 And the conference is being recorded. There we go. You should have heard our lady recording you. And facilitating the webinar with me will be Anna Yaker who is also from TechSoup, the co-director of our Green Tech Initiative. We'll be featuring two presenters. He's Morehouse from the Ella Baker Center and Matthew Bauer from Better World Telecom. And I will go ahead and let them start chatting. For those of you who have raised your hands, you're welcome to put those hands down at this point. If you do have a question throughout the webinar that you don't need to chat through, you can raise your hand. And one of the people monitoring the chat can follow up with you directly. So I'm going to pass it over to Anna Yaker to get started. Hello, and welcome to the Telegrain Your Work webinar. My name is Anna Yaker. And as Becky said, I'm the co-director of TechSoup Global Green Tech Initiative. Through Green Tech we educate nonprofits and libraries about how to use technology to reduce environmental impact, like reducing your travel, and how to reduce the environmental impact of technology. For example, using power management on your computer. Sorry, I'm just getting the hang of this tool as well. This month we are hosting a travel reduction campaign. It's an educational campaign to help nonprofits and libraries and other social benefit organizations discover ways to save money, reduce travel, and be more effective in your work. We have four weekly topics, virtual meetings, online training, telecommuting, and online collaboration. If you want to read more about them or follow forum threads or ask questions, please go to www.TechSoup.org slash Green Tech slash Travel. And again, we'll send that link out to you afterwards in a follow-up email. Because we all learn differently, we strive to provide the information in a variety of ways. And we also attempt to identify tools that are either free for nonprofits or offer a nonprofit discount. So we present the information through articles and blog posts, discussion forums, and product analysis as well as pointing you directly to those tools. So I encourage you to check out our website for more information. We are joined today by Matthew Bauer, an expert in modern telecommunications and Hayes Morehouse who works at a nonprofit who has implemented some of these technologies. You'll get to hear his case study, his take on how they have implemented these technologies. Matt Bauer is a social entrepreneur who has worked to improve communities in the U.S. and abroad for both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors over the past 20 years. And before co-founding Better World Telecom, Matt served in a series of leadership roles in the telecommunications and power industries including the AES Corporation, NetTel, Communications, and ValueCom. He has helped to start or significantly grow a number of nonprofits over the past 10 years. And Hayes Morehouse has been the Director of Technology at the Ella Baker Center since 2005. He has transformed the agency's use of technology, making the organization more cohesive and efficient. Before that, he was an IT consultant for nonprofits around the San Francisco Bay Area, working to improve their IT infrastructure as well as helping them to collect, maintain, and use records of their services and impacts. At this time, we'd like to get some information from you. Let me get to the right slide. How many of you have staff or volunteers who work remotely at least one day a week? Please raise your hand. Wow. We're seeing a lot of people raising their hands. I'd say, what, about 50 people there, Becky? Yeah, that's great. And then, which technologies do you already use in your office? Please chat in your answers. Are you using POTS system, plain old telephone system, voice over IP, virtual PBX, or VPN? Go ahead and chat in. Okay, so we're seeing POTS, VPN, phone, voice, cell phones, VPN, old PBX. Oh, I see some Skype users and GoToMeeting users. Great. Remote desktop. Yeah, mobile phones came up a lot. It matters a lot. Blackberries, Google locks. Great. GoToMyPC, trios. Great. Thank you for the feedback. That's helpful for us to know what people are already using. Lots of Blackberry users out there. It's great to see you using those mobile technologies. Voice and old telephone. Okay. Now I'd like to turn it over to Matt Bauer of Better World Telecom. Matt, are you there? Great. Yep, sure. Thank you, Anna. And thank you all for my coming through. You okay, Anna? Yep. Okay, great. Well, thank you all for being on this call and webinar. And what I'd like to do is, it was great that we could see some of the responses there in terms of some of the technologies you're using and in terms of what level of remote work. It seems like this group has had an adoption at least of the more open work concepts and not everybody driving to four walls every day and a whole myriad of technologies too. But I saw a lot of plain old telephone systems in there and opportunities to potentially start moving towards more exciting technologies. So what I'd like to do over the next 10 minutes or so is really paint a high level picture of the opportunity here in terms of the concepts that we're talking about in terms of we use the terms open work or telegreening and we talk about it and our company has better work as well. So I'll sort of use those interchangeably and then provide some ground level examples and tools that can be used to accomplish moving organizations from where they might be or where they are today to a more open work environment and with more flexibility to do these things and just more or less generate the what ifs. We're not going to be able to show you every detail and every way of doing this and that's what all these great follow ups are for. So it's at least get the creative juices flowing here and moving on to some of the industry folks here in the telecom industry. You'll see a term here that I use ICT which is information and communications technology as a sector and that is really anything that touches the network. So whether it's your PC or phones or data centers or printers or routers that's sort of the catch all. So there are a number of parties now both inside our industry and outside as you'll see on the World Wildlife Fund report here that just came out that are estimating the carbon savings to be substantial in terms of implementing much more proactively ICT technology solutions, telegreening solutions and I'll get to some of those exact numbers there. But the World Wildlife Fund reports up to a 50% reduction in the US carbon emissions in the next few decades just from a ramp up in adoption. It's not like we all you know the point of this is not to say everybody go work from home never travel and don't go see anybody again and we can't have human contact. I mean nobody is saying that this is more of just incremental change and the incremental change has a serious impact on the physical CO2 emissions that we have. So we'll provide some links to some of these reports if you want to dive in more in the follow-up as well. So a simple statement that we can start from and I think it's a great place to sort of get ourselves at which is if we move around too much and there are too many buildings this is kind of the root cause of what's creating most of the CO2 at least here in the US. So if we remove the intermediate components that folks are talking about hybrids, hybrids, offsets, solar, wind and so on it still remains the transportation and buildings are really the core problem and this demonstrates what I mean and that buildings and transportation contribute about 75% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US today and our industry or the sector that has the opportunity to really influence this is about 2.5% of the global footprint so most of the companies that are in that space are really focused in on that 2.5% and lowering their costs where the opportunity there is to affect the other 97.5%. And again you'll have this presentation and I'm kind of the high level stuff here I'm kind of blowing by but this is more or less just to get your framework in mind that about half of that footprint in the ICT world that is just printers and computers. So data centers and all the other telephony infrastructure and all that makes up about the other half. So with that frame in mind we start driving more into how the organization works and what these technologies enable. So if we look at substitution and starting to replace some of our activity with technology and again I stress some of our activity with technology these two factors in terms of our time wasted sitting in traffic, the cost of the economy and back to this World Wildlife Fund report which in one of their scenarios if we just ramped up telecommuting and virtual meetings and did some travel replacement that they've concluded that we could reduce our total greenhouse gas emissions as a country by about 50% in the next two or three decades. So these are very significant numbers and opportunities that we can take back to the organization. So that's sort of a high level component. Now let's start drilling into what we can do today how we can affect our individual organizations and that's the important piece in that the benefits of this are really twofold. It's both the greenhouse gas reduction and the cost and the flexibility that it brings to the organization. So some of the tools we can use for this are Web Audio Video Conferencing we're doing Web and Audio right here on our Webinar. Video conferencing is becoming much more cost effective and works really well for certain organizations, unified communications, voice over internet as an enabler kind of an underlying technology of this, virtual PBX and mobility and wire line enabling things like telecommuting, mobile workforce, having more flexible office capabilities and also removing some of the equipment and wiring and heating and cooling requirements that we have at the location. So let's define a few of these components, unified communications is really bringing the idea of bringing together phone, fax, voice, internet, email, I'm sorry, voice mail and some email components centralizing that communications. It's really agnostic to what technology is being used and communicates with any device whether it's a PDA or a cell phone, a landline, a voice over internet phone and think about kind of pulling the infrastructure and the phone numbers of the organization up into the cloud and that when you do that it creates a lot of flexibility for the organization both how you work and lowers costs in other ways operationally. Voice over internet, a lot of people are used VoIP as a term and you ask 100 people and they'll have 100 different answers. It's really just a transmission protocol. It's the method by which a lot of this happens is taking your voice and making it into ones and zeros and transmitting it and decoding it. So that's really what VoIP is at the core and then VirtualPBX is taking that private branch exchange that's in most folks' offices and so on in your telephone closet or computer room and pulling that up into the cloud and giving you all those voice mail call handling phone tree features. So this type of planning really lends itself to looking at how the organization works and taking a holistic viewpoint of how we can change how we work to be more efficient to save costs and to save on our greenhouse gas emissions too. It's very important that we have quality costs and accountability because the users and the organization and employees need to have a quality solution too. So focusing on this as a holistic solution with the different types of options that are out there, increasing productivity, how do we affect other parts of the organization not just our IT and telecom costs but really making the whole organization more cost effective and these are some examples of that increasing the results oriented work environment, lowering OPEX and CAPEX and more satisfied employees because of results. So one thing we've done is we've gone out into a better world and we commissioned a study with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute that's now almost complete, taken a street level view of this and saying, hey, what are some organizations that have done this with success? Let's model some organizations as well and see what the results are for a small, medium and large incorporating some of these technologies and that report will be available via TechSoup here real soon. This is an output of the model. It's not very easy to read but I just wanted to sort of show what the different categories are. We took a 25 person organization and modeled the different savings and by just a slight uptick of using open work concepts, five of the 25 starting to go remote, you save 31,000 pounds of CO2 and the benefits are $57,000 to the organization per year from just some slight adjustments and some travel replacement with technology as well. Sun Micro did this, another example that we use in the study. Half their workforce works two to three days of per week. They saved almost 70 million in cost, reduced their real estate because that's the whole thing is that increasing productivity, reducing the amount of physical space we need because not everybody's there all the time and then what happens then is you reduce your CO2 output as you can see from the slide there and they did it almost 24,000 tons. So in conclusion, this is really a technical social issue as much as it is a technical issue getting folks to think a little bit differently about what is work and how we work. The collateral effects of this really are you spend more time in communities and we can be more supportive of concepts like local living economies that Bali is promoting, also another organization, World Blue promoting more democratic and transparent workplaces. So this really does boil down into a great concept for organizations to improve in many different ways and the conclusion open work is better for people on the planet and directly has an impact on operational expenses for the nonprofit. That is it. Thank you. Thank you very much for... Thank you, Matt. So we had one question from the audience that I'd like to ask you right now. Could you please define for us OPEX and COPEX? Operational expenses and capital expenditures. So operational just more or less the costs of running the organization day to day and then capital expenditures, purchasing equipment and different items to run the infrastructure. So on an operational side, things like rent and other office expenses from month to month can get lowered from more open work concepts as well as the equipment, if you're going virtual PBX or do more conferencing or things like that, you need less equipment in the premise at the same time. Great. And another question from the audience. Did your study include the cost of the systems and time to set them up to enable the working from home? So I think it's that $57,000 that you were talking to on one of your earlier slides. Well, in terms of the virtual PBX systems that we were modeling, the setup costs are minimal. And yes, we took all that into account. The study will be much more detailed in showing all of our assumptions and results and we'll show that. Most of those cost savings don't come from – and this is what we're trying to get folks to think about. The massive changes here are not within the – right now I'm paying $5 for telecom and it's going to go down to $4. My building expense goes down, my heating, my cooling, my productivity goes up, other workforce elements. And these have all been shown in a large scale with a lot of these organizations that have done this. The impacts on the rest of the organization are much more significant than any cost related to the system itself. Excellent. So we'll field some more questions from the audience in a little bit, but I have a couple questions of my own here for you, Matt. So could you describe a couple of telecom problems or concerns that you find that small to medium-sized organizations typically have? Well, I'll focus on at least the small, the small mid, depending on the definition of medium. I'll say that that's probably actually a little bit larger organization. Small organizations typically don't have someone on staff to really tend to this day-to-day and can be really burdened by traditional phone systems that have a heavy burden of when something goes wrong, they have to depend on other third parties to come in and fix them. A lot of the new solutions allow you to make moves, ads, changes, deletes, and things ongoing. So I think from a resource perspective, a lot of folks are still using traditional systems, and they are cumbersome and very limited in terms of what they allow the organization to do. And the second part of that is that it then makes it difficult to really use telecom and IT in a proactive way to make the organization more efficient too. But the problem is a lot of people, when they raise their hand or they chatted about what they have, our estimates, and I don't have an exact number on this, but talking to some industry experts, most folks are still using at least 80-90% or still using what I would deem more traditional solutions, POTS lines and DSL and traditional phone systems that are more expensive to run on a day-to-day basis. A couple of people asked in the chat tool whether increasing telecommuting just transfers the carbon production and use to the individual. And I know I think Jim Lynch is also monitoring our chat and may have responded a little bit, but it would be great if you could talk about what the difference is between having people in the office and transferring to the individual as somebody implied in one of the chat questions and whether that's true or not true or how that kind of impact changes. Well, all the studies that I mentioned earlier, probably a dozen out now in the last year or so, if we're talking about the United States and the dynamics here and how much people drive and commute, just imagine removing a slice. We could put up all the wind farms and solar fields and drive hybrids and so on, and that's great, and it does help incrementally shift that, but if we physically take a percentage of that driving out of the carbon production, the impacts of that are huge versus offsetting them some other way. And the building space reduction, the numbers that I quoted in the Sun Micro take into account all detailed reports that they did, and when you look at the average home or wherever they would be working from, that is all these reports are taking these things into account. It is not, by being able to physically reduce the building space that you're like your home, your home's already there, and in terms of heating and cooling, most homes do not have smart heating and cooling and are being heating and cooled throughout the day. The person sitting there in a home office working a couple days a week is not increasing the burden on the home that much. It's the physical building space that we're replicating by having all this office space all around the country that if we can start staving that off, it will have a huge impact. Thank you, Matt. We'll be able to field a few more questions from the audience a little bit later, but right now I'd like to move on and introduce Hayes. And Hayes is from the Ella Baker Center, and I'll let him introduce himself. And why don't you tell us about why you made the decision to switch to new telecom technologies? Okay, hi. My name is Hayes Morhouse. I'm the Technology Director at the Ella Baker Center. The Ella Baker Center is a strategy and action center working for justice, opportunity, and peace in urban America. We're in Oakland, and we're an organization of about 25 people. And I'm going to talk a little bit about our experience in the last year of switching to a new phone system. So we actually had an interesting experience of what not to do. So I hope people can learn from our mistakes a little bit. We are a voicemail system just stopped working in the middle of last year. And we had to figure out rather quickly what to do. So we kind of looked at our options and figured that we could either repair our old phone system, we could upgrade to an in-house voiceover IP system to replace what we already had with voiceover IP and kind of have it work mostly the same, or we could go with a hosted voiceover IP, which is some of what Matt was talking about earlier. So we thought about this, and repairing our old phone system meant about $5,000 to fix it now, and then about $10,000 more in a couple of years when the rest of the system was basically scheduled to break. I mean, our phone system was about 10 years old when we started. And that's about the lifespan. We got pretty good use out of our voicemail system. And the switching system the guys were telling me would last about 13 years, maybe if we were lucky. So we looked at this and were like, we should just move on to something new. So then we thought about bringing it, having something in-house that would run the voiceover IP, would that save us money. And the problem with that is that I would then be responsible for maintaining it and keeping it up, or we would have to have somebody that would come in and do it. And mostly that just takes up staff time. As a relatively small organization, the way anything that we can push out to other people that allows us to focus on our mission more interested in doing that. So then we looked at the hosted voiceover IP system, and eventually decided that that's what we wanted to do. So it works. I don't know. I think some people out there have a pretty good idea how it works, but for those that don't, I'll just give you a little rundown about what we've learned about the hosted voiceover IP. It doesn't actually directly cost us a lot less than our old, we call them POTS, but basically we had 10 AT&T phone lines coming into the building. And a system that switched between all of them. And that was costing us a couple thousand dollars a month to run all that with the long distance and all that stuff. So now we have a voiceover IP system where we have each individual phone that has much greater functionality than what we had before for about the same cost. So basically we switched to something that had very limited capabilities, was all in-house to something that gave us really great functionality. And the interesting thing, I don't know if we were really clear about this before, but what's really cool about in terms of voiceover IP, and especially the hosted voiceover IP, is that the phones themselves are the system. All you have to do to make the phone work and connect as if you're in the office with your extension, with your voicemail, with all that stuff is plug it into an Internet and turn the phone on. And the phone connects to the servers and does its magic, and then just gets the phone number automatically. So we could put somebody in New York City, and people will call them on their Oakland 510 area code and have no idea that they're over there. And our receptionist could transfer to them as if they were in the building entirely seamlessly. So it can give a really professional feel for people who are working at home. So there's nothing that's calling around. There's none of this kind of disconnected feel to it. It all is very integrated. So we're happy that we kind of have these new phones that provide us, before we didn't have any kind of functionality at all we had, we didn't even have a caller ID. So we're excited that we have all these fancy features and stuff. So our telecommuting package, I mean I don't actually have users that are off site all the time. I have people that work at home one or two days a week. We do have one person that lives in Sacramento and it's about an hour and a half drive for him to get to work. So we have him work at home sometimes. So what we do is we have sort of a combination of technologies that we use. The first is the phones that I've gone over. And then we do have a VPN which is a simple VPN that just came with a router that we have. We selected a router that came with a minimal VPN. And I'm very careful about, you can only connect to this from the computer that we give you and make sure that people, in terms of security, that we don't have other people logging into that VPN. And the other thing that we have to make things more integrated is we actually use Google's hosted Gmail functions for our in-house. So again, that's all. It's just basically internal. The browser serves as your main web client. So you can be working in the office, you can be working at home. And then of course Google has Google Docs so that allows a lot of the collaboration so you don't have to go to the VPN to get to the server. So that's how that works. We actually had a question I wanted to ask you to reiterate one point. People have been asking, did you say you can take your phone home, plug it into the internet, and it connects you to the office? It connects you as if you were sitting in the office. You can take the phone to a hotel, theoretically, and plug it in. And if your hotel will get you online in a normal way, then you can connect exactly as if you were at the office. And also there seems to be a little confusion too about what is VPN. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean and how that's a side? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it's a way to connect to your office externally. So most of the resources that people have are here in the office. So the shared files, the printers, and stuff like that are on-site. So if somebody is working from home and they want to share a file with somebody that's either working at another home or working in the office, they can connect through the VPN to the office and get that information. And I think what people most, we are trying to figure out ways around using the traditional VPN because I think they are pretty, they're security concerns. So that's why we're trying to, we're shifting to using Google Docs for some of the shared document creation and working collaboratively. Great. To jump back to the phone, a number of people have been chatting in questions about how big is this phone, or can you use a regular landline, or do you need a special phone? Is it the size of the cell phone, or is it some desk size phone? So if you want to share a little bit more detail about what your specific phone system is like, and there's another question here about internet connection and how much speed you need to actually support something like that. Okay, so the phones that we use are books basically like your regular office desk phone. There might be travel versions that you could take with you. The other cool thing about the hosted voiceover IP is that you can have it transfer calls to your cell phone. So there's all kind of fancy stuff that you can start doing with it once you get the system installed. But our phones, and the phone basically just plugs in, it cannot work on a regular telephone line. It has to be connected to an internet connection. And the internet needs to be, your basic broadband will work. I mean in our office what we did was install a separate T1 line just for the phone. We have 20 people here, but we only need 20 people talking at once. So that will allow about 10 to 12 people simultaneously making phone calls without degraded call quality. Great. Now a couple of people asked about Skype, and whether or not this is what you're talking about is that the famous Skype, or is that different from Skype? And another person also asked about what voice service you actually use, what company is your provider. So if you could kind of address both of those, that would be great. It's different from Skype. Skype uses the computer itself to make a connection. And you can also do the same thing now through Google Chat actually. So Google has a video chat, which is another, actually incidentally is another way that we sort of integrate the workplace. It's like you can either call people up or you can just chat with them sometimes it's quicker. So what was the other question? I'm sorry. The other question was just what service you use for your VoIP? So we actually use Better World Telecom. We did a lot of consideration. We also looked at several other companies before we decided to go with them. But what it ended up being is we wanted to go with a company that we felt was going to provide great service. And so Better World came out and talked to us, and there's people that you can call or cell phone and they'll get right back to you if you have a problem. We didn't feel like we were going to get that from another company. Great. Well thank you for that. And a couple of people mentioned Skype on the chat and thought it was worth mentioning that Skype also has phones that you can use with that service too. And we do have a number of resources on TechSoup's website both in the Green Tech section and on our blog and some articles that do compare some unified communications options. And talk about things like using Google Voice in video chat, or Skype, or Wimba, or webinar tools. So there are a lot of resources available out there beyond what we're covering in this call as well. I think we have a few other questions that people submitted. Anna, if you had something you wanted to interject with as well. Yeah, actually before we move on to all the audience questions, what were some of the challenges that you experienced while implementing your new system? So it did take us a while to settle on a provider because we had to go through the process of getting bids and talking to different people. So that took a while. Even after we decided what kind of system we wanted to use, then we had to have the other problem with deciding which provider to use. My experience was it pays to kind of go back and forth and get some different bids and talk to different salespeople and definitely make sure you know what you're getting into. Almost all providers require a contract. So I think ours were three years. So do be careful making sure you understand everything that you're signing when you get into the contract. And then getting the phones and cells installed was a project. You want to have it be pretty seamless. You want to get all the phones installed and then make the switch over to a new phone system. And we were lucky to have some people helping us that made it pretty easy. But it's a whole new system until things were a little bit complicated but it worked out. And then the other thing was getting rid of the old phones took a little bit of doing. Because what do you do with them? So we didn't want to just throw them away. So I ended up finding somebody on Craigslist who paid $150 for 30 phones. She probably sold for $100 each. But there might be more creative ways of doing that but it's still like what are you going to do with them? Yeah, I'd just like to jump in there. For getting rid of old phones there are a number of different ways to do it. Re-selling them, re-use is the highest form of recycling. So if there's somebody out there who could benefit from your old phones that's fantastic. There might also be refurbishers out there who could take some of these older phone systems and rework them and get them out to organizations that might need them. But otherwise please work with a responsible recycler to make sure that your old electronics don't just get dumped in the landfill. And you can find some recyclers and refurbishers on the TechSoup website. We have a list of a variety of providers around the U.S. That's great. We decided that we didn't want to try to sell them one by one so I just found somebody who was refailing all of them. So we did some of that stuff. That's great. We had a few folks asked about what you approximated the cost to be of implementing and maintaining your voice at your organization. Do you have an estimate or solid numbers on kind of what the overall cost was for you? We didn't run the numbers on what it would cost. Are we meaning if we wanted to host it ourselves? The nice thing about having it hosted by somebody else is that it makes the costs really easy. We just pay, I think it's a couple thousand a month for our whole phone system and our internet and everything. And then that's it. So it's not easy. We didn't run the numbers on what it would cost to have somebody have the in-house phone system and then we didn't do all that stuff. We looked at our systems and decided that we didn't actually have the staff time at all to deal with that. So we just didn't do it. Okay. I think one person clarified a little bit and said what about the startup cost for the equipment or baseline cost versus after the transition cost. So you say monthly it cost about a couple thousand dollars to keep it running. So I guess startup costs would be the other part of that. Does it cost extra for all of the phones and transitioning all of that? I think to get an idea, especially for smaller nonprofits who are looking at whether or not it's financially feasible to take the plunge. I mean the nice thing is that the phones themselves were a couple hundred dollars each but that's about the same as you're going to pay for a regular digital PBX phone. Like our phones used to cost 150 dollars each. But then there's no other equipment or very little other equipment that you need to buy. So when we installed it we just installed a new T1 line just for the phone. A T1 line for folks that don't know is a type of internet connection that's very reliable and has good speeds both up and down. So both those things are what you want for your phone system. And then that's it. That's all the equipment that we chose to install. There are other systems that you can install if you want to get, you know, if you have more users and you want to make sure that the phone system is working, that the traffic is routed properly, that there are other equipment that you can buy. But that's all we decided to buy. So it is costing us about $5,000. There were a couple of other people who just wanted to know what operating systems you're using are using Windows, Macs, Linux, and have you found any complications if you have people running multiple platforms in thinking these things up whether it's your VPN or your voice or any of the technologies we're talking about that you've implemented? We run almost all Macs. And in terms of the VPN, there's a built-in client with the Mac that we use, the same as the built-in client for Windows. And the phone systems don't really interact directly with the operating system. The nice thing is in terms of some of the other stuff, like with the Google stuff, obviously it's cross-platform. It's all run through the browser. So it does help us integrate a lot actually. Excellent. And a question for both of you, either one of you who has some good tips on this. How would an NPO or a library implement some of these technologies? Are there some good first steps? I'll start it out real quick. The thing about this is it doesn't really discriminate on the type of organization from that perspective. It's really the factors that affect what decisions you make are more related to how the organization works really and how many people are there. Are they there all the time? And then you sort of back out from that. The voice channels have a certain amount of capacity that they take when you're on the phone inside the T1 or larger pipe or small. I mean, you can do this over a DSL if it's a small organization as well. But you're integrating things into one platform as opposed to having two separate networks, a phone network and an internet. So it's more efficient and typically saves, can save money just on that front, but it's not always the case. So in terms of the planning, you do an audit of the organization and say, what are you doing today? What do you want to do one year, two years, three years out? What are your constraints? What are your challenges? And then you take the appropriate products and create a solution which all the technology is out there today. It's finding an organization or group of organizations that can give it to you in a quality fashion that you can live with and at a price that's attractive as well. So starting with an audit of the organization and the current communications needs and requirements are essential. So Matt, can you just clarify who would do those audits? Would they talk to their telecom provider or their independent consultants who does that, or do they find somebody who can help? I see organizations that do both. You can go to your existing provider if they have all the tools that you need and consultants can help as well. I think this is, you know, there's enough information out there that if you treat it as a project and do a thorough job like Hayes did that you can probably come to the conclusions on your own. I don't know that this is necessarily a job that you need a consultant, but if it's complex it does help. It definitely helps to get somebody to go and root out all the solutions so that you can at least take a look at them and so that can be cost effective and help save potentially making some mistakes like Hayes had alluded to. So both ways have value for sure. Go ahead. I think from inside the organization, I mean if I had to do it over again I would start with the budgeting process. I don't know, I mean at our organization and lots of organizations, we kind of do a budget once a year and then that's what we've got to work with for the year. And so if I had it to do over again I would start putting the money in the budget like doing research on my own about how much this is going to cost and then put the money in the budget and make the case for why it's important to spend this money now. I mean the piece of information I didn't know was how old our old phone system was and what the expected lifespan of that. I think if I had known that information, I mean I was already thinking that we should get a new phone system. I just didn't realize that it was as imminent as we should have been more proactive on it. So I mean in terms of like a lot of, I mean it's the same as any technology purchase. You know, you figure out what your costs are and then you make the case of management to ask for the money. And I think to add to that in terms of looking at budgets, the interesting opportunity that does exist is to now take it outside of just the silo of what are your physical telecom and IT costs and then look at the rest of the organization and say all right, well we're spending $10,000 a month on our lease, we're spending, you know, our folks are driving on average 10 to 20 hours a week or something and then look at other efficiencies and heating and cooling and things like that and say well all right, if we implement a set of technologies that allow us to have a more flexible, that at least enable us to have a more flexible type of environment, we can potentially lower these costs. And one of the chat items I saw is as far as funders, those are the types of proactive, because you can only, if you're trying to get blood from a stone, well here's one way that maybe you can ring a bit more of it out and those kinds of activities look very positive to funders as well and could potentially lower the overhead and make the organization more nimble going forward. One of the other cost savings that we haven't talked about yet is that it actually can reduce some staff time. So we had a full-time receptionist because the only way to reach somebody in the building was through the extension. So when we implemented the new system we asked for direct dial line. So now people can either call the main number and talk to the receptionist or go through the phone system and dial the extension or if they know their person's number they can just dial them directly. So we've taken the full-time receptionist to, she now is part-time receptionist and part-time volunteer coordinator. So we've actually been able to free up some, I mean a person's staff time. And that's a huge savings. That alone probably pays for the phone system. That's incredible. And there was a follow-up question to that about just clarifying. So when they have that direct dial their extension can follow them. If they take their phone home and plug it in from their home office it's the same extension. Or if they set up follow me it can follow them on their whichever phone they designate. Is that true? That's exactly right. Excellent. We've had a few security questions come in both with VoIP and VPN. So what are some of the security concerns and what can nonprofits do to address those? In terms of VoIP, I don't know. The only thing I can think of is that the phones themselves are little computers basically. They're much more complicated than the other phones were. Matt can answer whether or not there's any chance of the phones themselves being infiltrated. I don't think so. It's kind of like your cell phone. It's much more complicated than a regular phone but you're not really concerned about somebody infiltrating it. That's true. It's difficult to hack into a device that far down. The thing that people, one of the common issues we have with some of our customers is that if they have a PBX that the PBX on site, the phone switching device on site that people, it's kind of amazing. I don't know if it's happening to anybody here on the call. If it has, go ahead and raise your hand slightly because it's a terrible thing when it happens. They can come in through the voicemail and then all of a sudden you have a thousand people dialing international calls outside your PBX and you've just got a $15,000 phone bill. Those kinds of things go away because you're not taking the risk or responsibility for that piece of equipment anymore. The piece of equipment that's switching your calls and handling that now is in the distributed data centers, wire centers of the main providers and they have the security at that level. These are huge computing systems and servers that handle millions of calls. People aren't hacking into those. I've never heard of that actually happening in the industry. They're very advanced computers, much more difficult to hack into and it's not the organization's responsibility at that level either. The level of security from things like that is definitely higher and it's putting the burden on the provider as opposed to you having to have the burden of proof and of refund for when that happens. As far as VPN, it is actually a security problem. I deal with that by really limiting the number of people that have it and making sure that they only connect to it using their own computers and really using industry standard tools. I would say that down the road in the next few years, people most of the time are still connecting over standard VPN where you get full access to the network but most of the time that's not actually necessary. I think that people are going to be moving to other types of VPN. Thank you. And final question, we have just one moment here, but people were asking about if you guys have seen a loss in productivity when people are working from home. Is there any expectation to help pay for employees' costs to set up their home office? We actually usually see – we have people that work from home one day a week just so they can get work done because there are some things that you actually can do much better at home. You can do any office in terms of really focusing on a writing assignment or getting some of that kind of work done. Whereas in the office, people are coming around and asking you questions and distracting you. So for certain types of work, you actually see productivity enhancement. And I think that that's – I think that it seems as though the metric I've heard is it takes about 15 minutes to – and I forgot what it's called – get into the zone of where you're really – you're deep in concentration, you're getting work done, and somebody disturbing that or what have you, it becomes difficult to keep that level up. And there's certain work that is definitely more beneficial in the group environment versus remotely or home, whatever it may be. So – but the savings in commute time, the studies we've seen of companies that have done this, Best Buy did this with all their corporate – they have sort of a laboratory of doing this because they told all their employees to go home and work from home in Minneapolis. Well, about 30% don't participate, but most of them do. Their productivity went up, their healthcare costs went down, their innovation levels went up, their retention went through the roof, their employees were happier, working harder, spending more time. I actually heard it on the downside of this is people say that they end up working too much and that they have to kind of stave that off because now they're unable to sort of work anywhere anytime, and you have to be careful not to be checking in and out at will. So that's one of the downsides that's in our report with BGI from some of the interviews we did. And Matt, have you ever heard of companies paying for the cost of home offices? I don't know. I know personally for our folks that we support in our company. We have a number of folks that work mostly remote. And we outfit them with phones and computers and whatever their link is at home. And that's really the extent of it in terms of other elements. There hasn't been a lot of data that I've seen on that. This is still kind of new frontier stuff, and it's look out 50 years. The bottom line with this, you look out 50 years and this is how the world is going to be, we're not going to all be sitting in cars driving in every day. Technology is going to be to a level where a lot of the new generations coming up are used to different dynamics and things. We're going to be there at some point. We're going to fly less because we'll have video conferencing on demand. We'll have meetings that can be pulled together. It's just a matter do we want to get there sooner rather than later. And realize the cost benefits and the carbon benefits. So some of the details are important, but there's not a lot of data out there yet. That's great. I think we're just about out of time here, so we're going to be wrapping up. We have collected all of the questions that people have submitted. Hopefully we were able to answer a lot of them. But if not, please post your follow-up questions in our emerging technologies forums, our community forums at the URL on the screen. This will also be sent out along with the slides, the archives recording of this session, and other resources in an emitter this afternoon. So please look for that in your inbox. There are lots of resources available through TechSoup on these exact topics. So if you're looking to set up VoIP or trying to figure out what unified communications can work for you or blog, or find a new phone system, there's lots of articles, there's lots of blog posts. You can find VPN systems and software in TechSoup stock. You can join our community forums to continue that discussion. And you can participate in other events like this one. We have a webinar coming up next week on Microsoft's donation program. So please feel free to register and join us for that. I'd like to thank our speakers for their participation. And thanks, Anna. Thanks, Jim Lynch, Christopher Posteloff, and Karen Gershers from TechSoup who have been helping to monitor the chat throughout this event. And I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. It's made possible by ReadyTalk, which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology through 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 which you've all just experienced. So thank you everybody for joining us today. And like I said, you'll be receiving this follow-up information in an email shortly, but the conversation can continue in our online forums, so please join us there. Thank you much, and have a great day. Thank you.