 Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar, The Third Wave of Nonprofit Technology, Technology for Social Change. We're thrilled that you're here with us today. We have an awesome presenter, Sam Chenkin from Tech Impact, and I'm Susan Hope Bard here at TechSoup, our Training and Education Manager. I'm going to take you through a few things about ReadyTalk before we turn it over to Sam for the presentation. Using ReadyTalk, right now you should see your screen with this slide about using ReadyTalk on the far left. You should see a column for chat. This chat box is there for you to ask us questions. You do not need to raise your hand at any time. You can simply chat your question into us. We will queue it up for Sam to answer periodically when we stop for Q&A, and certainly at the end of the event when we have a culminating question and answer session. You can also chat in if you're having any audio or technical challenges. So what I'd say to you is chat in what your challenge is, and we have folks on the back end that can help you with that. If you lose your Internet connection, simply reconnect to the webinar using the link that was in your email and your confirmation, or the reminder that was sent out yesterday or today. You can also find all of our webinars on our website where you can see the archives. We will be archiving this event within a few days. It will be on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. Great news is we're recording this presentation so you don't need to take copious notes. We will be able to share the recording out with you. Also the presentation Sam's PowerPoint will be sent to you, and any links that he mentions today. We will try to get that email out to you by the end of today. You can also tweet us at TechSoup or use hashtag TSWebinars. And again, audio should play through your computer speakers. If you have any challenges or back end support here, Alicia Kidd will be able to chat out the phone number that you can call in on a phone or Skype. A few things about TechSoup. We are located here in beautiful San Francisco. While I talked to you a little bit about TechSoup, go ahead and chat in where you're joining us from, what city and state, or what country you're joining us from. You may know that TechSoup is a 501C3 like many of you joining us today. We provide access to resources for nonprofits and libraries, folks just like you, such as webinars like this. We have courses. We have products. And I see folks joining us from Kentucky. We've got a few folks from Canada, Missouri, Indiana. Great. We've got a lot of folks on this webinar. Great. And a quick reminder before I do turn it over to Sam is that you don't need to raise your hand. We can simply see your chat in the chat box and then we'll respond to you with any support that you need. And again, any questions you have, feel free to chat out to us. And Alicia or myself will help you. I mentioned our wonderful speaker today who does many of our webinars with our partner Tech Impact. Sam Chenkin is the Director of Consulting Services at Tech Impact. And I'll let him tell you a little bit about himself when he introduces himself when he gets started. I'm Susan. I'm the Training and Education Manager. And assisting with our chat on the back end is Alicia Kidd. She is also with TechSoup. She is our online learning specialist. So without further ado, I do wish to turn this over to Sam. He is going to take you through an engaging and interactive experience. You'll be participating in some polls. He'll give you lots of great information that hopefully you can implement in your nonprofit. Sam, take it away. Thanks Susan. It's a high bar. I'll try to meet it. So we're going to be talking today about technology for social change or really where nonprofit technology has the potential to go. This is a topic that feels pretty close to my heart. I'm a millennial. And when I was growing up I was promised that technology was going to change the world. It was going to solve injustice. It was going to resolve economic disparities. And we haven't seen all that much of that happen. But I think that maybe we're about ready for it. And I think that the nonprofit world can help make that happen. And I think that technology is one of the ways to create that change. So bear with me during this presentation. And we're going to talk about where we came from, where we're going, and what we can hope for. So again, my name is Sam Chankin. I'm Director of Consulting Services at Tech Impact. If you're not familiar with Tech Impact, we're a nonprofit of 501c3, about 50 staff, our main offices in Philadelphia, and then we have offices in D.C. and Las Vegas and Delaware. And we provide technology services to other nonprofits. And that's really everything from help desk where we're sort of the primary point of call for someone who can't get office to launch on their computer, up through data and strategy kinds of services, helping nonprofits figuring out how to collect data, how to make use of data, and maybe how to change how they're working using technology. If you're interested in learning about what we do, I would encourage you to check out our live annual report. That's a bit.ly link right there that will get you there if you want to type that in. Or you can find it from our website too under the About tab. But I think that both illustrates what we do and how we do it. It's a live report that's tied to our database and gives you a real-time look at our impact and what we're doing to serve the community. I've been with Tech Impact 10 years as Director of Consulting Services. So I lead rather lightly the team of around 8 people who are helping do these higher impact interventions in the nonprofit world. So let's move on. I think that's enough about me. I'd love to know our audience today. If you can take a moment and respond here and let me know how you consider your role to be in nonprofit. And executive, IT staff, who are you? That will just help me understand the audience I'm talking to today. Great. So let's take a look at our results. We've got a lot of IT staff which isn't a surprise. I'm really thrilled by the other categories that we see here. I'm really excited to see nonprofit executives in this session. I think that getting executive interest in technology and technology as a way of changing nonprofits is critical. Buying from all levels of the organization is really important, which is why I'm also really happy to see a lot of program staff in here as well. And I really hope that this presentation will be helpful for everyone listed here and others. So thanks for being here. So today we're going to talk about where we're coming from as nonprofits, how we got to the current state of nonprofit technology which may or may not be particularly helpful to our constituents. We'll talk about that a little bit. We're going to talk about the future of technology and how technology should be considered a core competency of nonprofit organizations and what that looks like. We're going to talk about how technology itself is changing, how the way technology is sold and packaged is making things possible for nonprofits that never would have been possible in the past. And then I'm going to try and make it kind of concrete for you as a nonprofit. We're going to talk through different sizes of nonprofits, how you might staff creating this kind of change in your organization and in your communities, and then also some possible projects you might undertake. I really don't want this to be just theoretical pie in the sky thinking. I want you to come out of this with some ideas about how maybe you can use technology differently. So before we get started I'm going to do a little before and after kind of study here. I want to know how you feel about technology right now. And then I kind of want to get your understanding of whether or not your perception has changed at the end of this webinar. So if you can take a moment here and answer in the poll, what do you think about technology? How do you think technology is helping or impacting your organization? We've got a lot of fast fingers there Sam. Yeah, we do. That's crazy. I've never seen the results come in so quickly. So not surprisingly 81% of people think that it helps us be more efficient. And I think that's really where technology's core strength in the nonprofit community lies right now. We're going to talk about that. I think it's important, but I'm really interested also in this later category how technology can help us approach our mission. And a surprising number of organizations have started to figure that out. Let's try and get that number up to 82% just like being more efficient. I think that's really our organization's goal, Tech Impact's goal is to help make every nonprofit who can use technology to impact their mission do so. So let's get started. Technology and the nonprofit. Technology has always been a force in the nonprofit world. I think you're all intimately familiar with that. It's not new. But I think it's fair to say that the main motivator of that has been not our constituents so much as our boards and our funders. It's our boards and our funders that really want us to be using technology to make us more efficient and to tell our stories better. And I think the common result in the nonprofit world around technology is that there's a focus on making ourselves a business. A lot of the technology is focused on being professional, on reporting out. And it kind of encourages us sometimes to lose touch with our constituents, at least as far as technology goes. The way we collect data, the kinds of questions we have to ask, the way we're in front of a computer screen, those can be things that can take us away from our constituents. I think the most damaging part of this is that as a whole, particularly direct service staff and nonprofits have a perception that technology hurts our work rather than helps us. Maybe it makes us more efficient, but ultimately we're spending all of our time entering things into databases, trying to run reports that may or may not really reflect reality, someone who works in a nonprofit and has to do grant reporting myself. And that's not really the promise of technology. So how do we get there? How do we get to this place where technology is often perceived more as a burden than as a hindrance and is focused on sort of efficiency and helping our funders and our boards? And I want to take us back to sort of the first wave of technology in general, not just technology in the nonprofit world. And that's what I like to call just try everything. This is the 1990s, the birth of the Internet, the sort of elimination of the fax machine, getting into email and websites. This is a screenshot here of Carnegie Corporation of New York. That's the oldest charity in the U.S. And that's their website in 1996. If you've never used the Way Back machine, I'd encourage you to do so. And you can see here really what we were doing is just kind of regurgitating the stuff we were doing on paper and on phone and just sticking it into digital medium. So digitization, not transformation, this wasn't really creating big change through technology. It was just kind of like what can we make work? Let's throw up pets.com and cats.com, the 90s.com boom. And the result really I think was a bit of chaos. We tried just about everything and nothing worked particularly well. So in nonprofits too, nonprofits got websites and they got terrible databases and they got email. And did these things really help us inform or help our communities? Better? Probably not because we didn't really know what we were doing. But honestly, I don't think it was such a negative impact on the community. Technology couldn't really do much. A website's great, email's great, but it didn't have the potential to help us impact how we were actually affecting our constituents. And that brings us to the second wave of nonprofit technology, which I think is really where we live right now. And the second wave is where technology got its likes. It started to be actually useful. And the focus was on efficiency improving value. And in the nonprofit world, this took the form of data. Data, data, data. And you're all there, right? You all know, yes, we need data. This is not new anymore. We're past the point where nonprofits can wake up and say, oh yeah, you know that data thing? Maybe we should be thinking about that. So really it's already something that nonprofits are considering day to day. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is technology that was really built for our funders. Our funders are the ones that are driving this transformation, the second wave of nonprofit technology. And I want you to bear with me here for a moment because I think this is important in order to understand how we got to this data-focused, sort of funder-focused technology landscape and nonprofits. I think we need to understand how society's changes are impacting it. So in the last, let's say, 50 years, society as a whole has become very focused on short-term gain, short-term profits. And that becomes felt in the nonprofit world. And it becomes felt in the nonprofit world for a few reasons. One is that it's working in businesses. You know, businesses are more efficient. They're doing more. And so businesses are often the people that nonprofit boards come from. And they're often the boards of foundations. And foundations are seeing what's working. And all this kind of trickles down into the nonprofit world. I think we all know this as nonprofits. What is in the business world will eventually trickle down as expectations for us. And when those expectations hit the nonprofit world, nonprofits have to adapt. And what they do is they start to come up with metrics. They start to find ways to prove to foundations that what they're doing is working. And as a result, we invent information systems. And so the reason that you have all of these databases today is because our funders pressure us to prove our value, to prove our efficiency. So we have databases. And those databases allow us to be more efficient. I mean, it works, right? And now we're trying to reduce our overhead. We're trying to be more and more efficient. And we provide those metrics back to our funders and then they want more. So we're in this feedback loop here where the more information we provide to our funders, the more information we're being asked for. But the feedback loop is very focused on our funders. And our funders have our constituents' best interests in mind. That's their goal. So it's not that they're not trying to do good work. It's not that they're not trying to help the community. It's just that the feedback loop reinforces an approach that focuses on funders' needs and not necessarily directly on constituents' needs. How do I know that this is the kind of case in nonprofits? I mean, these are some things that I hear a lot. Sure, we collect 100 data points. I have no idea why no one ever does anything with it. Or, yeah, our marketing department or our development department makes great graphics. Our funders love it. But I've never seen that be used to actually help us improve how we're delivering services. Or our direct service staff see technology as a burden and not an enabler. And I think this really calls to the fact that technology has become this thing that we stick on top of nonprofits rather than really integrate into how nonprofits work. It's the cheap and cheerful model of home renovation. On the right there is a real picture. This is my house. That's my housemate there who owns the house. And maybe 10 years ago someone did a cheap remodel in the third floor bathroom. And the bathtub sloped and it's been dripping water onto the floor ever since. So we're very DIY households. So Tamara there pulled up the tiles and found underneath all this rot and pulled up the floor and now this is what we're with. If we do renovations the right way, if we tear everything out and kind of integrate it, put things back in a way where we're using the newest advances, where we're following best practices, then we're going to be left with something that can take advantage of the new normal. This cheap and cheerful model of technology use in nonprofits is not necessarily working to help us provide services to our constituents. It's really more focused on foundations or funders. So are we out of luck? Are we up a creek without a paddle? And this is why I wanted to do this presentation today because I think the answer is no. Times have changed. Five years ago the cheap and cheerful renovation was all nonprofits could afford. Technology was incredibly expensive. Doing anything interesting required a whole room full of PhDs which is very expensive as you know nonprofits just can't afford that. But we live in a different time now. We live in a time where technology has become a kind of commodity that allows organizations of any size to tap into really interesting creative work done by those PhDs, but in a way that it can actually be brought to bear on problems that nonprofits understand. So if you want take a look and go to how-old.net. This is a website that uses a Microsoft Facial Recognition API and you upload a picture and it finds all the faces in the picture and then it tells you what age it thinks those people are. Now that's me. It's actually a little wrong there. I'm 30, thank you very much. But it's not bad, right? It's pretty close. And there's other ones where it will actually tell you what it thinks the person's emotion is, right? Now I don't totally know how this would be useful to nonprofits but I'm sure that someone on this call has an idea of how being able to upload pictures and understand people's ages would positively impact the way they work with their constituents, right? And this particular service is super cheap. It's $1.50 for 1,000 queries. So 1,000 pictures you upload cost you $1.50 even less if you do more of them, right? So for the first time this kind of really innovative work is becoming accessible to even smaller organizations. Today, companies big and small, they're not necessarily writing software anymore in the way that we used to understand writing software. They're not writing 10,000 lines of code for a login system and they've come up with their own database. They're pulling together building blocks. This is the platform as a service revolution. You don't need to know the technical details of it. But basically all these different vendors have building blocks that can be pieced together in really interesting ways to create something new. And all of these components are commodities. They're cheap. So I want to give you kind of a practical example. Don't get too overwhelmed here. I'm going to walk you through it, okay? But I made up this organization. It's fictitious, just an idea called Connecting the Dots. And Connecting the Dots works to put a small group of people on the ground in the event of a disaster, okay? So we have a tornado or a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake, something else. They put people on the ground. And those people go and they create a database of services that are available to people who are being affected by that disaster. And I don't just mean government services. Maybe Sally down the street happens to run a pillow stuffing business and has 1,000 pillows in their garage. So little things, being more community integrated, right? And they create a database of this. And Connect the Dots has built this software application. So in this particular scenario, people on the ground who are experiencing an issue can text in to Connecting the Dots and say, I need a pillow. I have an issue. I need a thing. What's that thing? And Connecting the Dots has written a software application but they haven't written it from scratch. They've glued together different components that are available from these big name software companies to create something new with 1% of the work it would have taken 10 years ago. So we're using the Microsoft Chatbot API which allows you, gives you access to natural language processing so that it can actually have a conversation with the person and pull out the questions and ask for more information if necessary. And that Microsoft Chatbot API is talking to Microsoft Cortana Search which is talking to an Amazon database. So the database is hosted in Amazon and that's where Connecting the Dots is storing all the different services that are available to people. So the search is going in and saying, okay, well, this person asked for a pillow. I asked them what their address was. They told me pillow is near that address. Here's the result. And it can return that back to the person. And then we're using Google Machine Learning here. So Machine Learning is a really interesting thing and it's actually monitoring the query. So after we tell that person where to find the pillow, maybe we check in the next day and we find out whether or not they got what they needed. And then that goes into the Machine Learning. And the Machine Learning algorithm is educating the Cortana Search and helping it understand, well, actually, that wasn't a very good answer. It didn't work out for that person. Maybe you should try something different next time. And these are not things that are requiring a roomful of PhD computer scientists in order to build. We're tying all these things together. And then we're using Click Data. Click is a data visualization application, one of many. And we're creating a dashboard that presents to the community what is being asked for, demand data. So let's break down how this is impacting society, this theoretical application. On the one hand, people have access to materials that they wouldn't have had access to before because the government isn't agile enough to integrate these sort of community-based resources into their systems. And there's not a good way for people to ask the question about what they need. So that's one way we're impacting it. Another way we're impacting it is that we're asking if it worked. We're putting in a direct feedback loop, which is one of the most radical things you can do is really learning from your constituents what's working and what's not working. And then we're actually educating the community about what the needs are. What are people asking for so that the community can respond and provide more of those things that are being asked for? So this one application can really change how this service is being provided to the community. And we're doing it through an application, but it's something that isn't totally built from scratch. We're pulling together all these different building blocks. So why aren't we doing this? Why haven't we been successful with this? And the reason is that it's hard. It's not all fun and games. And I want through this presentation to get you folks excited about the possibilities, but also to understand what the challenges are so that we can start to work together to figure out how to change the way nonprofits approach technology. So why is it hard? The first is that nonprofits don't have access to capital in the same way that startups do. Facebook and Twitter, they burned billions of dollars before they made a profit. People were throwing money hand over fist to them. Nonprofits don't have that luxury. Foundations don't necessarily want to take big bets on nonprofits building software applications that may or may not work, and a lot of them won't work. That's just the way this works. Nonprofits can't fund raise by selling equity either, so they don't have access to kind of the public capital market. And this is a real issue. So we have to get creative. We have to use office shelf tools. We have to figure out how to do things cheaply. We have to figure out how to prove our values so that foundations take us seriously. And also say that organizations like Tech Impact and TechSoup need to help change the conversation in the philanthropic world, in the foundation world, so that they're more willing to take risks like this. The other big thing to keep in mind is that this stuff is expected. It's not just good. It's something that foundations and funders are starting to expect nonprofits to do. This sort of instinct to disrupt the market, just like everything business-y tends to make its way into the nonprofit world eventually, this push to do things differently, to be radical, is starting to push the nonprofit world as well. And that's a risk because it's a risk in which we can just re-entrench and continue to approach things as how do we please our funders versus how do we work with our constituents. Technology for the first time is really at a point where nonprofits can build things that positively and directly impact constituents. It's possible now. I was just talking about that. But if we're not careful, we can just go back and do things because it looks good because our funders are asking for it and we know how to talk to our funders. We know how to seem like we're doing innovative work. So that's a real risk for us as nonprofit organizations. So the crossroads we're at right now as nonprofit organizations is do we double down and continue to use this market force, this foundation, this funder, this board market force to decide how do we use technology? Or do we really step back and figure out how to integrate technology and make it community-focused, make it focused on our constituents, and use it to create real and substantial change in the world. Not just being the band-aid on society but really changing society. And that brings us to the third wave of nonprofit technology which is technology for our constituents. So the first thing I'll say is that I think this third wave of technology, this technology for our constituents is our responsibility. I was talking a little bit about I grew up in this era where technology was supposed to solve things. It's supposed to amplify my efforts so that one person's work could have a profound effect on the whole world. It's supposed to allow people who didn't have a voice to have a voice and create radical transparency so people couldn't pretend to be doing good when they weren't. This is really the promise of technology. And I'm going to step out on a limb here because I'm a little radical and I don't mind maybe ruffling some feathers. And I'm going to say that the business world hasn't stepped up to create those technology tools. The business world hasn't created the tools to fix these injustices in the world. And in some ways that's not its fault, there isn't a profit motive there and that's the way our markets work. But I think the other thing is that businesses aren't in touch with our communities enough to understand the problems and what can actually create change. I mean you've all seen well-meaning corporate volunteers come in to your nonprofits and they definitely help but they don't quite get it. And software development, creating tools using technology really requires intimately understanding the problem. And you as nonprofits have that expertise in a way that the business world doesn't. So as a nonprofit I really think it's your responsibility, it's my responsibility, it's our responsibility to figure out how to use technology to serve our constituents better. And if we want to do that, if we want to take advantage of technology's potential here, we need to make some changes. We have to change how our nonprofits operate. We need to adjust our attitudes, our approach, and our skills. And that's what I want to talk about now. I want to talk about how we as nonprofits can adjust. The first is about attitudes. This is how we think about technology and organization. And I talked about this a little bit, right? Nonprofits' thinking of technology is something for our funders or thinking of technology as something that is mostly hurtful to our constituents. That's got to change. We've got to change the conversation. We have to figure out how technology can feel positive in the organization. And that's not necessarily without reason, right? A lot of the ways we do do technology in nonprofits is hurtful to direct service staff. It is not necessarily helping us provide better services to our constituents. So we have to make some changes in that as well. And we have to start asking questions about how technology can help. So I don't know if any of you have spun up new programs, right? And maybe you're 80% of the way through spinning up the new program. And then suddenly it occurs to you, hey, maybe we should talk to the IT person about how we can go about getting a server to that site. We need file serving. We need email, etc. Bringing technology into the conversation that late into the game isn't going to be effective. So as nonprofits we really need to be having that conversation much sooner. And we need to be having that conversation right when we identify the problem. So if the problem is that our constituents aren't coming in and coming to our appointments, the first question has to be can technology help with this problem? And the answer is not necessarily yes. And that's really important. Technology doesn't solve everything. But can it help? Maybe. We need to be talking about technology at board meetings, at management meetings, at staff meetings. The conversation about technology really has to be throughout the organization, which also means that you have to have some kind of expertise in the room to help us understand how technology can help. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But this attitude shift, this cultural shift is critical. The second is changing our approach as nonprofits. This is definitely not true of every nonprofit, but I think the nonprofit sector as a whole tends to more paternalistic top-down interventions. That's just how our funding models work. That's where our history is from. And that approach doesn't work when it comes to technology. Trying to force people to use technology to better themselves is not successful. That's certainly one thing that is very democratic about technology in the world. And I want to bring to you one sort of concrete example. And it's a little forced, but I think it is illuminating, so bear with me. So I don't know if any of you have ever used ETO. If you have, you probably hate it. I don't think I've ever talked to someone who likes ETO. It's called Effort Style Comes, and it's a database that is used to track interventions and whether or not those interventions work, tracking outcomes, efforts to outcomes. And Direct Service staff have to use this database and they have to type everything into it. It's usually required by a funder, by the state, by some kind of agency. And usually they're typing information into that database, and they're typing information into another database, and they're typing it into a third database, because that's the way we work as nonprofit organizations. So this ETO application, everyone hates. People are using it because they're being forced to use it, but you're certainly not going to get your constituents to use it, right? And I want to contrast that with Facebook, which is a free application that holds just as much sensitive and privileged information in it as ETO, right? ETO has everyone's social security numbers, and it's got their birth date, and it's got the problems they've got. Facebook has when they last went to the bathroom and the last thing that they ate for breakfast, right? So the level of detail is not that dissimilar between these two systems. Facebook, totally voluntary. People want to use it because it was designed for them, because they see a value in using that system. And that's the difference between this kind of top-down approach versus a bottom-up community integrated approach. And I really think that we need to come to terms with that as nonprofits if we want to use technology in a way that creates change. We have to build things that individuals want to use. And I think we have the potential to do that because we know these individuals, right? We're in these communities, and we're talking to these communities. We can ask them. And that's something that the business world can't really do in this particular sector. Now again, I think that's our charge as nonprofit community. So if we're going to change our approach, we really need to be community-integrated. So we need to be talking to our community members. We need to be asking them what would be useful. We can't be making assumptions, right? Because we're usually wrong. But we have those relationships. We're up to that challenge. We need to be iterative because we are not going to get it right the first time, and we can't afford to build the whole thing the first time. So we need to try something, adjust, etc. And we need to be prepared to fail. We need to be prepared for it to not work. We need to walk away and try something else, or try the same thing in a different way. And these are lessons that I think the business world has learned. Nonprofits who are much more risk-adverse have trouble learning this lesson. I think it's really important. This small change over time approach, this iterative approach is really critical if we're going to use technology in a way that creates real change. And it goes back to the funding model and all the rest. So there's certainly aspects of the system that we need to adjust to make this practical. The last thing we need to adjust is we need to adjust the skills that we have available to us. So Server and Desktop Administration is old news. Honestly, you can do it. You can outsource that less expensively. I would love to see every IT person in this session become focused on creating technology that really impacts the mission of nonprofits, become focused on adding value for constituents. So to do that, we need to be hands-on helping staff integrate technology into their work. A lot of times what a staff member needs is they need to understand how to use a header in Word, or they need to understand how to create a Google form. That Google form is going to totally radically transform the way in which they work. But no one is taking the time to really understand their workflow and help them do that. That's the kind of skill you need on staff as a nonprofit. We need to identify where technology can help change how our programs work. So that's that sort of approach. We need to integrate this conversation into how we're working, into every level of that conversation. And that's something that doesn't happen a lot because IT is kind of off and siloed on the edges of the organization. It's the stepchild that no one likes. So we really need to change that and bring it into the fold of planning in the organization. And then we have to have the technical expertise to define the problem, to understand the requirements, and to manage vendors. So as nonprofits we're not going to be doing a lot of this work ourselves and I'll talk more about staffing models later. But we need to have the expertise inside the organization in order to be able to write down what it is we want that vendor to do and then hold them accountable. So this is a stretch for nonprofits. At Tech Impact we almost have this, and this is really what we do. This is the core of us. So building the skill set in nonprofits is a long-term play. And there are ways to get this expertise without having it in-house through volunteers, through consultants, etc. But this is our goal. And I'd really love to know where you as nonprofits think you are right now around these three skills. So if you can come back to the session and let me know, I'd like you to rank these. So which of these skills do you think you already have on staff? Where one is not at all, and three is we've got a lot of it. So one is we're entry, and three is we're experts. Wow, we've got a lot of fast fingers again. These folks are getting professional at giving us feedback. I also saw that some people in the back end are chatting out about Slack. I'm sorry, I am not able to display the results, but I can tell you from the back end here it looks like the first option that we had identifying how technology can help was the highest in terms of our average with folks that think they have that type of expertise already on staff. Great, so that's great progress. And I think that is the first place to start. Once you can identify the opportunities for technology, you can start to build that expertise. So I want to move on and talk about what nonprofits can reasonably accomplish. I have some scenarios for nonprofits of different sizes, but Susan, do you think it would be helpful to stop and take some questions before we go on? Yes, we do. We've got quite a few questions. The first one was, and actually I'm going to bring that back to Slack. We had Aaron had chatted in about in terms of communication, Slack is their mountain, and they want to implement easier communication, but learning Slack is like pulling teeth, so any recommendations. And I had said that we've implemented Slack here, and there's definitely a learning curve on our end, but we're wondering if you have any recommendations. Sure. Well, I would say that usually when we talk about training, we're usually missing the point. So training is often not the problem. Usually the problem is incentives, particularly with something like Slack which is built to be pretty easy to use. And depending on the age of your staff and how willing they are to learn new things, there might be some training necessary to teach them the raw technical skills. But normally what's needed is to understand why people are communicating and how you can encourage them to use Slack rather than other communication channels. So it's more about political change. It's more about building interest in using Slack than it is about teaching people how to actually use it. So how do you actually go about that? I mean it really depends on your organization, but when I try to create change in my organization, I do a few things. One thing is I try to identify the gatekeeper. Who's the person who's really making this decision? It's definitely not me. And it's definitely not my executive director, right? Who's the person who's really pushing out communication or absorbing communication? And if they start using this channel, everyone else is going to do that, right? So that's one thing I would do, and get that person on board, talk to them about what they would need. I would also figure out how I can make Slack useful. So maybe I'm going to only push out certain kinds of top-down communications through Slack. If you want to know when you're getting free lunch, or our holiday schedule, or you want to have an opportunity to claim those tickets that one of our foundations gave us, you're going to have to go to Slack to find out. And those are ways to shift the incentives so that people are using that particular tool. Again, top-down change does not work with technology. So you have to set things up so that the natural entropy, the natural resting state, is one where what you want to happen is what's happening. And that's about setting up incentives to create that change. And I'll just say that same approach applies not just to internal tools, but also getting our constituents to use technology as well. Thank you. We have a couple of other questions here. One from Roberta. What would be some good practices for using technology in campaigning for nonprofits? And Roberta, I guess I'm curious what kind of campaigning you're talking about. If you're talking about base building, or getting out the vote, or turnout, what's your goal? And as she chats that in, we can take another question. John asked, how does he get the experts at his table if he's an all-volunteer organization? Great. And that's a really good question. And let's actually table that question because I'm going to talk about really small organizations and what really small, and I mean fewer than five people including volunteers, can do with technology. What's practical in the next part of this presentation? Okay, great. I think we can wait for the other ones then until the end of the presentation. Okay. Thank you. Okay, so let's talk about what you can do as a nonprofit, what's really practical. And let's start with a tiny nonprofit. And I think your goal as a tiny nonprofit is to use free and inexpensive off-the-shelf tools in ways that maybe they weren't built. You can really do a lot with this. You don't necessarily have to be writing software in order to use technology in a way that creates real change for constituents or for you. And you're usually going to staff this with one tech-savvy program manager or operations person, one of your volunteers. You need one person who's willing to really dig into the weeds and has that expertise. And if you don't have that, you should get it. I mean building these skills either by soliciting volunteers or by hiring is necessary in order to create this kind of change. And I have here some possible projects which we can walk through. And these are things that I see nonprofits do that I think are really cool. One is creating self-service educational material. I love this example because it's a way in which you can create things one time. And suddenly the reach is thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. So there's these online tools like Eliatomy or Teachable where you can create a course. You can create videos and questionnaires and testing. And then at the end someone learns something. They've gone through this whole thing and started to finish. And you just have to build this. And some of these are free. Or maybe they're not free but you can actually build a revenue model out of it. You can charge money to other nonprofits. I don't know what makes sense for your organization and I'm certainly not trying to push making money for the sake of making money. But there's a lot of opportunities for nonprofits to expand how they're working through technology. Another example I really love is just allowing people to sign up for workshops using Eventbrite. And this is crazy because people really don't like interacting in person anymore. They're not so likely to call you or even to email you in order to sign up for a workshop. But if you put that workshop online with a link to a forum they're much more likely to register because they don't have to sort of feel embarrassed about the call and they can just kind of do it when they have the instinct to do it. So signing up you're going to get increased registration. But then you can add in some automation with Zapier and SurveyMonkey. These are two tools. Zapier allows you to do kind of this, then that. So if someone is checked in to the session, so if they attend and you mark them as attended in Eventbrite, it can then send them a link to a SurveyMonkey forum to fill out a survey. And that's an example of a feedback loop which again is one of the most radical things nonprofits can do is make it easier for their constituents to tell them what's working and what's not working. So now we have this system where people can much more easily come to webinars and they're immediately getting a survey after the fact about what worked and what didn't work. And now the nonprofit can adjust the content so it's more useful for the community. That's all done using free tools. Another thing is creating beautiful dashboards. If you go back and you take a look at the dashboard that I linked to on our slide, that is an example of a Power BI dashboard and it's publicly available. It's accessible to our website. And it is beautiful visualizations. And in our case it's tied to our database but it doesn't have to be. So even small organizations can take advantage of some of this really powerful data visualization and interactive data visualization functionality to tell their story. And not just tell their story to their funders but also tell their story to their constituents, maybe build trust. Or maybe tell the world about the problem that their constituents are experiencing. Be a mouthpiece for their constituents. And Power BI is a free tool. It's part of Office 365. You can sign up and you can connect it to a spreadsheet. So you don't have a sophisticated data system. You don't have a data manager but you have an Excel spreadsheet. So that Power BI dashboard is just connected to that spreadsheet. You're typing in numbers in the spreadsheet and then that information is published in a way that gives you a lot of credibility to your website. It can be powerful stuff. So let's continue and let's talk about a small nonprofit fewer than 50 staff. And I think if you're fewer than 50 staff you're probably not going to be creating really sophisticated custom applications. You're not going to be doing a ton of software development. But you can still do a lot. You can create really beautiful integrated data systems. I think I'm showing what a nerd I am because I just said the word beautiful. But create complex integrated data systems with online platforms that your constituents can interact with too. And I think something that you as a small nonprofit are going to have to come to terms with is that you're going to have to have some of this expertise on staff. You have to hire. You have to find the funding. And that's just the reality. Technology is specialized. You have to have that expertise on staff. And it will pay off in terms of impacts to your constituents. You're going to be doing better work because you're going to better understand what's working and what's not working. And in terms of getting funding because you'll be able to tell those stories better. You'll be able to play the second wave game more effectively. Some examples are integrated web portals with self-service outcomes reporting. You can have someone log in and maybe say how they're doing. And again you've got to create the incentives for them to do that so they want to do it. Or maybe you just create an online form that gets emailed to them. And then that information automatically goes into your database. So now you have much better information about what's working and what's not working. Let's say you're having problems with people coming to their sessions. You're some kind of social services agency. You're scheduling. You can integrate your case management system with a text alerting platform. People are much more likely to use text messages. Or I've worked with organizations that distribute health tips or allow new moms to communicate with nurses through text messaging. And these are off-the-shelf tools. You don't have to write code in order to use these. But it allows you to reach your constituents in the way they want to be reached, meeting them where they are. It's really a perfect example of how technology can change how you're working with your constituents. And then again, that dashboarding model, you can connect that to your database in real time so that whenever you're providing a new service, it's immediately posted to this public dashboard. Or whenever you collect another data point about how screwed up something is in the world, you're telling the world about it through that dashboard. You're creating that radical transparency that can bring attention and interest to bear on your particular issue. So if we move on and we talk about bigger organizations, I want to say that I think right now, this is the case, I don't think as an organization of fewer than 50 people you're likely to be doing a lot of software development work. But I do think this is changing. So I think that in the next few years, nonprofits of every size are going to have the ability to write cool things that really change how they're interacting with their constituents. And we're not there yet, but we're going to be there. So pay attention even if this isn't you. So at this scale, you can create applications that totally change how you pursue your mission. Custom software, right, that connect the dots application. You can build something like that. You're going to need some kind of information manager, someone full-time, someone high enough level to be able to write the grant application, the letter of interest to get funding, someone who can manage the project start to finish. It's going to require a different level of expertise than nonprofits have traditionally had, but it's certainly manageable for organizations of this size. And I will say too, as someone who provides technology services to the nonprofit world, there are a lot of people who have these technology skills who want to be creating change, who want to be working in nonprofits. And they're frustrated that nonprofits aren't being innovative, that they're not trying new things. So when you're ready to hire people like this, they're out there. Some possible projects that example I gave you before is kind of the quintessential project, right? We're integrating machine learning and natural language processing and a chat bot all in one tool. Doing data integration with wearable Internet of Things, that's the newest thing. I'm sure I'll do some kind of trendy webinar on that soon. But the idea is that you have all these devices out there that are collecting data. You can do that. It's not that out of reach. You could maybe give some percentage of your constituents Fitbit and collect health information and add that to your current outcomes data and have a better idea of what's working and what's not working. Or maybe you're tracking global warming or sea level issues or temperature or rainfall. You can create, you can buy little devices that sit somewhere, solar powered, and they phone home over a cellular network. And you can collect that data and you can use that to better understand what's happening in the world and communicate that out to people so that they're paying attention. It's much harder for people to ignore that kind of information in a pretty graph than it is anecdotal, or at least it should be. Another thing that I think is really amazing is something called machine learning. And something that I really think is going to be happening for nonprofits in the very near future is integrating machine learning into case management systems, outcome measurement systems where we are tracking all the different kinds of interventions you're doing for your constituents. And we're using machine learning to know what is a warning sign. So if someone misses an intervention after having two interventions with this outcome, we can maybe say, well based on past experience we know that that's more likely that that person is going to end up back in an institution. And doing that kind of real time monitoring where we're looking at what's actually happening. So we have this data set. We have all these interventions. We know how we're impacting our constituents and we know our outcomes. We can run that through a machine learning tool. And then the machine learning tool puts together a model that basically says, well I can now predict to a certain extent how likely it is that someone is going to have a bad outcome. So we can take action before that bad thing happens. We can use this past experience to keep other people from having the same experience in the future. Okay, so where do we start about this? What do we do as nonprofits of any of these sizes? And the big thing is to change the culture in your nonprofit. And really the place to start with that is winning hearts and minds. That means both winning the minds of direct service staff so they're willing to change how they're working. They're willing to adapt some of these new things. It also means changing the minds of your administrators, of your executive staff so that they're willing to invest in these things. They need to understand that in order to use technology you have to have the skills and you have to have the tools and you have to find the funding to make it a priority. So winning hearts and minds is the way to do that. And quick wins is really the place to start. So for that I would recommend taking a look at dashboarding like Power BI or Click or Tableau. Those are three great dashboarding tools. That's a great way to win over management because suddenly they have access to information about how they're working and they're going to say, oh well can I have this too? And you can say, well we don't collect that. We don't know that. You've got to invest if you want to actually get that information out of it. Another thing for direct service staff is to focus on process automation. How can you make it so that they're not doing so much manual repetitive drudgery? How can we automatically integrate data systems or just copy things from this spreadsheet to another? Those are the kinds of quick wins that will really change the culture in organization quickly. And the other is don't worry so much immediately about hiring or having the skill on staff. Don't wait until you have that in order to move forward. So start by finding a volunteer or a board member, someone who maybe has this expertise and bring them into your staff meetings or into your management meetings. Try to integrate them a little bit and help you find your way to having this expertise. It's not a replacement for having the expertise, but it's going to help you get there and it's going to be a stand-in until you can manage it. So one final reminder, I think I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't leave this with you, is that technology is a tool. It's not a goal. So technology is great. It can do amazing things. It's not going to solve the world's problems. I don't think it is, and you shouldn't think it is. So you have to be careful so that technology for the sake of technology doesn't take over. And keep it grounded in your constituents. Keep it grounded in doing good work. Okay, so I'd love to get some feedback from you. We did this pre-question where I kind of asked where you thought your nonprofit is. I'd love to know if your perceptions have changed at all. Can you answer this poll question for me? Again, thanks everyone for such active participation. Yeah, really, real quick. We still have some questions. I think some folks are going to want some recommendations from you, Sam, because they're so impressed with the information you've shared. Well, this is the best outcome I could have hoped for. We have a lot of ideas on small changes you can make, and that's where to start. Don't get lost in the big picture. Focus on small changes for now. So I think, Susan, you've got some more content. This is my information, which you'll have. Feel free to reach out to me. This is what I care about. My name is Sam, and that's my email address right there. And with that, Susan, I'll turn it over to you, and then I'm happy to take questions at the end. Great. Thanks so much. There are a lot of folks who are looking for some personal recommendations in terms of the types of software that they might use for particular activities. So we're going to chat out Sam's email address. He encourages you to connect with him directly because I don't know if we'll have enough time to get to all of those questions. Before I run down the list of the questions that Sam can address quickly, I wanted to ask everyone, if you could chat into us one thing you learned in this webinar today, I know, hone it, just whittle it down to one, or something that you are going to implement based on what Sam has talked about. And as you do that, I'm actually just going to roll through my slides very quickly so we can take some questions. We do encourage you to go to our on-demand courses which are at techsoup.course.tc.com slash catalog. You can see a lot of free courses where you can learn about design or tech planning, a lot of what Sam has talked about on that site, and we'll chat that out as well. Be sure to check out our upcoming webinars on our webinar events page, and we'll chat that out as well. Sam, so I'm going to see if we can get to some of these questions. The first question that came in a little while ago, actually at the beginning of your presentation, some folks are looking for small grants for technology solutions for nonprofits, or how could this nonprofit get advice on what technology they should invest money in? Yeah, so I'm going to actually do a plug for Tech Impact on that because I feel really strongly that we provide a service that's hard to get anywhere else. We have a flat rate project that's pretty inexpensive that can help you look at the market and understand all the different off-the-shelf tools that are available to you and make a selection about what's best for you. So if you need a project management tool or a donor management tool or a constituent relationship management or you need outcomes measurement, we can help you look at all the different tools that are in the market and figure out what's best for you. But I'll also say it's not rocket science. The way to start with that project is to document what your needs are. So what is the problem we're trying to solve? What are the features we need in order to solve that problem? And what's our budget? And then you go on the Internet and you Google, and you create a huge list of things in a spreadsheet, and you work through to narrow that list based on that criteria that you put together. And you also want to ask organizations that are doing work similar to yours. And I have found that if you just email like an Office Administrator or Director of Operations of a nonprofit in a similar sector, they are more than happy to tell you about their attempts to solve that problem for their organization. And you can learn a lot that way. Great, Sam. I think we've chatted out the link to Tech Impact for folks to check out your organization and also your email address. I did want to take a minute because we're almost out of time to see if we had any other questions that weren't software specific. It looks like there's a question about Power BI. A lot of folks were asking questions about data visualization, easy for me to say, data visualization tools that connect to their database. And I think you mentioned a couple. Data visualization webinar as well. So Tableau and Power BI are the two easiest to use for nonprofits. And if you go to our website, techimpact.org, there's two things you should take a look at. One is that under the About tab you will see a link to our annual report which is a Power BI dashboard. So you can get an idea of what data visualization can do. I'll chat that also into the window. But another thing is that we have a webinar on data visualization that will help you understand what the different tools are and their strengths and weaknesses and how they might be used. So that's a free webinar. You might just want to take a look at that. And we offer training on Power BI and Tableau through the TechSoup catalog. Yes, and you know what else Sam, your Jordan has done some webinars for us on Power BI. And we also have an article. And I can attach a link to that article to the follow-up email that we'll be sending out because we do need to wrap up. We are just out of time. But Sam will provide some of the links that he just chatted out today to me. And I'm also going to try to curate very quickly a couple of links to Power BI webinars here at TechSoup that Tech Impact has helped us with. Also some articles that we put together about data visualization. Also in partnership with Tech Impact. We just do a whole lot together. And we should get that email out to you by the end of our business day. So you'll be able to review this recording, check out all these amazing links, and also see Sam's PowerPoint. Sam, you know, we always chat at the beginning before we get started how fun it is to work with you. And it really is true, the engagement that you get with our audience, I can see from the chat that you've just been amazing and you're so generous with your time and your expertise. I just want to send a sincere thank you from TechSoup and our audience. And I also want to send out a thank you to Alicia on the back end. She's been quickly trying to chat out a few things and she's relatively new here at TechSoup. So it's been a great experience for her as well. So Sam, I don't know if you have any parting words. I appreciate that. No, just keep looking into this. This is definitely the direction we're going and it's our responsibility. Great. And a special thanks to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. And of course to each of you that has stayed on the line, thank you so much for giving up an hour of your time. We hope you've walked away with a lot of valuable information. Tell us about what you thought about this event. When you X out of this event, there will be a pop-up. It will be a survey. Please give us some feedback so that we can share that with Sam so we can continue to get better to serve your needs because we do that in partnership with Tech Impact. So thanks. Have a great day and enjoy the rest of your week and have a good weekend. Bye-bye.