. If you could give two seconds of your time to fill out our survey after the fact, that would be great. So, thank you. Have a great day. And so, Lee, if you can go ahead and go to File, Exit, Leave webinar. Teresa, if you are still on, I will be sending out a link about GoToMeeting. Just so you know, for the most part, from my knowledge, GoToMeeting, the question is how many people can share GoToMeeting at the same time. If you're at GoToMeeting account, it's 15 people. If you're on a GoToWebinar account, it depends on what you signed up for, but my account has up, you can have up to 1,000 people. And there's also another tool called GoToTraining, and you can have up to 25 people on that. So, again, thank you everybody, and I will be closing out the webinar.