 Welcome everyone to finding and cultivating local tech expertise for nonprofits and public libraries. Thank you so much for joining us today for TechSoup's webinar. Before we get started, I'd like to make sure everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk, the platform that we are on today. You can chat into us at any time with the box on the lower left side of your screen to let us know if you need help or have any questions for our presenters. Most of you are here in the audio play through your computer speakers, so if you are hearing an echo, it may mean that you are logged in more than once. And if at any time the slides and webinar fall out of sync, or if that streaming audio isn't clear or consistent, we would welcome you to dial in to the toll-free number that Ali chatted out just a moment ago in the chat window. We will keep all lines muted so that we get a nice clear recording for you to refer to and re-watch, share with your friends and colleagues at your convenience. If you lose your Internet connection, rejoin clicking that green Join Meeting button in the confirmation or reminder email that you would have received when you registered. For those of you who registered before this morning, you should have, in the final reminder email that went out an hour ago, have access to the full slide deck. It is available under the downloadable files on the right side of that email. And for those of you who just registered in the past 30 minutes or so, you will also be able to find that slide deck attached under downloadable files on the right side of your message. For those of you who are dialed in, you can reconnect at any time with that toll-free number. And you can also reach out to ReadyTalk Support at this 800 number on screen. We are recording today's webinar and we will make it available on the TechSoup website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. That's also where you can find a list of our upcoming events. So feel free to look there at any time to see what else is coming down the pike. You'll find this also on our TechSoup video channel within the next day. You can find that recording. And then within the next few days you'll get a full recap email that has the link to the presentation, the full recording you can watch at your convenience, and any links that we discuss. You can feel free to tweet us at TechSoup or using the hashtag TSwebinars. My name is Becky Wiegand and I am the webinar program manager here at TechSoup. And I've been with the organization for 8.5 years now. And prior to that spent a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California. And I'm giving you a little bit about my background because I'll be presenting a bit today as well. And was very much in the position of being the accidental techie before I came to TechSoup. And even when I came to TechSoup that was sort of my role here. I was the litmus test for a lot of really smart tech analysts who wrote complicated articles. And if I didn't understand them it meant they had to rewrite them. So I come to this today in the hopes of sharing some of the resources that we've collected over the years for finding and cultivating those tech communities wherever you live so that you can access people in the flesh and get the people that you need to help you make the best tech decisions for your needs. We are also joined by Roshani Katari who is a nonprofit tech consultant and has presented at NTC, the nonprofit technology conference, and NetSquared D.C. events which she is a co-organizer of. And we actually go back really a long time. Roshani and I used to work together in D.C. Not at the same organization but we used to host happy hours and at the time what we called skill swaps where we would bring people together around technology and say, hey, you know how to blog. Can you meet us and tell us how you blog and what your platform is and what the best practices are? And this was in the early to mid-2000s so it was pretty new back then. But we would do it on a whole host of topics. So I'm really glad to reconnect with her in this venue. She has more than 10 years of experience working with nonprofits where she previously worked at Community IT Innovators in D.C. which I'll talk about a little bit later in this program. The International Women's Media Foundation, One World U.S. Pact, and Catholic Relief Services. She is well traveled having been to more than 30 countries and living in a variety of them as well. And she lives in Washington D.C. where she helps organize those NetSquared D.C. meetings. And we'll talk to us about how she has helped cultivate and grow that community of tech experts and can help connect you to doing the same if you are so interested. We'll also hear from Elijah Van Der Giesen or Eli as we lovingly call him here at TechSoup. He is our NetSquared Community Manager where his primary goal in life I think is to be a connector. He really helps connect communities together. He's been a volunteer manager, an event organizer, and a digital campaigner. And he is based in Vancouver where he helps organize Vancouver NetSquared events and organizes all of our NetSquared organizers around the world as well as NetSquared ambassadors who are reaching out and connecting organizers to one another worldwide. You'll see on the back end assisting with chat Allie Bozikian who is TechSoup's interactive video producer. And she is helping with any of your questions and any technical needs you may have. Feel free to reach out to her. Looking at our objectives today, we hope that you'll come away from today's event feeling inspired by the wide range of ways that you can find and engage with tech experts in your day-to-day life as much or as little as you need. It can be a daunting task to talk to tech people sometimes. Sometimes you don't feel like you know the lingo or that you're speaking different languages or don't understand each other's goals. So we hope that you'll come away with some resources of how to get that sort of base relationship and how to find people that can help you fulfill your tech needs. We hope that you're going to come away having acquired at least two new resources that you hadn't heard of before today for tapping into Tech Pros. And then we hope that you'll gain some tips on starting your own gatherings if you'd like to do that to connect nonprofits or libraries with tech experts in your area. We don't expect that all of you will want to do that, but we want to make sure that if you do that we're providing you some resources to get started. So really quickly before we dive into the full topic at hand, for those of you who may not be familiar with TechSoup, we are everywhere on this map that's blue in the world. That's 236 countries. And we would love it if you would chat into us to let us know from where you're joining in the world today. We will talk about some donation programs and discount programs later on in the program that are primarily geared toward TechSoup.org which is US-based organizations. But a lot of the other programs we'll talk about could apply no matter where you are in the world. If you're joining us from outside the United States and you want to learn about the different donation programs available to you, I'd recommend visiting TechSoup.global and choosing your country from the dropdown to find your local or regional partner. Now diving us into the topic today, thanks to all of you who are chatting in from where you're joining. I see New York, St. Louis, Vancouver, West Virginia, gosh, all over the place. So thank you for chiming in on the back end. We know you can't see one another's messages, but if you have tips and experiences you'd like to share about how you've cultivated and reached out to Tech experts in your area, what's worked for you, or maybe what hasn't, feel free to chat those in and we will share them back out with our community since you can't see all of each other's chat messages. So looking at where do you currently tap into Tech expertise and support? And this is just to give us an idea of what you, the people on the line today, come to us having used. And you can select any that apply to you. So maybe you have in-house IT staff. Maybe you only have accidental techies which is farther down on the list. And that was always my unofficial role. I always had a different title, but people would bestow upon me the, you look like you know what you're doing on my space, so go fix our server, which always cracks me up because I knew nothing about servers. Maybe you don't have any tech support or expertise or experts available to you right now. Maybe you have accessed paid consultants or managed IT services. Maybe you use local volunteers. If there's something I'm not mentioning and that's not on this list, feel free to chat it in to let us know what most applies to your methods of accessing tech experts. Maybe it's mostly online through places like TechSoup or NetSquared or Idealware that you're getting tech expertise. Kayla comments that the city IT department also covers the library. So that's great. So those of you who are connecting with libraries, maybe you kind of fall under the umbrella of getting IT services from your city or municipality. And Michael comments, we have no experts and no money at all, so please mention if your resources are free or not. And I will try to be very conscientious of doing that as we move forward. So I'm going to show the results. And then I'm going to have Eli join us on the line to talk to us a bit about NetSquared as one of the first free options that we'll cover today on how to access those tech experts. But just looking at how you weighed in so far from those of you on the line, 46% it's a tie between folks having accidental techies in-house and hiring paid consultants or managed IT services. So it seems like you're either having to pay for it or you're just managing it with people who maybe know a little bit. I often say I know enough to get in trouble but not enough to get out of it. And I imagine many other people may be in a similar situation. And then some folks almost 30% have some dedicated IT staff. So that's great. And even with that you may want to be engaging with other tech community, or you may be the IT staff and you're looking for ways to connect your own expertise to others. So we're glad to have you all on the line joining us today. So with that I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Eli to talk to us about NetSquared as one of the ways. And again we'll have a whole bunch, we'll have a range of ways that you can source and find and cultivate the local tech expertise to support your work that we'll talk about throughout this. But we're going to start this initial chunk with talking to Eli about what NetSquared is and what these meetups are all about. And we'll hear from Roshani about how she supports that community in DC. And then we'll talk about a lot of other different resources after. So stay with us for the full hour. I think we'll have a lot to share. Thanks Eli. We're glad to have you on the program. Delighted to be there. So hi there. My name is Eli. I'm in Vancouver, Canada. And it is my huge pleasure to work with TechSoup's global network of nonprofit technology meetup volunteers. And I'll talk a little bit more about what this is all about. But what you need to know basically is we're going to talk about how you can connect up with people in your community who want to help you with this crazy technology stuff. So perhaps this looks a little familiar. Maybe you are that accidental techie who is in over your head. Or maybe you are that super wizard who totally knows technology. But in either case what I often find is that it can be a super isolating role to be the technology person in your organization because no one else usually knows what you're talking about. Like you're the smartest person about tech there. And it means you don't have someone else to talk to, to work through some of your problems and discuss how you could start building your skills. And so that is why TechSoup has created NetSquared. Because we think that it's important for us to get techies together in a room to support each other. TechSoup of course will also support you through our blog posts, our forums, our eLearning courses, and webinars like this. But we think that sometimes there is this magic that happens when we get together in a room. And there are just certain kinds of conversations that you can only have when you're there with someone else. And so that's why we've got this global network of non-profit technology meetups. There are currently 72 groups in 24 countries. And last year we had about 13,000 non-profit techies come into our free events. So we're probably already in your neighborhood. I think these NetSquared events are amazing. I came into the community as a volunteer myself about 8 years ago. But you're probably skeptical. You're like, well, what are these things? What do they look like? So I'm going to give you a sense of the flavor of what these events can look like knowing that they're a little bit different in every community. So sometimes they're going to be a pretty informal chat. And what you're looking at here is a photo from our Burkina Faso group where they sort of get together in a courtyard once a month and work through their shared technology challenges. Other times our events are going to look a little bit more one-on-one support. So what you're looking at here is a social media tune-up where we connect local nonprofits together with social media experts for 30-minute consultations. Another example of that is going to be the Design for Non-Designers event I'll actually be hosting in Vancouver which is basically going to be where we pair local nonprofits with a graphic designer to learn best practices and how they can create graphics for their social media without having to be super experts. Other times the events are going to look like a presentation or a lecture. So a good example of that is actually going to be happening very soon in Washington, D.C. with our presenter here, where they're going to be talking about online advocacy strategies. And that's a great example of one of the more high-level presentations that will happen within the NetSquared community. And then sometimes our events are just going to be let's go together to a pub and drink together, weep together, and talk about our shared experiences as nonprofit techies. When we ask people why do they go to our events, they're really looking to build practical skills in technology tools and then they're looking for a community because they want to find people who know the same problems and have gone through the same struggles. So here in the U.S. there are actually 30 active NetSquared groups which means we're probably already in your neighborhood and if we aren't already in your neighborhood, we'll then let's get together and we'll chat afterwards about how we can help you start up a group in your own community. But basically how do you find your local group? It's not too difficult. All you really do is go one to netsquared.org and then right here in the center search box, put your name or your state and then go and click the refresh button. And then this map below is going to magically zoom right into your city and it's going to then right here show you your local groups and the events that are upcoming. If you don't see anything, go here to the distance field and put a larger number and more events will show up. So that's really how you're going to find your local group. So I think NetSquared is magic. I've been involved with it now for nine years and it's really helped me as I've developed up my career in nonprofit technology. I think it should go because the events are totally free which means it is low, low risk. I also think you need to go because as nonprofit techies we need to connect up with our peers. We have so much knowledge to share with each other which means we need to get together at a room and start building those relationships. I also think we should be going to NetSquared events because it is the place for you to get tech help and discover the smartest consultants and other nonprofit techies in your community. So you can steal their best practices and ideas and have people who you can turn to next time you need to figure out the difficult problems like how did you convince your executive director to invest in a new website? Someone else in your community has already gone through that process before. So you should come join us at NetSquared because it's super fun. Some of the popular topics have been social media, email marketing, Google AdWords, the major platforms like Office 365 and Google Apps aka Google Suite. Also fundraising is a super popular topic. Website Designs, Content Management, CRMs, basically if you have a technology problem we're probably there to help you solve it in one of our events through the course of the year. So at this point I'm now going to go and send you off into the next phase of this presentation. There's a great survey coming up. Thank you for that Eli. We had a comment in the background from a participant, Kathy, saying that they're in a rural mountain area far from any city and that it's hard to hear kind of these bigger gatherings happening in these bigger cities. So I think it's a good point for those of you joining us from rural communities or from areas that are maybe far flung from big populations where maybe there isn't an existing NetSquared meetup. You may find that there are other kinds of meetups. You may be able to encourage it just by putting a group interest on something like meetup.com saying you're interested in participating in a group like that. And it may just come together with a few people and could be really beneficial. That's kind of how we started doing our skill swaps in DC even though it was a big city. We were almost drowned out by too much noise and we said, hey, do you know about this? I really want to know about this. Could we have a meetup and maybe have a couple of people talk about how they use it even if they're not experts. That could be helpful. And then we can sit around the table and share how we are doing these things and how we're looking at them. And then maybe we can have a beer after. And then it just started becoming a regular meetup that was sort of the precursor to NetSquared in DC before it existed. So we asked this question just to get an idea of who on the line is already familiar and maybe has attended a NetSquared or Tech for Good meetup. And I didn't include all the other kinds of meetups. There are data kind meetups, hack for good meetups, code for change. There's bar camps and civic hacking days and all kinds of things like that. So if you've attended any of those kinds of events, you can say yes. If you've already voted, that's okay. But we wanted to get an idea of how connected to these kinds of resources our audience is. And by far the great majority is not already. But there are in a lot of places around the world. So I would really recommend connecting because it's a great way to really meet people who either are in similar positions as you may be or to meet the people who have the insight and the expertise to provide you with some solutions or give you some free consulting advice over a beer. And it's just a great opportunity to do that. So I'm going to go ahead and have Roshini come on and talk to us a little bit about how she's helped cultivate this community in D.C. Just as an example of how it's worked there. And even though it is in a larger area, not a far-flung rural community, this is something that's really not that challenging to do. And like I said, we started doing it just because we saw a need, that, hey, I would really like to know how you're using Salesforce. And you're just starting out using it, I know. But could we get together and talk? And hey, maybe we'll invite these other couple of people that we know are using it. And that's how it all began. So Roshini, give us some background. Tell us how you've cultivated this Tech for Good community and give us some tips on how others can maybe do it if they feel so inclined. Sure, Becky. So I want to share a few tips for getting a group started. I saw in the poll that a lot of you have not attended that's greater Tech for Good lead-ups before. So I think these tips will be helpful for you to think about in terms of starting your own group and you can follow up with Eli afterwards as well and get you all started. So for me, it started back in 2006. So almost 10 years ago, there I am in their red sweater, quite young, working in the nonprofit space, and then just getting involved in the nonprofit technology space. I would say I'm definitely more of an accidental techie. And I attended one of these meetings, the NetSquared DC meetings. And I really learned a lot and decided in 2010 that I would like to become an organizer and start organizing these events. It's been such a great way for me to connect with people and to learn. And now NetSquared DC has over 1,800 members. So it's definitely a very popular group here. So why start Tech for Good or NetSquared? I'm basically using them interchangeably. As I mentioned in the chat comments, N10 or the nonprofit technology network is a great community to connect to. And some cities have groups that combine N10 local group with TechSoup's NetSquared group and they call them Tech for Good. So for us it's interchangeable. In DC we have both N10 group and NetSquared group. So we're lucky to have a lot of great resources here. But as I mentioned, it's a great way to connect, learn, and network. I think part of taking the initiative in terms of organizing this group, you really get to meet a lot of the movers and shakers, people who are involved in helping nonprofits with technology. It helps you personally to build social capital to get jobs or consultancies just as you're building your network. So personally I think it's worth it to invest in this and to get something started if there's nothing in your area. So I just want to share a few tips for getting started. Part of it would like-minded organizations. And I think Becky is going to mention a few organizations later, but as I mentioned N10 is a great place to start. You can connect with the community online but also locally with their local communities. There might be some groups in your local community at the library. You may see if there is like a website building class or some other type of class and you might meet some people who are interested in working on similar things. Or you might just know other people in other organizations that are facing the same challenges you are in terms of how do you manage social media? What are the latest and greatest things when it comes to digital strategy? So try to figure out other groups or individuals that you can partner with. And then just a popular topic. So for example, what is everybody talking about in your community? Is it how to reach millennials? Is it how to deal with moving to the cloud? What are the topics that are most interesting to people in your community? What are the biggest challenges facing people in your community? And pick that topic and then bring people together to talk about it. Invite interesting speakers. If you hear about people in your community that are experts in any of this, just talk to them and say would you be willing to come and talk to our group about this topic and how you are helping others? And more than likely they would be happy to do it because it is a great way to promote the work that they are doing. So identify a few people who are good speakers. Now finding a space to host an event, it can be fairly easy. You can look at local churches, local community centers, local universities. You can always find a free space. We've definitely hosted both at local nonprofit organizations, offices, and also at libraries. And most recently, co-working has become really popular in DC. So we've been hosting a lot of events that we work in their different locations as well. And finally, once you set up an event, it's really important to promote the event via email list and also Facebook groups and Twitter. And make sure that you really do a great job of getting the word out so you get people who would be interested in your topic to attend your event. So just frequently ask questions. What is the best day of the week to host the event? Usually it's a Tuesday or Wednesday. Monday people are just getting back from the weekend. And Thursday, Friday people are already thinking about happy hours. So Tuesday, Wednesday is a great time. That's time to host an event, 6 to 8 p.m. or 12 to 2 if you prefer to do a lunch event, finding interesting speakers. I think we talked about this already, but connecting with other local nonprofits, tech companies, attending other meetup events is always a great way to find interesting speakers. Finding space to host your event. We touched on this already, local churches, libraries, and universities, and also promoting your event through social media on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also post an announcement in other meetup groups. That's also a great way to share what you have coming up. Popular event formats. So I mentioned you could invite speakers, but let's say if you don't find any speakers on a particular topic. You can also just get people together to share, okay, this is a challenge that we're dealing with our website, and let's all come together to talk about the latest website, a design trend, and see how our organizations are dealing with it. And even if you don't have a speaker, you can have people who come to the event to share their own expertise, or to share what they're doing in their organization, even if they're an accidental techie. Which sounds like you all have a lot of accidental techies that you're working with. So that's a great situation where you bring people together who are accidental techies to talk about what are the challenges they're facing and how they're dealing with them. The panel discussion is a great format, so we have different people in our community. For example, we have an event coming up on visual storytelling where we have a photographer who talks about how she works with nonprofits and helps them communicate their messages, and we have another nonprofit consultant who's going to talk about the same topic. So we do that more of a panel discussion where we have brief presentations and afterwards we have a moderated discussion. Happy Hour is a great way if you have a local restaurant, a bar, where you can just get people together. That's a great way to start. It doesn't take much time to set up, and you just get people connected, and then it's easier next time when you do an event to get them to come out to that. Our nonprofit Makeover has been a popular format as well where you invite a nonprofit that's dealing with a specific challenge, and then you have the audience, and the people in the audience give advice to this nonprofit. Let's say if they're focused on a specific challenge in their organization. And Speed Dating, this is a fun format where we actually brought together different nonprofit technology experts and had tables in the room where people could go from one table to the next to talk to different people. So one table had experts that focus on websites, another table had experts that focus on IT, and then people just went around the room and talked to, you know, in a Speed Dating fashion, talked to the people in the room. So that format also works really well. So these are just a few comments that people have said in our Meetup Group. It's a great way for people to meet people, and they got some excellent tips. In fact, the first person on there, the quote from Giselle, she's actually presenting at our February event. So we have a lot of people who attend our events who are always interested in presenting what they're working on. So we always start the meeting with, you know, if you have ideas for future meetings, please come and talk to us after the meeting. And we have them speak at future meetings. And then, as you can see, Baird said he was a very great, you know, in terms of like good content, networking, smart attendees, thoughtful host. So as you can see, it's just been a wonderful way for us to kind of share our knowledge to learn from each other and to network. And then finally, this is just my personal information if you want to follow up with me by email or by Twitter. And I also have the link that you'll get in the follow up presentation to our Meetup group so you can see some of the topics that we've been covering in the past. So everything from online fundraising to marketing to IT. So we cover a wide range of topics. And the topics we select are really based on what people are interested in talking about. Thank you very much. Thank you for that, Roshni. And I'm excited to see on the back end that we have one person that already said they went ahead and submitted an application for helping support a NetSquared group. So we want to ask, and you don't have to feel obligated to answer this, we just want to get an idea of whether you might be interested in helping support a NetSquared group in your community. And I apologize for my typo. I see that I have an errant letter on that. I'm usually really good about that. So feel free to chime in. If you might be interested, we promise we won't spam you a bunch, but Eli may reach out to you. And we'd like to then also point you to the next step which would be going to netsquared.org that we did chat out. And Eli showed on screen checking first to see if there might be an existing group in your area that you can already connect with. That doesn't mean that you can't be an organizer or can't support it because many of these groups have multiple supporters and organizers that help coordinate the events. Folks that can help find the space for the monthly gatherings, whether it be at your local library or local business association that may give you space or provide you resources to use. So I'm going to just close this out in just a second. I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to vote and show the results. We've got 50-50. That's not shocking, but that's actually pretty great that even half of you are interested in helping support a NetSquared group. And I'm just going to show that screen once again where you can check, Eli chatted out the link, where you can check where in the US and where around the world there may be a group that you can already connect with. Somebody mentioned that there in San Francisco we have a group that meets here at TechSoup's headquarters. We actually have a couple of groups that meet at TechSoup's headquarters each month for different types of tech meetups. So with that I'm going to talk a bit about different types. This is going to be kind of a quick road show of resources for this next chunk of time that I'll be presenting. And so I'm going to talk about a couple of different levels of resources from real paid consultants and paid IT managed IT services and resources for accessing those to pro bono grant programs and foundation supported programs, volunteer supported programs that are free as well as some other types of meetups that I'll share links to later on in the program. And we know what happens with the accidental tech you when you get in over your head and you're feeling this overwhelm, you're feeling, oh my gosh, I think I've broken something. I don't know what I'm doing or I've gotten a little in over my head, or I don't even want to touch that because I just know I don't have the ability to follow it through. So this is a look at kind of the different ways that many organizations, the different levels of technology expertise that people can access at many nonprofits where you may have in-house staff and accidental techies that knows a little bit but then they're kind of asked by their peers to fix issues. They're mostly reacting to, there's something broken, how do I fix it? Or we have this problem, how do I solve it? I don't know necessarily what to do. We've talked a bit about that. You may have in-house IT staff where you have a staff person that's in charge, but they may be kind of doing it all on their own. They may not be on site. We had somebody in the chat talking about how they have an off-site staff of IT folks that really hold tight reigns on what they can do at their local branch of their library and that's sort of limiting to what they can do. You may support and have an IT contractor that maybe you have a person that you can call up and you can pay them $100 an hour to give you advice or help you fix a problem by coming in or coming in remotely. You may have a firm that has a whole staff of IT people that can come and you pay for a bucket of hours that you draw down over a certain amount of time. So maybe per month you have 6 hours of tech support that you get from them. Maybe you have a certain amount per year. Or you may have managed IT services where especially if you have cloud services that you're using like Office 365 or Google Apps like the Google suite, you may have the ability to have a lot of this managed off-site. If you don't have an on-site server or a network that you need to manage, managed IT services becomes much easier. So I'm going to talk about one managed IT service thing just to give you an idea of what kind of relationship you can expect from a managed IT service because we want people to not get into these kinds of relationships if it's not really the best suited thing for their needs. So with a managed IT support service of any kind, you want them to be maintaining your PC server and network. So these are the kinds of things you should expect that person to do. And I'm not going to read through all of this. You also want a managed IT service person or contract to include your strategic IT planning. I was talking with somebody on the back side in the chat window about how they are stuck with a website that they've had for 10 years that was built on a proprietary customized platform and they don't know what to do to get off of it. They really need some advice. And a managed IT partnership really is somebody that can work with you on the bigger strategic questions. What do you want this to accomplish? How long are you looking at changing this out? How frequently do you need to be updating your computers? Are you getting new staff or volunteers that are going to need new machines? And how do you budget for those types of things? They are there to really help you review what you are using now. Do you need a new database? Do you want to be using Salesforce? Do you want to be using a different CRM? How's your email management? They are looking at all of these questions and working with you to really come up with what's best. I talk about this because I want to highlight a program that we've recently made available here at TechSoup called IT Assist. And this is a managed IT program and it is delivered through TechSoup by another nonprofit called Tech Impact. And we are a nonprofit as well. And it only is available to nonprofits and public libraries. So if you're joining us from a different type of organization, it's not available to you. And we include churches in our definition of nonprofits here at TechSoup, they are 501c3. They can provide support virtually, but they can also have somebody come into your office no matter where you are. They have relationships with vendors all around the country that can come in and make sure things are plugged in right and jiggle the handle and look under the hood if they need to. But a lot of the support is provided virtually up front and over the phone. They can work with your IT staff or with accidental techies and they really specialize in communicating with the nonprofit and library sector. That's who they are. That's where they come from that they are from a nonprofit and they serve nonprofits. And they would have regular meetings to check in on your technology planning, help you make those decisions around your hardware and software purchases or cloud purchases and help you with budgeting. All of this so implies that it's not free. It isn't. It is hugely discounted but it is still something that you have to have a budget for. So I wanted to call that out because it is not a free program. But the way to find out more about it is to go to this page, techsoup.org slash it-assist. And you can fill out a really quick questionnaire and somebody contacts you to talk about whether it's actually a good fit for you. This isn't something we want to sell people into by any stretch of the imagination as we're a nonprofit and they are too. We really want to only provide this to the organizations that could benefit from it. And so they would have a call with you to talk about whether this would be a good fit for your organization's needs. Maybe you don't need that. Maybe you can get by with a couple of hours of consulting as needed. Maybe you could replace out an IT staff person with something like this and it would cost you less than that. Or if you have the headcount and haven't been able to find the right person, this could be a good fill. So this is a good opportunity to check out. If you're super duper small and don't have a budget at all for technology support, this may be a waste of your time. So I'm just putting that out there. I don't want to have people putting time into it if it's not something that would be the best fit for them. But this is kind of the structure that they help bring down the cost of managing your IT through migrating your servers to offsite services like Cloud and VoIP solutions. But if that's not the direction you want to go and you do have budget, then also may not be the best choice for you. But I wanted to talk about it because it is an option to get you tech support no matter where you are. This is based for organizations in North America. So if you're joining us from outside of Canada, US, and I think even Mexico, this is not available to you, at least not yet. And so now I want to shift gears to talk about other types of nonprofit-focused tech consulting orgs. These are also not free, but these are organizations that, and these are just a handful. I'm sure there are many others. These are just ones I included here. I mentioned Tech Impact and that they are a nonprofit consulting firm. They are actually a nonprofit as well. So is TechBridge. And so is I think Community IT Innovators is a nonprofit and a cooperative. Roshini would know best because she used to work there. So maybe she can chime in in the chat. Aspiration here in San Francisco is a similar type of nonprofit and 501 Commons in Seattle. I just called these few out, but there are organizations that specialize in bringing tech expertise to nonprofits, and they are nonprofits as well. So I don't have a comprehensive list of where they all are, but these are just a few I wanted to highlight. Some of these provide services no matter where you are. So Tech Impact, TechBridge, these ones can help you no matter where you are in the US. And I think they even, I know Tech Impact supports Canada too. I don't know about TechBridge. But you may find that there are organizations that can provide quick consulting to you, that can provide you with, and maybe you just need a conversation for an hour to help you work out what you really need. And these are the types of orgs that can help with that even if you don't have an ongoing relationship. Some of these offer, oh, so Roshini chimed in in the chat that Community IT Innovators is an employee owned company in DC. Thank you for clearing that up. I knew it was some type of employee centered cooperative type group. So I wanted to highlight a couple of the different options for less expensive consulting through some of these partners. So Tech Impact, if you're looking at specific types of services like SharePoint or Office 365, or if you're considering switching to a voice over IP phone system instead of the plain old telephone system through AT&T or something, they have a variety of workshops available if you want to do these things yourself. I don't have the full list on screen. I just took a quick screenshot of some of their offers but they also have just, hey, if you want to just have a 45 minute consult or an hour long consult with somebody just to get that idea of, hey, we need this website. We're trapped into this proprietary platform that's not working for us. We just need some advice. Here are the biggest needs we've identified. What do you think we should do? They offer, I think it's a $45 rate that they offer which is less than half than what the standard is. I think most tech consulting firms are charging around $100 an hour for their services. So for $45 through this program that they have with us, you can do that sort of consulting. And they do it on a variety of different pre-determined issues that we know people ask about a lot but also just a general tech consult. TechBridge offers something similar where they will help you assess for $15. They'll do a consultation with you around whether your data is really well suited to be used on Salesforce. So maybe you're looking for a way to contact or keep your constituents, your members, your contacts, your vendors, your donors. Maybe you're looking at Salesforce to potentially manage that. They would help you for $15. They would help you determine whether it makes sense for you to do that. They don't actually help you set it up but they can connect you with the people who can if you decide you can't do it yourself. They also have a VoIP service. So these are just a couple of options that are available. And so there is a section on our site that talks about consultants. It talks about working with them and managing them and lots of good resources and tips on how to do that effectively as well as having links to these different options available to you of deeper discounted rates from nonprofit consultants who are nonprofits. I saw a question in the chat really quickly just asking if churches are required to have 501c3. Churches generally all are kind of granted, grandfathered, sort of 501c3 status within the IRS. But you do technically need to have it. If you don't have a piece of paper from the IRS that says that you're a C3, you can often just contact our customer service at TechSoup.org and they can verify and validate you as a legitimate organization and get that fixed for you. So for organizations who are joining us who may want to access this, if you're not sure whether you would qualify or be eligible, definitely reach out to our customer service team. Now a few other resources that I'll share before we open up the Q&A, Tech Volunteers and Grants Supported Expertise. So what I just talked about, there were fees for that. These things are free. And by free, I mean free as in cats. We say that saying because kittens are great but they are not always easy. They do take some work. There may be some cost of ownership in maintaining the kitten. And in this case, these relationships can offer you free tech expertise. Some of them are from Pro Bono Services like the Taproot Foundation where they can help pair you with skilled volunteers for either done in a day, is what they call it, like one day barn raising type activities for your technology. They can connect you with short term projects. Maybe you need a new website. Maybe you need dot sales force development done, and you would need a tech expert to help you do that. So you submit projects for your organization to the Taproot Plus platform. Maybe you need a short digital story, a video created for your organization. You can submit that to their platform and apply, and then they will try to pair you with a volunteer. And if they can't, sometimes they'll fund somebody to do it for you. They'll grant you some funds to complete the project. They are specific projects. So this isn't like ongoing for the rest of your life as an organization. You'd have your tech expert buddy in your pocket. This would be to manage a specific project that you define, and you estimate the time. So here's just a screenshot from their site. A group in New York, a group in Atlanta. This one was in Detroit. They're looking, or I guess they're in Lansing, but they've had Detroit on here someplace. They're estimating this would take six weeks' worth of work with 30 hours total. So these are projects that would be a few hours a week, somebody helping you accomplish a specific goal with your technology. So a great resource to apply to. Another one that's very similar to that, oops, I mixed my slides up here, sorry. Another one that's very similar to that is Empower, which some of you may have been familiar with Empower locations around the US a decade ago. They were providing kind of a day-to-day network admin and tech support in I think 12 or 13 cities around the country. Well, they have since changed a bit. Some of those have branched off into their own independent organizations doing that. But the primary Empower now operates a program called Community Core. And it's open to C3 nonprofits in North America where similar to Taproot you can post your tech projects, whether it's websites, CRM network admin. If you want to learn how to use Office Better, you need somebody on your team to really become an Excel wizard. Any of these different topics, you can submit that to their website as a project. They will help promote those projects to their community of skilled volunteers. And they also have skilled volunteers, and they also have a program intended to train young people from lower income communities in technologies. So they are also training people through their programs on the other side. And so you can get placed with a volunteer or somebody that's gone through their training courses to help you with that project, and it is also free. So you can apply at thecommunitycore.org and learn more about their programs slash nonprofits. I am going to go back. One slide here just to talk about employee product donation programs. It's a mouthful, EPDPs. But EPDPs are when corporate partners, any kind of corporation has either a product or a staff and they have philanthropic goals of helping the civil sector or nonprofit sector. Sometimes their product is available to be donated and their employees get to pick. So if I'm Jane and I work at Cisco, which is the example I have on screen, and I work in the Carmel, Indiana office, I as an employee of Cisco can donate a certain amount of those Cisco products to whatever nonprofit or cause I want to that year. And Cisco in particular, the reason I use this example is that they have granted more than $5.4 million in Cisco products in just the last couple of years from these local offices where they have staff around the country. So if you're located anywhere near these, you can reach out to the Cisco office and say, hey, is there any employee on your staff that would like to give us some routers for our internet or maybe a firewall or a switch or any of the Cisco products that are available, which there are many. You may not know a lot of them, but if you did a little bit of looking, they make a lot of technology hardware in particular. And you can say can they come and help hook it up and help us increase our broadband in our library or in our organization or maybe help us set up some of the computers that we provide to our senior center or our domestic violence shelter or whatever it might be. So there are programs like this in many, many, many corporations, local corporations, big ones, little ones. So this is just a call to you to not let the opportunity pass by. If you know somebody who works for Intuit, if you know somebody who works for Symantec or Yahoo or Amazon or any of the other littler corporations in your communities that manage technology, reach out and ask because a lot of times they empower their employees to gift their skills in volunteer time and they empower them to gift their products to nonprofits and causes they care about. If you want to learn about the Cisco program in particular, we can help connect you to accessing the volunteers and employee giving in these cities. So you can reach out to them directly. And we have one example here that we blogged about that it's an interesting heartwarming story about disabled kids and fine arts and dancing and how they were supported by this program. So we are getting close to time so I'm going to wrap up with just a couple of other resources. I know Eli showed the big map of where you can find NetSquared locations around the world and existing chapters. I also wanted to highlight that N10, the nonprofit technology network that many of us are familiar with, have nonprofit tech clubs. And I know Roshini mentioned some of those are combined as Tech for Good, so NetSquared and N10 tech clubs have combined into one but there are lots that are not. So I would recommend checking if there's not a NetSquared meetup near you, check out nonprofit tech clubs, see if there's one in a city near you that you can join or further support. I mean it's like starting a book club. You just say, hey, we're interested in this. You can go directly to sites like meetup.com if you're not familiar with that. I've been using Meetup for, it feels like forever, but I was surprised when talking to a friend the other day that they had never used Meetup before in the Detroit area. And they were shocked at how many Meetups there were that they were totally interested in both professionally and personally. And so I would recommend go to Meetup and search. You can search in different topics. Tech is one of those topic areas. You can just see what's already happening in your area of different Meetups. They're generally free to attend unless there's a specific fee-based event happening. But you can show up, talk about data for good, talk about helping kids learn how to code, talk about your own tech needs, talk about how other libraries are working on technology in your community. Lots of different Meetups out there that are happening every day. These links are not clickable on screen, but you will be able to click them from the slides. The map that you see on this screenshot right here is a map of the states that have state or local nonprofit associations. And often your state nonprofit association, even if you're not a paying member of it, often has resources they can point you to for local tech experts in your state, in your region, in your city. So many of these are very active. And a lot of them also provide their own set of resources for tech Meetups and tech events in the state or local area. I linked also to DataKind chapters. So for those of you who maybe manage a lot of data and would like to see something effective done with that data, there are data scientists all over the world that are excited to take your data and turn it into an awesome visual to show what the communities are that you serve, or to show the environmental impact of a problem you might be working on, or to show how many animals in your area need to be adopted, or how many children you're serving through your public library, early reading programs. So there's great groups out there that are doing amazing work that you can connect with. You can also search these more traditional places to find people who are looking to volunteer, looking to do good work, post on Idealist, post on Volunteer Match, Craigslist, in our TechSoup forums, in N10s community forums, and even finding services like TaskRabbit. For those of you who may not be familiar, you can say, you go to IKEA, you've got a bookshelf you need to build, you can post on TaskRabbit. I need somebody to assemble my bookshelf, and they'll come out and do it. And it's the same thing with technology. You can say, gee, I have no idea how to hook up this Wi-Fi router. You can post it to TaskRabbit, and you can have somebody come out, and it'll cost like $30, and they'll come out and do it the same day. And these are just regular people that are looking to do these things. TaskRabbit is not free. Generally, there is a fee with that, but it's a great way just to reach other people who may be doing things that you need help with. One other thing I'll mention before we open up to Q&A is we know a lot of local colleges, universities, even high schools have computer science or technology programs, vocational schools do it too, and that you can often partner with them. If you find a professor, chat with them and say, hey, we've got this project, and I would love it if you have a group of students that might be interested in helping with it. And we've seen a lot of really successful stories of university programs or college programs connecting with a nonprofit sort of adopting them to say, okay, we'll make your promotional video in our AV club, or we will come and help you build your website, and we'll get to use it as part of our professional portfolio, and we'll do it for free. So don't pass up those opportunities to reach out to the resources in your community. The worst they can say is no, but they just might say yes. So it's definitely worth checking it out. So with that, I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to take some of these questions that are in the chat. Let's see, we've got Michelle reminding us, which I think is great. Thank you for doing this, that any place if you're holding events to try to be conscientious of those in your community who may have different abilities and may need different accessibility resources, try to keep those events open and accessible, whether you're having it at a library or an office space that you're making sure that people can actually get into it. You're asking your attendees if they need captioning or translation services and trying to provide that. And you can often find volunteers who are willing to do that. We had for a long time a transcriptionist who transcribed our webinars for us for free for years, and she was fantastic. Now we pay for it just because we didn't want to abuse her wonderful generosity. So let's see, what else do we have here? I'd like to ask Eli. Michael had a question around their in-house website being proprietary. And I know Roshini, you've talked a little bit behind the scenes with Michael, and so have I. What would you recommend? Would you recommend that Michael takes an RFP, which is that document where you list out your requirements for a project and request proposals from people and maybe connect with a NET squared group to try and pass that around? What would you think would be a good place for him to start on figuring out what to do with their website situation? Yeah, so hi, this is Eli in Vancouver. So my first recommendation is to do what you've probably already done, which is really to start talking with your peers and getting some recommendations on what they think is a good path for you to go. But then before you get to the RFP level, I would suggest you consult with someone who can just sort of help walk you through what your core needs and functionality are. And for that, I would recommend you take a look at the Community Core, which connects you with three volunteers online who will basically connect with you for a multi-week project to do something like walk through what your future website needs are, and then from there, start going through the RFP process. Terrific. That's helpful. And we've had a couple of other questions on the back end, and we are almost out of time, but I'm going to just field a couple while I raise up this other screen asking that you chat in one thing that you learned today that you'll try to implement while I answer another question here. We had a question asking about Amazon Web Services. Paul, you asked about this, and if there were any sources of help for that. I didn't include in here that there are user groups for many of the bigger technology platforms. Many of them, like Google has user groups for Salesforce and just about every CRM and Amazon Web Services has Google groups and user groups too. I would recommend trying to connect with those user groups, but Amazon Web Services is pretty massive. It's a big heavy lift. So I would recommend that you talk to somebody who is a pro that specializes in it, at least to get a consult about what you need if it's new to you, because it is huge. It is massive. So that's not to scare you away from using it. We use it here at TechSoup, but it has like 100 different things it can do. So I wouldn't want you to go with a volunteer that maybe doesn't know what they're doing up front. I would recommend checking those user groups and getting a referral to somebody who specializes in it. Talk to them for an initial consult and then go from there. Let's see, Michelle gave a great reminder that many independent living centers and communities can tell you where to find accessible spaces in your community for any events you might host or help organize. So that's a great tip. And Kathy had a question about liability insurance. And I think also offered a good tip about not hosting events in your own home because of potential accessibility issues or allergies and the risk that it poses to you as the homeowner. So around liability insurance, I don't know Eli, if you have any tips on that, but I feel like if it's happening at a public place like a happy hour type event, I don't think you need that. But you would know better than I would. What do you think about liability insurance? Is that required if you're hosting events? So great question. So the answer to that is in most cases if you're not serving alcohol then typically the venue that is acting as your host will also basically include you within the liability insurance. Your venue may sometimes need you to name them within the insurance which can be a bit of a pain. And so in which case I'd say like maybe it's time to explore another venue because NetSquid's model is around keeping things light and easy. But the default answer is you're almost always covered as a user of the venue. That's great. And I think Michelle who is a lawyer in our chatroom gave some really sound advice here too. When in doubt have people sign a simple waiver. Amen. Protect yourself. And I think you're right though Eli that in general you'd be included. And Michael also gave that good tip that you can also find many free spaces to use from your public libraries because we know that they are often available to communities to use the space for community driven events. I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up. I'm sorry we're a couple minutes over time so I'm going to close this out at this point. But thank you so much Roshini and thank you Eli for spending time on this. One other resource that I want to point you to is that we have now in the past few months launched our learning management system platform. We have a small catalog of courses but that's ever expanding where you can come in and access courses on tech planning, tech training, Adobe Photoshop basics, Adobe InDesign basics, and we're adding courses all the time. So feel free to visit that if you'd like to take some online courses. A variety of them are free and some have small fees associated. But check those out and also join us for our upcoming webinars. Next week we have two, one on getting to know GrantStation, a database where you can search for funders of all types. And then we'll have one on grant writing 101, getting those basics. And then we'll talk about how TechSoup can help museums and historical societies later, I guess at the beginning of February. And then we'll talk specifically to libraries about how they can empower their staff to help manage basic tech and learn basic tech skills. So thank you everyone for joining us today. Really appreciate you being with us. Thank you to Ally and Karol for helping on the back end and for Eli and Roshini for your great presentations. Lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of today's platform. Please take a moment to complete the post-event survey that pops up when you exit. We really do read all of your feedback and use it to help improve our programming. Thank you all. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye.