 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is Tammy Griffith and today's presentation is creating a successful computer refurbishing program. We've got Pat Furr from Computers for Classrooms and Bruce Bucklew from OTX West. I'd like to introduce both of them and welcome them and thank them for putting together such a great presentation. So Pat can tell us a little bit about what you do for computers for classrooms. Thank you Tammy. I started the program 19 years ago by realizing that we needed more computers in classrooms. They were very few and so I decided to start the program at my house. So what we're hoping today is to give you an overview of the things we've learned in the last 19 years so that you'll be able to learn from that experience and your pathway will be followed more easily than pointing out to Bruce Bucklew. Great. Thanks Pat and Bruce. Can you tell us about your work at OTX West? Yeah, my name is Bruce Bucklew. I'm the founder and director of OTX West. We focus just on the city of Oakland and our mission really is to end a digital divide in Oakland. We provide free computers to Oakland high school and middle school students in Oakland and we provide computers to schools and nonprofits for refurbishing fees. I've been doing this about 19 years as well. We became officially an organization and nonprofit in 1995 and like Pat, a lot of missteps we hope we can keep you from making. Great. Thank you so much and together the two of these folks have more than 35 years of experience. So we're really lucky to have both of them on the call and so much great information. We have a packed agenda. We're going to go through these questions rather quickly so that we have enough time at the end for Q&A. So we're going to start out by talking about why you'd want to start a program, how to get started, or you can find funding some special regulations that you might not know about. How do you manage on a small budget thinking about removing the data? I want you to know there. How do you receive the hardware donations as well as software donations? And what you can think about for tax support, tracking information, and promotion. So I'd like to get started by asking Pat, why would someone want to start a reuse program? Well, there's a tremendous amount of electronics going out at millions of pounds and in the past we were like thrown in a landfill. So we see this as a valuable resource and we know our schools have a tremendous shortage. We have, again, a huge population in the United States that do not own computers or have access to the Internet. So what you need to do is really decide what you want to focus on. The more narrow the focus if you're just getting started, the easier way you can put your program together. Are you going to be doing job training? Or are you going to have employment opportunities? Be able to hire people? What about the environment? What about all those millions of pounds we're keeping out of the landfill or that seems trash? Many people think recycling first and they don't think of reusing it. We have a tremendous amount of equipment we can put to use and what we want to do is show you how you can do it on a low budget and do it more easily. Bruce, did you have anything you wanted to add? Two quick things. One is you might want to check to see if there's already a reuse program in your neighborhood or in your community that you could volunteer for, learn from them, and then make a decision whether you really want to start a separate one. If there isn't, we started our program just in a high school with the idea of getting computers to graduating seniors. So again, be as specific as you can in your mission and start with a target. And just as a transition slide, be as specific as possible. Right. Be as specific as you can be and start small. And what questions, Bruce, need to be answered before you get started? Well, I started with that. But a good thing I think to do is to identify very specific recipients before you start, particularly before you start collecting anything. We started our program in a high school because it had some donated space that I could use so I could start it with basically with no cost. So I became a high school volunteer. I took over a classroom and started working with kids to gather some computers and started very specifically to get computers to graduating seniors, then to put computers in the classrooms in that one school. And at that point you've got to watch what you wish for because the demand is really there and it will grow. I think there's a big thing right at the beginning too to say, are you going to be the technician or do you have a technician partner? Can you do everything that you've committed to do? And another big thing is my suggestion is pick either Macs or PCs. Pat and I both do PCs because they're much easier to work on. There is a MAR program that makes your software legal and it's an industry, not a company. Just for some people who may not know what MAR is? MAR is the Microsoft Authorizer Fervishing Program. The great thing about MAR is that it allows you to legalize every Windows license that you install on a computer. We still think we have a better computer than they have in the store because the MAR program provides us with Windows XP Pro which is still the most used operating system in the industry. We're a PC only refurbisher. Pat, do you have anything that you wanted to add to this slide? Sure. Well, my background going in is I've been a teacher of an electric PC. I've had business experience and I actually went back to get a master's in computer science. But even with all that I didn't know the hardware part of actually getting these going. So I asked for help. I had other technicians come in and teach me. And I started in my house so it was free for the program and then moved it to my barn until the floods came. And then I asked friends and associates for donated space. And in times like this there's a lot of donated commercial space sitting vacant. So it's actually a good time to get started. You just need to talk to a lot of people to get it. Actually we do some Macs as we've grown along. I was getting Macs and so I didn't know what to do with them so I went to the local Apple Mac Club and said, gee, I hate to throw these away. But you don't want to start when you're starting. You don't want to start taking in things that you cannot place or you don't know where they're going. So we can't emphasize that enough. These things grow and have a way of multiplying and spare room. So don't get started unless you know what you're going to do with it and know where it's going to end up. One final thing too on these slides is you can be focusing on refurbishing a computer but from the beginning you should really think are you going to provide training for the recipient and once they get the computer if they have problems are you going to provide technical support? Really good. And then we'll be talking a bit more about tech support a little bit later on in the presentation. I also wanted to ask Pat, how do we get these types of programs funded? Okay, Bruce and I have different methods of funding so that's why I think in our focus of our programs is somewhat different. I started in the early years to have local support by various programs but it got larger and had to form a nonprofit and actually hire staff. We did go ahead and form a nonprofit but we operate on a cost recovery basis which is a great way for you to get started. Bruce and I both have fees that we charge for our computers and that's what we use to stay in business. Our computer prices actually go from $90 up to $280 for a loaded laptop with lots of Swiss things on it but we do sell to low income families $90 to $135 for a Pentium 4 guarantee and that is enough to cover our expenses. So you need to figure out even if you're starting up small and you're going to do 10 computers if you could sell them for $100 to $135 each that gives you some fees money to go ahead and help with your expense. And Bruce, did you want to add something? Yeah, we determined that we wanted to have pre-computers for a certain population and then for the social enterprise and charge organizations for other computers. So our schools and nonprofits get our best computers at what you see $100 to $250 and we also write a lot of grants. So Pat does a complete recovery on her product and we're right now about 60-40 grants moving hopefully toward 75% income, 25% grants. Also when I started I didn't have any funding. I just did it myself. I got donated space, volunteers, and students. And for the first three or four years I didn't have any money. I just did what I could do. The other thing was instead of even thinking about starting a nonprofit look to become a fiscal agent relationship with an existing nonprofit or a church or somebody else where you can raise money but you don't have to do all the paperwork of starting a nonprofit. And one question came through. Someone's asking you where do you apply for grants? What does OGX West get their grants from? OGX West does have a nice three-year grant from CETF that we're in just about to start the third year of which is causing me some consternation. We also have applied to Zero Divide but haven't gotten grants from them. Local foundations, small foundations, we get a lot of donor directed just of philanthropists that have found us and like what we're doing and fund us on a regular basis. Stop Waste is our local waste management organization. They have very specific reuse grants. They're not very big but they're very straightforward to get that's in California at least in the Bay Area. So I think quite often there's a small grant possibilities through waste management where they recognize the value of reuse. I just search too. I search and search and search. I also wanted to let folks know this I didn't mention at the beginning of the presentation a couple of things. There's a couple of refurbisher guides that were created by Pat and Bruce and we have those on our website. I sent a link to it in the reminder email this morning as well as we have this streaming live into Second Life and there's an audio stream online as well. So if anyone is out there and looking at tweet chat you can see an aggregation of tweets and this happening in Second Life. And I also wanted to let Pat know that I muted her because of the noise of her phone. So Pat if you wouldn't mind unmuting your line and if you had anything else that you wanted to add to the slide before we moved on. Pat, we can't hear you. Here we go. Can you say something, Kat? Can you hear me now? Okay. Yes, great. Thank you. Sorry about that. So any last things about funding? I just wanted to say I wasn't very good at writing grants and getting money. So we have a larger area that we're servicing. We actually service all of California and we've also bond to some foreign countries on a limited basis such as laptops for Haiti and we just sent some to Tanzania and so forth. So we have a slightly different operation than Bruce does because we have a larger geographical area and we're handling very large quantities here at our 25,000 square foot warehouse. Let's talk about some of those special regulations that people should know about. Bruce, can you start a box? I can start but I think Pat's actually better on this than I am. You know, you do need to know the rules and regulations of whatever. Usually there's state rules and local rules about handling hazardous materials. Monitors are considered hazmat. Once you open up a computer the electronics inside can be considered hazmat. But the big thing is to just find out what your local rules are and follow those. Batteries can be a problem. Definitely monitor glass is a big problem. In the state of California there's the state passed a Senate bill that funded the correct recycling of monitors. So there is a stream that you can flow into to make sure that your monitors don't end up in a bad place. There are certified recyclers that handle monitors correctly. All monitors are the same as TVs that have lead in the glass and that's hazardous material. Pat, what do you got? Okay, through the EPA or DTSC Department of Toxic Substance Control the regulations are very strict. If you are here in our area you need to check where your area is. But if you collect over six monitors you are required to file for prior authorization to start collecting them and you're immediately put on the lines or have to fill out paperwork and meet certain handling restrictions. If you collect over 200 pounds of e-waste computers you would need to do this. As your program gets larger you may want to part out systems and you would be able to sell the scraps. You're looking on this slide here this isn't from us but from our recyclers where they collected the copper yokes around monitors and they sell for 40 cents a pound. So as you get larger you are able to go into this area but I can't impress enough upon you the importance of knowing what the laws are. For instance you can't save monitors for over a year under our regulations. So you can go to your local waste management company find a recycler in your area and before you collect anything know what you're getting into. Very good. And Bruce did you have any last things before we move on to the next slide? Pat always says make sure you know where the stuff that doesn't work is going to go before you collect it. If you have a small room that you're starting in you'll fill it pretty quick with stuff that people will be happy to give you but it's not going to have any real value so you're going to have to handle it and get rid of it. So don't worry about saying no at the beginning of things that just become hazardous material for you. Now where are some other things to think about before getting started? Pat can you start us off? Well I think we went through this pretty well and in fact we just talked about that quite a bit on the last slide. There is so much out there. When people find out you're taking in things for a good cause if they want to give you more and more and so you just be really careful. Bruce do you have anything you'd like to add? No. Okay well the topic that a lot of you I'm sure are curious about is how can I do this on a small budget? So Bruce can you get us started talking about volunteers? Yeah volunteers come in all forms and as anybody that's managed volunteers no volunteers can both be a great asset and they can be a lot of work to manage them. Our evolution has been when we started in high school all of our workers were kids, high school kids. That was great because they were getting great experience. I was being able to do a little mentoring of high school kids and it really worked well. As we were found out the second group I think besides students is seniors and out of work technicians that there seem to be a lot of that want to do something productive and want something to put on the resume as well. We ran into a little bit of a problem as we grew when we got larger. We have a professional now that loves the software and make sure that everything is finally ready because we found that person was redoing what volunteers were doing. We have a really active volunteer program where people can earn computers which has been very successful. Mostly what our volunteers do in our organization now is they clean everything to a fairly well so that everything that goes out has been scrubbed and scrubbed and cleaned and looks like new. If there's an A plus class we partner with an organization that does A plus training so that while they're in A plus training they come here and they do various things. Either technical or they'll get a specific job like a great job for a volunteer if you can find one that's got a lot of time is to deal with all the printer issues that you get. Not enough time to go into it here but printers are an issue. People get into you and you have to decide whether to take them, whether to scrap them, or whether to try to refurb them. The same with scanners that we find and quite often a volunteer will be very good at taking a very specific task and doing that. There's a lot more in our manual than I'm sure in Pat's too. Pat? Pat? Yeah. We have a different philosophy I think than Bruce does in that we have a good side part of our program devoted to our volunteers. Again we let them earn a free computer after spending so many hours here and we have a volunteer coordinator that supervises them. So our volunteers do our initial triage work with the computer donations. They first of all remove the hard drives after we teach them where they are and then they boot up the computer checking to make sure the power and all the other things that you have to do in triaging your computers. We decide which ones we're going to keep, which ones are working, but probably not going to be worth our time, and which ones don't work that we take apart. But our volunteers learn a lot by doing this. We don't have them cleaning computers generally other than some of the disabled folks or some of those with developmental disabilities are perfectly happy cleaning mice and keyboards so they can earn computers. The photo as you see there, the gal on the upper right, her name is Lauren and she's blind and brings her guide dog. Lauren isn't with us after we moved to our newer warehouse because there's no transportation for her. But she wanted to be a volunteer to help us so she answered our phone and then after a while we didn't get many calls in those days. So she learned how to part out computers and learned how the torques and the various ways of doing it. And so she said we turned her from a receptionist into a stripper, but she has fun telling that story especially when we're out in public at some point. But Art at the bottom is any baby. He was at Pearl Harbor during World War II and both Art and Ron in the middle have been with me well over 10 years and they're volunteers. I do give them raises. I give them percentage raises and they've been very happy. We also do a lot with college classes and getting them to come in and some of them get course credits for spending a certain amount of time. But they're learning to give back. They're learning to volunteer. And when I was in computer science I would have loved to have had the hands-on training that we were able to give our volunteers. That's really great. Thank you both. I'm going to move on to the next question which is what are the key things to know when removing data? And I'd like to have Pat get started. Right. Number one, you have to have a secure facility. Someone shouldn't be able to break in and steal a computer out of your facility wherever it is. You need to think if you're going to give your computer to someone what do you want to have happen with the information on that hard drive? You're not able to generally do it at home. You can't just erase it and have it disappear. That's like taking the index out of a book. All the information is still there but those with the proper tools can get it back. So you need to have a secure place. You have to wet the drives completely. Now we're not able in the time of this webinar to get into it but Bruce and I talk about it extensively. We both have manuals and there are some Microsoft PowerPoints and it will step by step take you through it. We use software programs to wipe the drives. We have various machines. We've invented to wipe them if they're too small or they have bad sectors on them. We destroy the hard drives. It's very important. Now as you can see from the photo, if you're starting now, a drill press is a good thing to go. If you have a holder for the hard drive it does put out a lot of metal shavings so you have to have the proper eyewear goggles and the ability to back them up so you don't contaminate your environment. We're larger now so we put out about $7,000 for a decouser and it's a machine we drop the hard drive in and it's able to wipe it completely. We also do this for hospitals that want to send a hard drive in for warranty repair. We're able to decouse it so that no information is getting out. But this is very, very important. You do not want to have any information getting off the hard drives. You don't want to look at what's on the hard drive because we've received some that were evidenced in a pornography case and believe me, we don't want to look at anything on that hard drive. It would actually ruin your program. Bruce, do you have anything to add? We're a little bit different in that when we get calls from the public because we both do large pickups from organizations and we take public computers. When public computers and people call in, we often will tell them how to download a wipe program so that they can feel assured that they've wiped it before they've given it to us. We can have a conversation about that's much better than removing the hard drive. People that are worried will remove it and that decreases its value for us. With large organizations, our experience is there's two kinds. The kind that are required by internal policies or law to completely wipe the hard drives on their own premises before they give them to us and those that want us to wipe. Those that want us to wipe, we follow the same procedures that Pat does. Those that have already wiped them and can certify that when they give them to us, we don't rewipe them. Can I add something there, please? Of course. I went to an agency, I won't name it, and they said, oh, we wiped the hard drives. And I said, oh, how did you? She said, well, we have this wand. It's a de-gousing wand. And she showed me how she waved it over the top of the computer. Well, I mean, that's like a wishing stick. I mean, I wish it's done. So I told her later that she had not wiped the hard drive, in fact. But we just assumed that none of them had been wiped. We wipe them all. We don't want to take any chance of anything happening. And I think some of our larger donors appreciate that because you know, you just absolutely want to be sure everything is taken care of. I agree with that. I'm just a little lazier than she is. I want to move on to talking about a topic that several people have asked questions. And can you share ways that you receive the hardware donations? How do we get them? Yes. You know, for us, it's been very interesting that once we got a little article in a local newspaper, it started to pass around. We get in the newspaper once a quarter maybe with some story, some little story, and it gets picked up and people call us. I find that the best, and there was a question on the site, absolutely the best is whenever you can get a donation from a large corporation where everything is the same. That's the best. People saw, for instance, before they were bought by Oracle, gave us about 5,000 computers. And the good rate was about 95%. Another really good one is any local government agency, whether it's county, city, state, or federal that are in your area. The fed seemed to replace perfectly good computers with new computers just because they have such a long replacement planning cycle. The same with county and state. I think those are great places to start. The hardest are individuals because every computer is different and they're harder to work on. But on the other hand, you often get really good computers that people want to get rid of just because they've got a virus on them and they bought something new. So you don't want to turn down individuals. The best thing is an organization that will give you 100 computers, 50 computers that are all the same. We take them all. We've developed a method of using a Microsoft program called System and using a Linux server. And again, this is stuff we don't need to get into right now. But we've found a way of taking all kinds of computers and loading them fairly quickly. Earlier, a slide showed some benches there and we're able to load like 31 computers at a time. Again, you can look at our slides and manuals and find out or write to us. We'll tell you how to do it. But right now, this year we're giving out 1,100 free computers to middle school students as part of a UC research project through UC Santa Cruz. Well, those are the kinds of computers that for schools they want matching computers, small footprints that all look alike. But our public donations, they may be all different kinds. But to support free projects, they're tremendous. There's a good question on the chat. Someone's curious about this 20 times better than recycling which brings us to this next slide, Pat, if you could go through this a little bit. And we included this as a way for you to justify the environmental impact that computer refurbishing has. So Pat, can you go through this? Sure. I developed this a couple of years ago. The EPA Environmental Protection Agency came out with a tool where we could get the environmental benefits of comparing recycled computers, reused computers, or computers that went to the landfill. And so I did these individually. I took 100 computers, 100 CRT monitors, and compared the benefits using the EPA calculator. Now, the one thing that Jim Lynch has brought out in his past articles is the greatest environmental use of water, of air quality, of mining new things is in the initial creation of the computers and monitors. You have to get oil for the plastics. You have to get aluminum and actually gold and other things that go into the computer. Well, that initial mining is what really uses so much of our environmental resources. So if you can reuse those computers, there's a tremendous savings over recycling. Now recycling needs to take them apart to their component like the copper I showed in those slides. That is recycling. You separate the plastics and metals, the valuable parts of it, the wire. It's all separated. You're not reusing it when you de-manufacture it. So there's a tremendous benefit to our environment. And this is a real good tool for you to use to get people to donate to you. But we need to educate that it's so much more important if we reuse first. Eventually everything gets recycled. But the ones that are coming out of service, they really have a good life ahead of them that can be used by schools or low-income families. So you can see on here your energy savings. It shows how much electricity, how many households you can power versus if it's reused, how much energy savings we have. If you look at the bottom line, you can see what the replacement cost savings would be. And it's well over 25 to 1 savings if you're able to reuse instead of recycling. I think Bruce, you show this on a per computer system basis, don't you? Right. What we do is we run it in front of our home page that instead of buying a new manufacturer and buying a new computer, if you use a reused computer, you essentially save the environment $670. That's the manufacturers cost on the environment to create one computer and CRT monitor. So reduce, reuse, recycle. Don't get a new computer. And if you are going to get a new computer, make sure that the one that you are getting rid of is reused. And for somebody that's getting the computer like a school, getting reused computers instead of new computers is really a green way for a school to operate. We say the environment is about $15 million, Pat, probably even more just through reuse. I'd like to, and that's really great information, so be sure to use some of this language in your own brochures. I'd like to move on to talk about software donations. So how do people go around getting software donations? Pat? Well, we don't really encourage software donations. We put new media on all of our computers. We generally use this Microsoft authorized refurbishing licenses because most of our students and schools want Microsoft products. There are other freeware products we can put out there, but through, we can get Microsoft Windows XP and we can get Microsoft Office 2003. Over the years the products change from Microsoft, but most schools and educational programs, this is what they are looking for. We can also put OpenOffice, which is a free program for schools since we're not able to put the Microsoft Office on it. But we don't encourage donations of software. We do take them, but the software donated, number one, everything gets wiped off. So you would have to have the original media, the original license, and the donation slips saying that whoever donated this gave you all the rights to the software as well. Because someone could theoretically keep it on their own computers and just give you the diss and then you would be a non-compliance and you could be in lots of problems with it. And Bruce, do you have anything to add? Yeah, we're the same in terms of we don't like software donations. We don't use them because we don't do one of the kinds. All of our home computers have exactly the same configuration. We've spent a lot of time looking for free and open-source software. So we put really a rich application mix on every computer of free and open-source software from Audacity, which is a great audio program. The GIMP, there's a lot of online training that's available on these programs. We like OpenOffice. It's more compatible with a new version of Microsoft Office than old versions of Microsoft Office, if you run into the DocX problem all over the place. So we only do XP. It also really helps to have a standardized model so that you only have a few models. We have one for high school, one for middle school. I mean one for high school, middle school, one for elementary, one for home, and one for nonprofit. And that's all we do. We also have one other product that we put out, and we put Linux on some lower-end laptops, like maybe a nice Dell Pentium 3 800 MHz laptop, which is good, but it runs too slow with Windows on it. So we do put Linux on that, Ubuntu Linux, and we can sell those to anyone for $100. And they get a wireless laptop that will do email word processing and web browsing at a decent speed for $100. So again, we keep trying to find ways of using everything until the internet is out for recycling. We again have standardized loads as Bruce does. The other thing we're really moving toward is the web-based stuff. Google Docs, anybody that hasn't seen aviary.com, it's just amazing. There's online Photoshop now that's phenomenal. So as more and more people with computers are on broadband, they can get more and more apps for free off the internet. That's a really great point. I do want to talk about and ask Bruce if you support the equipment after it's distributed. You know, there's two things that we do to support the equipment. The first thing we do, and it takes up a lot of our time, is we make sure that everybody that gets a computer from us has been through our class. And on our website, our manual is downloadable. And if you want a copy, it's in draw format. If anybody wants a copy that they can modify, just email me and I can send you one in draw format so you can cut and paste out of it. But we find that support starts with training. So we do, it's just a three-hour training, but it's enough to describe what they're going to be getting on their computer, how they get support, and how to use it. Then what we do is since we're Oakland only, we don't have the YG geography that Pat does. We offer right now free tech support for as long as you have the computer on a drop-in basis. So every Tuesday, anybody can bring a computer that they've ever gotten from us, and we will either fix it or replace it on the spot. We find since we have just one model, it's much easier often to pull the date off somebody's computer and replace it than it is to try to fix it. So we'll spend 15 minutes fixing and then we'll do a replace. We just came to the realization that we didn't want our computer sitting in anybody's house not working. We do something very similar in that we allow drop-in any day of the week between 9 and 5 for those that are local. As the computer gets older and newer models come out, we allow them to update for say $30. And it also saves our time with tech support. Sometimes when they have a lot of photographs and so forth, we'll even just put that in as a secondary hard drive and let them keep all of their data and photos and so forth. So we do a lot and we also do one-on-one showing them why they ended up getting viruses because they were doing LimeWire or something like that file sharing program. We do a lot of education when they come in for tech support as well. But it's word of mouth. We never advertise. We have a constant stream of volunteers and people coming in to get our low-cost computers. That's a nice segue into how can you promote your program? You said word of mouth, but what are some other ways that you can promote your program? So Bruce, can you get us started there? Yeah, a simple brochure is good. Something to hand out when somebody asks you about your program for sure. Quite often there's the local public access television station that you can get on fairly easily. Go through when there's a school television station. They're always looking for things. That always helps us get the word out about our program. Our promotion is really two-fold. One is promote it in three interviews that we think need our product as well as promoting it with potential donors. And we hit both. We also do an email campaign with all the high school and middle school principals since they are our primary target. We try with greater and lesser success to work with immigrant organizations. We work with an organization called IRC in Oakland to make sure that our information is getting to new immigrants. New immigrants are a large population of people that don't have computers or broadband. There was a question also on the website about lower-cost broadband. And there's a couple of things. One is AT&T is generally the cheapest way to start. We find the DSL Extreme and Sonic Net provide good service and are a little cheaper. Pat, why don't you talk more about which? We have a website for sure. I think we do on our website a lot. Anybody's free to look. We have a gallery that has a combination of things that have been on television about us, videos we've made, and videos that our students have made when we run digital media classes, digital storytelling, that kind of stuff. Yeah, Bruce and I are in very different geographic locations and have had different kinds of experiences. He's in a large city metropolitan area and we're in a very rural area here in Northern California. So we have different types of clientels and different things available to us. For instance, we can't very easily get corporate donors because we don't have any larger corporations in our area. One thing we have been able to do is promote different programs we have. For instance, after I came out with the Reuse Recycle brochure that I shared with you earlier, I was able to get on the Sacramento Television on Earth Day. And they did quite a nice story from our community and showing the schools where our products were being used. And then you can take special days like that and use it with your local media and they're really happy to help you with it. Or if you can get together with your recycler, we have a lot of good drop-off days. We have days we offer anyone low income to come in and we will check out their computer for free and diagnose it because a lot of people were given computers. So special days like that, you will get coverage in your local media. Brutus is ahead of us in all of these videos and so forth. But we recently had a very nice one that was made by a professional videographer wanting to tell the story of reuse and putting it on turning green TV. So both of us, you can find out more about our programs. You'll see some videos. My new website just went up last Friday. This put pressure on me to get it done having this webinar. So I got something really good out of it. My new website. We're so happy that you could present. I want to move on to some questions because we have about 12 minutes left. And one question that seems to be on the topic of outreach is I think more geared towards Bruce, how do you do outreach to government and large corporations so they know you exist? And who at that company would you talk to? There's two ways that we do it. Quite often we're contacted because somebody has heard about us. But when we do the outreach, I've gone through our local congressperson. It seems to be that there's two people that you need to work with. One is whoever is the worker that's either on the dock or is responsible for salvage, they need to like you. And they need to want to call you and work with you. And the other is the policy maker that says support this program. That's often the community relations person and an organization. They have to want to get suppressed, let's say, and they have to want to be a good citizen. But then it often comes down to somebody looking out for you in the salvage yard or in the IT department if it's responsible for getting computers, replacing computers and they know they're coming in and they'll warn you. We've had organizations that lease because quite often people lease these days and they don't want to give you. The computers just go back to the leasing company. They found that it was worth their while to buy out of the lease and give it to us rather than ship them back to the leasing company. The hard thing about it is these days everybody has a process. Everybody is doing something with their computers and the thing that Pat says that I think is so critical is people really confuse in their mind e-recycle with e-reuse and very few people really understand the difference. They think they're being green by calling the recycler and sending it to the recycler and there's such a greener way to do that. Often recyclers I found will work with me if you do a drop day, an electronic drop day, say you take the stuff you can use, we'll take everything else and that way we can work together. I want to transition to the next question which is for Pat, people had questions about your percentage raise for your volunteers and how you can figure that. I can figure it because I don't pay them anything. How do you give them a raise when you're not giving them anything? Well, they just don't have to be real good at math. It's a joke it really is because they're getting 15% raises every year or 20% raises but 20% of zero is still zero but they feel so good. They got a 20% raise this year. It's a fun thing but these people have been coming in for well over 10, we quit counting it 10 years and I have, some of them have been with me a very long time like the Mac person and we really, they believe in their organization and they believe in what we're doing and they're willing to give themselves to do it. My friend and I spent about 3,500 hours to figure it out the other day. Well Bruce, one question was what's included in a $250 machine? This would be for both of you. The big difference between, our standard configuration for a family is still a high-end Pentium 3, Windows XP, 384 megs of memory, 512 is a little bit slower processor. For a $250 machine it's a black Dell with at least a gig of memory, at least an 80 gig hard drive and a flat screen monitor. We don't get that many flat screens but we get a lot of schools that really want them. I don't like them, they're just fashion but schools want them for either energy or mainly just for looks. So what I started doing was saying if we have to go out and buy refurbished LCDs we will in order to have a product that meets the needs of our customer. So it's a Pentium 4, 2.6 gigahertz processor, black LCD, new keyboard, new optical mouse. That's $250. We also install, so we have a tech support group that will go into a school, install, lock down, configure printers and networks. So that's an extra $25. That's how we get up to $250. Pat, do you have something you'd like to add? Well, we do give Pentium 4's to families for $135 and if they want a 15 inch LCD we charge $50 for that. But these are all excellent computers and again they're guaranteed. They can get the CRT monitor for $135. But in California because the recyclers and collectors can get paid for having the monitors destroyed we've run into a real problem of not having enough monitors to be able to hand out. But these laws all depend on your location and where you are. But for me it's tragic to see perfectly good equipment when it could be reused. We have a tremendous problem in California with Hispanic community not having access to technology. And we have special English Spanish computers and we go out and do a proactive go out to schools and communities to help get them using technology so their education can have a level playing field. Let's talk about the programs that are used to wipe the hard drives. Are there any free programs or do you have recommendations for what you use? We use Derek's BootNuke D-A-R-I-K-S easy to download either a CD or a floppy boot and the program called KillDisk. One of our technicians made this great Linux, bootable Linux CD that has a whole bunch of ways to both recover data and once you've recovered the data then you can kill the disk. I know Derek's BootNuke is an excellent program and we actually have used Blanco which is a program that we received that is also very good at wiping hard drives. Okay, another question on Microsoft Security Essentials. Have you guys used that before on Astro? Do you have any thoughts on it? Yeah, I really like it. We just converted over to it. We were using ABG-free but with ABG on our home computers there's a borderline legality thing about whether we're allowed to install it and clone it or you have to put the install file on the computer which is an extra step for a user. But there were some good comparisons on websites I found comparing essentials, security essentials with ABG-free and AVAST. And so we've converted over to security essentials. Since we only work with one big school district they give us license to the antivirus that they use so we don't put either one on those computers. But we really like essentials which is pretty good. Okay, and could I add something real quick? There is a refurbishers group and this has been one of the topics on the refurbishers group. So I heard from Bruce and others about the success they've had with security essentials so we're also going to convert over to that. But the refurbishers group is hosted by Jim Lynch who is also on the phone call. But I would encourage anyone interested in refurbishing. We get lots of good ideas. We share information and it's a real good ongoing resource. There's another question Pamela had. Do you sell back to businesses? We don't know. We only sell to – you know, sell is an interesting thing because this came up in a big conference I was in last week. We charge a refurbishing fee. It's a fee for refurbishing. It's not a product that gets taxed. I think Pat does the same thing. We only pay tax if we buy and sell with something that's more expensive where we sell more than what we pay for. But we only go to schools, nonprofits, and low-income individuals. And then we'll move on to one more last question. It was a question about laptops being refurbished and the battery or power supply goes bad and catches fire. Who is liable in those types of cases? Who would like to respond to that? Pat would. Thanks a lot, Chris. Truthfully, we have never had the problem. I suppose if we would have the problem we would check it out further. Our laptops go out with a 90-day warranty instead of a full year, but we will warranty the hard drive and all for longer. But so far we have not had problems with the batteries. They are tested and they go out with working batteries, but they certainly are not guaranteed long-term. We hate laptops. We really do. They always come back with a spill or something on them, especially when a kid earns them. We don't give them the kids. We have maybe high school seniors going to college or adults, but we do not give them out to young children. And high school seniors going to college are the best targets, I think. I've given four or five hundred of them out to graduating seniors going to college, and that's the best target. Excellent. Well, we're going to end there. That's all the time that we have. But if you have additional questions that we weren't able to address, please post those to our community forum, the Technology Planning Forum. There's a link here. Becky will be sending that out via the chat for you to write down, or you'll also get it in our post event email that I'll send out in about an hour. If you're new to TechSoup and aren't sure about all the things that we have to offer in addition to these webinars, we have articles, the community forums, we provide postings of upcoming events, and we also have a donated software program. There are a couple of webinars coming up that I'd like to tell you about. Getting started on Facebook is happening next week. And then there is actually a Twitter one happening a week after that, but I don't have the description for you. And then in April, we've got Finding the Perfect Donor Database. We're very excited about those. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk, which has donated the use of their system to TechSoup to help us raise awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So I'd like to again thank Pat and Bruce for such a great presentation.