 Welcome to New Year, New Tech Plan, Mission-Driven Technology Planning. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. And I am in sunny San Francisco today and happy to be your host for this webinar. I am joined today by two of my esteemed colleagues from TechSoup Canada, our partner in Toronto that runs a program throughout Canada. And they really are super to work with and I love having them as colleagues to be able to call on to share their expertise with our audience. Whether you are in the US or Canada or someplace else joining us from around the world, their expertise is universal I think. So I'm really glad to have them. The first of our presenters will be Tierney. She is responsible for the day-to-day running of TechSoup Canada. Her goal is to build technology capacity in the nonprofit sector. She regularly blogs and speaks at nonprofit webinars and conferences. She also has experienced developing software in the corporate sector and has a degree in software engineering from the University of Waterloo. So we are glad to have her joining us. Also joining today is Joyce Sue who oversees TechSoup Canada's external communications. So that includes running email campaigns, blogs, social media, and events. So she has a ton of experience doing the hands-on work of getting your message out and helping plan how to best do that, picking the tools and things like that. So she has experience in the charitable sector and understands what it means to wear multiple hats having been an event planner, program developer, and fundraiser herself. She has a deep love for the world of philanthropy and seeks to help the nonprofit sector be more efficient and effective with technology. So again a great talent to have joining us today. And again my name is Becky and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here. And I've been with TechSoup Global for coming on 7 years prior to that spend a decade working at small nonprofits wearing a variety of hats in 4 different nonprofits in Washington D.C. and then later in Oakland, California where I live. So I am very pleased to be your host today. You'll also see assisting with chat, Alibaz Deakin who is an interactive events and video producer here at TechSoup. She'll be there to answer your questions and help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. I mentioned that we at TechSoup Global are here in our headquarters in San Francisco and that Tierney and Joyce are in Toronto. But go ahead and chat into us to let us know where you are so we can have an idea of where you are all joining from today. We know you can't see the chat messages coming in. You can just see what we put out to you. But if there are tips or resources or advice, experiences that you share that we think are useful for the rest of our audience to know, we'll go ahead and chat those back out. We have people joining from all over the U.S., Colorado, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, California, Oregon, Missouri, San Diego, that's a city, not a state, Florida, Virginia, all over. So we're really glad to have you all with us today. I have some people rooting for their favorite teams. Go Hawks. Is that the Seahawks? I don't know my sports, sorry. So thanks so much for being with us. And a quick look at our agenda. I'll do an introduction to TechSoup and what we do. Then we'll have an opportunity to hear from you around your technology planning and what's important to you. Then we'll go ahead and launch into how to access your current technology use, look at some case studies, and hear some tips on technology planning and how to use it best. So TechSoup Global is a network of 63 partner NGOs around the world serving nonprofits, libraries, and social benefit organizations in 121 countries. We work to connect and get technology in the hands of you, the people who are serving your communities and doing great work and social good around the world. You can see where we are around the world, many places. So if you're joining from someplace outside of the U.S., you may want to go to TechSoupGlobal.org to find if you have a local partner in your country that can serve you with technology donations and resources as well. You can see a bit about our impact that we have saved the NGO sector more than $4.8 billion in technology products and grants. So I'm proud to have been both a TechSoup user when I was in those small nonprofits and also a TechSoup staff person now. And you can find out more about our product donation programs at TechSoup.org. Or again, if you're joining from outside the U.S. to check one of those countries to see if there's a program where you live. Now on to the topic of the day. Do you have a TechPlan at your organization? Go ahead and answer honestly, not aspirationally. Honestly, do you have one and is it solid? Or maybe you have one sort of informally, maybe you don't at all, or you might have something else to say about it. So go ahead and chat in the comments if there's something else you'd like to share. I'll let everybody have an opportunity to respond here by clicking one of those radio buttons. So hopefully we can get some information. We have lots of people chatting in nose, nose, nose. I wish. Yes, informally. We're working to make it serious. Emily comments in the chat that it only comes out at certain times. And then Catherine comments we're working to put our first TechPlan together. And some people have started but not yet flushed them out. We have one but no one outside the Tech Department knows about it. Oh, we know that's a problem, isn't it? I'm going to go ahead and show the results on screen. We have about 85 people in here right now. And it looks like almost half of you have no TechPlan and about 45% slightly less have yes informally. So it looks like about 50-50 split on whether you have some kind of TechPlan or you have none at all. So Dean comments, we have no Tech Department which I'm sure is a very common issue. And all the nonprofits I worked for had no Tech Department either. That was me always. So one other question for you here, why is technology important for your nonprofit? And go ahead and check all that apply to your organization. And if there's some other reason, go ahead and chat us and comment to us in the chat. Does technology, is it important because it provides your access to Internet and email? Does it increase your efficiency of operations? Does it help you track your organization's impact? Engage supporters or patrons? We know some of you may be joining us from public libraries. So maybe it helps you with that. And we didn't put a whole lot on here that was specific to different types of organizations out there. So if you have a specific way that it's really important to you, go ahead and chat us in. Does it help provide flexibility or mobility allowing you to work remotely or connect with your teams that might be in the field or located in different places to help you increase your donations? Is it a service you offer to your community? So maybe you provide technology to your community in the form of library patrons or senior centers or whatever it may be. Go ahead and let us know. We have some people commenting in the chat that it provides client database for services we provide. Emily comments that they are a public library. It's essential for patrons. Let's see, who else? Michael comments, it gets our message and information out as a church and religious organization beyond the walls. Lots of good answers here. And this is multiple choice, multiple answers. So you can click as many as you'd like. I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results in just a couple of seconds here. Veronica comments that they use it for collaboration. They have board members in the US, Europe, and South America. Linda comments, we include our program in the community. We are a well kept secret now. That can be a challenge, can't it? I'm going to show the results really quickly. You can feel free to keep chatting into us. We are reading those messages. So it looks like 97% really see that technology is important because it increases the efficiency of your operations. That's a huge portion of you have voted for that one. And providing internet and email access, which is the staple of how most of us communicate on a day to day basis. We also have engaging supporters and patrons as big ones. So this is great. Thank you for taking the time to share that. We do have somebody asking if there is a way that participants can see all the comments and we don't actually have a way to open it up to everyone. It's a limitation of the tool we are using. So like I said, if there are comments that we think are useful, we will share them back out in the chat with you. I won't be reading them out any longer. So thank you so much for that. I would like to go ahead and introduce our first presenter Tierney Smith from TechSoup Canada. She will be talking to us about New Year and New Tech Plan, Mission Driven Technology Planning. Welcome to the program Tierney. We are so glad to have you. Thanks so much Becky. You can hear me okay? Loud and clear. Okay, perfect. So let's dive right in. Becky did a great introduction so thank you so much for that. We are super glad to be here today. So you've already heard a little bit about TechSoup from Becky. So essentially who we are as TechSoup Canada is we are the Canadian partner in that global network of TechSoups around the world. So our focus is for those of you in Canada hopefully you are familiar with us. Our focus is on helping you guys in particular to use technology whether that's getting you the discounts and donations through the technology donations program or whether it's by providing educational opportunities like this. But really we love all nonprofits and libraries everywhere so we are really happy to be here today. A little bit more about some of those other educational things that we do because they are much more cross-border. Some ways that you can find us are on our blog, on social media, and we do host regular monthly events that we livestream publicly to anyone who wants to join. So those are just a few ways if you think you are listening to us you think we are so cool you really want to stay in touch which is a logical response to today's webinar. Then I highly recommend you check us out and we would love to hear from you on some of those channels. Another thing to know about us is that we are a small nonprofit ourselves so there is about 8 of us in the TechSoup Canada team so we know what it's like to be a small nonprofit and we are actually a program of the Center for Social Innovation which is a nonprofit based out of Toronto in New York and we are a co-working space community and launchpad for people who are trying to change the world whether you are a nonprofit social purpose business, social enterprise, etc. So if you are in one of those cities I also definitely recommend you check out the Center for Social Innovation. So to start off today's presentation we wanted to have some really broad framing about why is technology important and we did the little poll earlier and I think that really highlighted that a lot of you guys are coming into this webinar with a really good understanding of the roles that technology can play in an organization which I think is fantastic. So I love that all of you as almost every single person that answered the poll talked about the role of technology in increasing efficiency of your organization and I'm really glad that you guys have a good understanding of that that is really encouraging because that is certainly the starting point for seeing the role that if you can use technology to do the things you want to do with a greater efficiency then of course that gives you more time for your mission. As well you guys all pointed out a lot of other excellent reasons why technology can be really important for a nonprofit even though that might not be your primary focus. So we have a way we like to think about technology at TechSoup Canada and to put it in the context of your larger organization. So the way is to think about your organization a little bit like a house. So the roof of your organization is your mission. So this is the thing that at the end of the day you are formed to do. This is your primary role in life basically. If you are not fulfilling your mission then you are not doing your job as a nonprofit. So that is really the goal at the end of the day so we put that at the top of the chart because everything basically supports that. Everything else you do is supporting that mission and holding it up. So the walls of your house are your programs and services. So those are the things that you do in order to achieve your mission because they fit with your theory of change because that is what you think is going to create the change that you want to see. So whether that is to provide access to patrons at your public library or whether that is to run church services or whether that is to provide a homeless shelter or whatnot those are your programs and services that are supporting your mission. Pretty straightforward so far. You know this all better than me. Now where you have basically the foundation of your house there is a whole bunch of different layers and pieces to that to support your programs and services. So finances and fundraising or grant seeking are a couple examples of some of the things that you need to do just to keep things running. So we have put technology there as the bottom foundation of your house. And we find this is a really helpful way to think about things because if you think about technology simply as maybe like a way to keep the lights on, it's just a frustration you need to deal with then it might not be given the proper importance in your organization. And it might be hard for other people in your organization if you are the accidental techie you are trying to convince someone else to understand why this is something we should be having a conversation about why we should be spending money on, etc. But if you see technology as the foundation for your entire house then it helps put it in that place because if you don't have a strong foundation then if your foundation maybe it's fine for a while but eventually your whole house is going to come tumbling down. And that could be because whether it's a backup problem or whether your database is just so difficult to use it's not meeting your needs at all or whether it's you have some very public social media fail or whatever happens. Basically if you don't have those solid plans at every level you can end up it's kind of like a game of Jenga where you eventually are cutting costs and cutting costs and cutting costs and eventually the whole thing comes tumbling down. So today we are going to talk about how to turn that on its head and instead help you build a strong foundation that will support your programs and services and ultimately support your mission because that's what it's all about. So today what we are going to talk about, most of our presentation is going to be spent going through a framework that we've developed at TechSoup Canada that we suggest is a helpful way to think about what is technology in a non-profit? And I saw someone commented that in. It's a great question. What does it really mean to say that we talk about technology? It's such a big concept it can be kind of overwhelming to think about. So what we like to do is break down what does technology really mean? Well we look at it as being a whole bunch of different things. It's infrastructure, your back office, your data, your communications, your technology that supports your programs, and then how your technology ties into your overall strategy. So what we are going to do from here on is we are going to look at each one of these areas and talk a little bit about what are some technologies in this area. Share a case study or an example of a non-profit that is doing some cool work in this area to hopefully give you some ideas. So just a little framework of that's what we are going to go through today, how you can use this in your organization. What I'm going to recommend that you do after this session is that you go back to your organization and you assess what is currently going on in your organization if you haven't already done so. We actually have a template that I'll show you in a second to help you do just that. Then once you've done that assessment there's a few kind of key things that you can do even if you're a small organization or an accidental tacky that doesn't have a full tech department. Of course if you have a good tech department great this will be a lot easier to do. The first thing we always recommend you do is check for any obvious cost savings. So by that I mean maybe you are paying for more than one website for hosting and you aren't actually using one anymore. Or maybe you are buying someone a really expensive computer that you don't need to. Sometimes there's just some little things that just taking an audit of everything can help identify and bring up. The next step is just to look for a few short term goals so you can get kind of your quick wins that you can easily fix to help start getting people excited about this tech stuff. And then try to pick yourself maybe one goal for the year, for the next year and a half that you can, a larger piece you can start working towards. Maybe your website needs to be redone, maybe your database, etc. And of course document things, that's your tech plan. So I just want to share this as a high level framework but this will make a lot more sense once we've gone through all of the pieces of the tech plan. I just want to say a couple of other framing things at this point in the presentation. We talked in the description of the session about how smart technology spending can save you money. And we're not necessarily going to tell you in this presentation how to cut costs per se, your organization, but the philosophy that we're going to be recommending is that by being planful about your technology and getting buy-in and being intentional, like asking good questions up front, that is how you save money with technology. By not spending on random things that aren't important or that aren't really going to be used, and by making smart investments that will save your staff time, that is how you're going to save money and increase your impact. So we're going to keep coming back to the theme throughout today's webinar. The other sort of overall theme I wanted to share is that tech planning in some ways is common sense. It's about planning and just taking the time to think things through. I don't want anyone to go away from this session with the idea that tech planning is such a big and difficult thing that they can't even get started and they don't know how to do it. I don't like to make technology intimidating. I don't think that's really helpful for anyone. So what I want you to remember, if nothing else, is just that taking time up front to ask some good questions and to really think intentionally about how you're using technology is technology planning. If you can really articulate that, link it to your strategy, and create a great document, that is awesome too, and you should definitely aspire for that. But it's better to start with asking a few good questions, if nothing else. And I did promise you that there would be an actual assessment to help you do all of this and take it away with your organization. So we have a link here and we'll be sharing it after the session as well. We do have a template for a tech self-assessment online that will go through all the areas we're going to talk about today and help you apply this to your own organization. So this can be a session that will really help you out going forward. Now, without further ado, I am going to jump into the actual different aspects of the framework that I presented just a minute ago. So I'm going to talk about a couple of them, then I'll pass it over to Joyce, and then we'll be back to me, so we can mix it up a little bit. So let's start by talking about laying the groundwork with good infrastructure. Now what is it we mean by infrastructure? This is essentially kind of the nuts and bolts of your technology and your organization. And this is often what people think about when they think about technology because some of it is very visible, right? Do you have a computer? Does it work quickly enough to let you do the things that you want to do? Can you actually load up your Internet browser or load up your database? Or do you have to go away and get a very long coffee while that happens? Do you have a good Internet and network connection that is fast enough for you to do your work? Do you have good backups of your systems? Do you have good security in place? Do you have tech policies and practices that support your organization? Now you might be – if any of you are interested in learning more about these topics, we have a lot of resources on our website and techsoup.org does as well. So I'm not going to go into detail on each one of them because of the amount of time we have today. And I think as well a lot of you may be familiar with a lot of these topics and know some of the advice on how to address them. I think with this area of infrastructure often the issue is more just getting it done. We kind of put some of these things off because other things become a higher priority. It gets kind of pushed down the scale. So the image that I want you to think about here is this idea that it doesn't matter if your house is well-cut when your basement is flooded. So often it can be tempting to put our time into sexier projects like getting a new database. Well, I find that sexy. Maybe you don't. Or getting a new website or getting on the latest social media tool. But again if your computer doesn't run quickly enough to do that or if you put together all this data and a database and then you actually lose all the data because you don't have a backup of your server then it's not really going to help you go forward. And there are obviously a lot of horror stories to be shared. I think you may have heard some of them. One painful one that happened to a nonprofit, a friend of mine recently was that I was helping them out. And they had a couple of servers. Their tech guy had just left and they weren't sure whether those servers were backed up enough. And we were in the process of trying to figure that out and trying to get them an interim solution. And the day before we put it in place the one if their servers died and they turned out they did not have a backup. So it's not kind of thing it doesn't happen every day but it does happen often enough and I don't want any of you to be in that situation. So a good place to start with this and again especially when it comes to getting buy-in from your leadership because I know that can be difficult is to take an inventory of your technology. Sometimes just laying it all out there is helpful and it provides people with the documentation they need to start having a conversation about actually having more modern technology and getting those upgrades in place. So we do have some templates for you online which you can use to help out with that process. Also just using some of the resources will help you know, okay if your computer hasn't been upgraded in the last five years that is sort of a basic standard that might help you think okay well we don't need to be at the latest industry standard but once it's past five years is it really working and doing what we need? Maybe we need to consider upgrading. So that's all I'll say about infrastructure but just to leave that there that is really if technology is a foundation of your nonprofit house infrastructure is the foundation of your technology. So definitely make sure that you have a solid foundation there. The second area that I'm going to talk to you about today is about organizing your back office. This is kind of a broad term that is not necessarily clear so let me talk to you a little bit of what I mean for that. Back office is a term that we use to describe a whole bunch of the different types of technologies that you use to just run the administrative side of your nonprofit. So most fundamentally email. Most nonprofits today I hope every single nonprofit here and a lot of you mentioned this at the beginning just has access to internet and email but it's kind of a basic functionality that you need to work in today's world. And other points include file storage, right? Obviously you have files. Where do you put them? Is it in a central place that is accessible to everyone in the organization? Is it backed up? And this also reaches into other areas such as do you have a project management tool you use? Where do you track your finances? How do you do your calendars and scheduling meetings internally and externally? And how do you work on documents collaboratively as a team? I will say that for 2015 and just for the past few years really the biggest trend we've been noticing in this area is the move to cloud. And in particular not only just cloud solutions but in integrated cloud solutions that will actually cover a lot of your back office needs together. So the most common ones you've probably heard of are Google apps for nonprofits and Office 365 for nonprofits. If you haven't heard of them essentially what both of them are is back office cloud suites. So they will take functionality that everybody needs to have like email, file storage, calendars, events, etc. and they'll bundle it into one tool that's all integrated together. So they're both excellent tools once from Google, once from Microsoft. They're both free for most nonprofits. So those are worth looking into if you're struggling with an aging email server or having other challenges like that. Another trend we're seeing in this area is the idea of hybrid cloud. So if you're not familiar with that, what that's about is some nonprofits are saying, well I like the idea of cloud computing because it provides us a lot of flexibility. It can be more cost effective. We can access our stuff from anywhere. It is more backed up and it can be more secure in some ways. But we have a certain data that we would really rather keep in-house on a database. So what we're going to do is we're going to put some of our applications in the cloud and we're going to keep some of our applications in the server and we're going to be strategic about what we do where. We don't have to go all one or all the other. So again we have more information about hybrid cloud available but that's something to consider if that resonates with your situation. So an example that I'll share in this area is a non-profit in Canada called Brampton Caledon Community Living. And what they do is they support individuals with developmental delays throughout their lives and just in helping them to have a place to live and have their needs looked after in a respectful and supportive way. So one of the challenges that they were having and maybe some of you will resonate with us is that they had 43 different houses so they're a little bit bigger. And they were all running off of one slow email server. So it was basically all the IT person could do. They did have one IT person. It was all he could do to really just keep that email server running and keep the emails being delivered to where they were supposed to go because it was constantly having problems. They also had a challenge with their documents because they were so dispersed. They didn't have a good central location for documents. Everything was getting emailed out. And these were really important documents such as information on each client's care. Sometimes the wrong version would get to the wrong people or people in an emergency wouldn't know where to go to find the latest information. So because of these challenges Brampton Caledon Community Living decided to go with Office 365 which is the tool that I mentioned just a minute ago. And they decided to focus first on their email situation which was the most critical for them. And probably will be the most critical for a lot of you. So they decided should we replace our server? No, we're going to move to the cloud and we're comfortable with that level of security. So they moved their email to the email portion of Office 365 for nonprofits which is really nice because it lets people either use the cloud version if they want or still use Outlook on their computers if they prefer. So it's a nice way to transition without making it too rushed for people that aren't ready to do everything in the cloud right away which is totally okay. Once they had that email piece in place they also looked at what other improvements they could do. And one of them as I had mentioned documents was a problem in central document storage. So they decided to use OneDrive which is the tool that comes with Office 365 but especially for files. Now if you guys have used Dropbox it's kind of a similar idea. But the thing, so OneDrive other than being Microsoft's product because it's associated with this organization-wide system it means that everyone in the organization can get access to the files in OneDrive of course based on appropriate permission structures. So by putting the files in there they made sure everyone could access the files that they needed at any point and always have the right version. And they actually went a little bit further to get some of their staff or key staff tablets so that they could access those data wherever they were especially in case of an emergency which did sometimes come up in their type of nonprofit work. So one tip you can take away from this aside from the idea of moving to the cloud just for any IT project is to plan and implement in phases. So if you're struggling to get especially again if you're struggling to get buy-in for a project with many of us are struggling to get funding sometimes it's easier to sell people on doing the first phase of something instead of doing the entire project. And also that can be a better way to transition your staff if they're resistant to change when it comes to technology. So maybe if we just move our email everyone can kind of get used to the system before we make another change. So it's always something to consider. If I'm struggling to get, push this project forward how can I break it down into phases? So that's a little bit about back office. Now we're going to talk about data management which is a really important topic as well and I'm going to pass you over to Joyce at this point. You're going to hear a bit from her. Alright, hi everyone. It's Joyce in Texas, Canada. So I'm going to take the presentation and we'll keep it going. So right now on this aspect of data management which seems like such an obvious statement that technology is one of the forefront if not the foundation of this. But one of the things that we really want to stress with this is not necessarily the data collection which if you're not collecting data at your nonprofit we highly encourage you to do so. Whether you're aware of it or not, whether you're small, whether you're large you are collecting data. Whether you have volunteers, donors, financial data, your HR policies, staff data, just even program outcomes. How do you measure the success and failures of your initiatives? These are all data points. And the concept that we're trying to emphasize is not so much that you need to collect them because you are collecting them whether you're aware of it or not. But do so in a meaningful way and in a way that will help you find them when you need to make a decision or make a strategic plan for your organization. So as you can see here the visuals that I'm trying to give you is going back if you don't have a plan and you're just collecting it, your data if you can imagine as a tangible piece that you can hold might be a piece of paper. It could be a file, a paper file on your desk. It would just be all of your office. So let's say your executive director asks you how was our last workshop for high-risk youth? How many people came? How were their feedback? How much money did we actually spend from the grant? And basically wants you to put together a progress report and also a funder report. Now those are two big crucial elements that are not completely tied to your mission but it's crucial to ensure that your mission continues. So if you don't have a plan, in this image you're pretty much walking around trying to find all the different elements that are necessary to put together these reports. But as you can imagine if you don't label them, if you don't know where they are it will take a lot of time. So one of the case studies that we'll cover later on has this problem. Now the other aspect is now that you do label it. You know where everything is but you're just piling it. You're never looking at it. You're not analyzing it. You are making strategic decisions but you're not actually looking at your information to inform your decisions. So the second trend that we noticed is a lot of nonprofits are starting to collect data but they're not really thoughtfully analyzing it. So we also encourage you to have a technology plan for that. There are many different tools. It ranges from Excel just using a simple pivot table to really dynamic data dashboards like Zoho reports or SAP tools like Crystal reports. There are a lot of tools out there that will help take the guess word out of your current data and make it into something that you can just look at and get the necessary information from that. So I mentioned that there's a nonprofit in Canada. Sorry, I went too fast. So the first case study is Cambridge Self-Help Food Bank. So for them compiling these reports for their donors, for their board of directors it used to take nearly a month because of all the manual work. Their staff have to contact all the different departments and at the end they have to sift out all the relevant information and then compile it into a neat report that can be digested easily. So before having a tech strategy that would take a long time that could have been spent on actually delivering the program which is the food bank and ensuring that it's well stocked, that people are happy and just getting more clients through. So then they took time to kind of take a step back and say, how do we empower our staff to actually achieve our mission more effectively? So in this case they looked into constituent relationship management systems which are usually called CRMs for short. And this particular system they settled on SUMAC. I shouldn't say settled, it's a great product for smaller nonprofits and charities. SUMAC helps them connect all of the data points and collect them automatically. So when they need to generate a report they just need to tell the system what data sets they want to look at. Do they want to look at how many people receive their services, how many people were satisfied with their services and it just takes an hour to generate. And that includes from beginning to end. So selecting the criteria and then generating the report. So that's one way that technology empowers them in terms of data management. The other aspect is just being able to take all the data points and do easy analysis. In this case Matri Foundation, they're able to again with the same tech planning in place, they have a CRM that collects all of the information and is able to show them all the relevant information in one place. So it's easier for them to take a look at what's coming up, take a pulse of things. So again the trend is to not just collect your data but really look at it and inform your decisions. It will save you a lot of time and headache in the long run. When you do embark on a program then it's not as successful as you think. If you were to just take 10 or even an hour to look at the data that you've been collecting it can actually show you a lot of great trends. You can predict a lot of things that you may not have been able to predict if you didn't look at it. So that is how information is a foundation for your data management and how this can help and inform your nonprofit. So the next area that technology can help is in your communications. Now this one seems again very straightforward. Of course technology helps with our communications. You send emails, we have this webinar, we're doing this all through the use of technology. And even when you're doing your direct mail campaigns you use technology to mail merge all the names together to have a gift matrix. We understand that you know that it's embedded but the trend is to not use technology as a tool like a means to an end but use it as a foundation to guide your strategies. Again be mindful of how you partake in your activities and to resource your staff well. So these are some of the areas that technology if you have it as a foundation can really not only help you with your communications to your supporters and your donors and even your staff but to really maximize that impact. So the first one website. Now of course this seems again so easy. Of course we need a website. That's how people find information about us. That's how they donate. So a way that technology serves as a foundation again it's not that it's a tool to make a website for you but either really think about how do people view your website. So in this example the trend is now responsive templates, responsive design and we're not going to pretend that we're perfect in this area if you ever check out techsoupcanada.ca you know that it's not responsive. We're working on it. We're in this together. We're all nonprofits but we also understand the importance to plan your website in a strategic way. The reason why we keep it stressing responsive and other nonprofits and I'm sure like nonprofit consultant stress responsive design it's not just because it's sexy and modern and it looks great but it's actually good for user experience. So user experience means from the person who's visiting your website, how do they experience your website? How do they use it? What do they read? How does your website look to them depending on the device that they use? So for example that say you have a fundraising campaign for disaster relief. It's so timely. It's so critical that you raise 50 grand in three months. Or even think of it as a crowdfunding campaign. You need to raise that amount in one month. These are timely fundraisers that you need to gather a lot of attention to. So of course you're going to feature it on your website. So let's say you're at your computer you know you have a website. You use technology to build it. It's great. But then there's a big donation button that draws a lot of attention. But if you didn't do enough like tech foundation and really think about how that website will display, let's say your donor views your website on a tablet. On a tablet that big donation button is cut off. So when they look at it they see all the main body content but what they don't see is the big donation button because it's just cut off of their screen. If they looked it on a desktop they can see it but because of the device that they use they miss that very big call to action. So in that sense you might not think of it as a big deal but a lot of people are using mobile devices on their smart phone, on their iPads. You don't want to miss a big call to action, a big communication point because you didn't plan it or foresee it ahead of time. The same thing with social media. A lot of people are jumping in on so many different channels because they know that's where their audience is. The latest trend that we've been seeing and we know that in the US like data privacy laws are less strict than the Canadian privacy laws but the trend is no matter which country you're in, no matter what platform you're in, data and how you use it is becoming more strict. So with social media channels it's great that you have great engagement on it but in terms of how you can use that data, can you export that data out? What can you say on that platform? It would only get more strict from this point onwards. So how does that affect your technology planning? When you plan for engagement tools like that jump on Twitter, that jump on Facebook, or Tumblr, or Vine, have a strategy as why you are there, what goals are you planning to achieve there? If it's just raising engagement and raising awareness that's fine but if you want to tie it back to something more tangible like I want to increase my funding, I want to increase brand recognition, really think about how the data aspect ties into your social media. So as an example of this is like for in Canada when people are on social media networks it's great that you can connect with them there but as a data privacy law we can't communicate with them outside of that channel. Again that might not apply to the US audience but it's almost the same comparison that the data is owned by those companies. You can't completely have control over those aspects so when you do want to make projects and initiatives with social media being kind of a backbone to them you need to be strategic in that sense. Not raining down the social media period is still great for exposure but again keep that in mind. Again for emails and web conferencing it's not just about having the tool but having a strategy in that tool. So kind of going back to the data aspect for emails, what kind of data are you collecting? Are your users able to manage your subscriptions? So that's something that if you don't have a good technology plan you might run into the trouble that when someone unsubscribes from you they unsubscribe from everything. Everything from fundraising alerts to just organization impact updates. These are things you don't want them to miss out on so keep that in mind. So on a brighter case because I know I talked a lot about data privacy and it's kind of a downer so here's an uplifting case study of how when you have good technology planning and good foundation you can really achieve remission and again increase your impact. So the case study here is the Goodwill Industries International. For Labor Day they decided to have this campaign where they share 150 success stories. So again this is them reaching out to their supporters and the goal was to raise awareness and celebrate their success, celebrate their impact so then their donors and volunteers can be really proud that they're supporting this great organization. So what they have is on Twitter they have a dedicated hashtag, 150 jobs. Each day up to Labor Day they will share one story per hour. So in the second column you see an example of what that looks like and the third column is the community's response to them. So in this aspect because they were planful they know what their goals are. They weren't trying to raise money. They weren't trying to get more volunteers. They were just trying to highlight these success stories, make sure people are aware that they're not just a little thrift store, they actually do impact lives. In that aspect they were a great success. So again I don't want to take up too much time if you want to learn more. The URL is there as an overview of that case study. So without further ado I'm going to pass it back to Tierney who will continue with the tech planning. Thanks Joyce. So now we're going to talk about that top piece of the pyramid which is what all of this stuff is really building towards and that is how technology impacts running your programs and services. Now for more than anything we've talked about so far this is really going to be affected by your individual organization, what your mission is, and what your specific programs are. So of course the statements we're going to be making are fairly general but I think just more the takeaway to principles and see how they can apply to your organization. So when it comes to programming what we really encourage you to do is to ask yourself across a whole bunch of range of areas. How can technology improve the way I administer my program? Just handle logistics. Maybe it's about using an online form to get programs signed up instead of getting people to call in and writing it down on a piece of paper. Maybe that's something as easy as a free Google form that you're going to throw together. How can you use technology to change your program delivery? So the way TechSoup does webinars instead of always having in person events or the way some counseling organizations are using social media and text messaging to provide support as an alternate channel to phone and email. How can technology be used to track your program data? So the stuff we talked about, Joyce talked about earlier in terms of data specifically to track data on your impact of your program that you can share that results back to your funders or your donors. How can you use technology to communicate with clients? I've heard some really good examples of how some youth-based nonprofits are really embracing social media because they realized, well they might like telephoning people, but there are no teenagers these days that prefer telephoning to Facebook or Twitter or SMS or other methods of communication. So how can nonprofits really think more about what their clients want and get in that space? Of course if your clients, maybe if your clients are older that's not their preferred method of communication so there's no blanket statements here. And lastly of course how can technology be used to communicate back with your partners and stakeholders? So maybe if you're running a joint program with other organizations you're using some common file sharing areas, you're collaborating on documents together, maybe you're sharing in real time back some of your data and your fundraising or your program results so people can see and stay in the loop with that instead of having to email files back and forth. There's a lot of different ways that technology can touch your programming. So because I can't talk about everything I'll share one cool example that we've heard about recently that we're really excited about because I think it speaks to that kind of way of rethinking how you think about technology and putting that upfront investment in technology that is leading to better programming and then leading to greater impact. So the case that you were going to talk about here is an organization based here in Toronto called the Furniture Bank. And essentially what they do is people who are getting rid of their furniture, businesses, or individuals will give their furniture to the Furniture Bank and then if you have people who are maybe getting their first house after they've been transitioning away from homelessness, if you have women and children that were in an abusive situation and they are starting their new life together, or you have refugees or newcomers to Canada that need that little help to get started and get established. One of the basic things you need is of course furniture just to have something in your home. So they give this furniture that they get donated to any one of these types of clients free of charge. Now how this works in practice or what used to work for them in their manual way of doing things, they would have a client come into their location, tell them what their needs are, and they would fill out a whole bunch of paperwork. You can imagine them standing there with a clipboard going through all of the information, writing it all down, took about 16 minutes. While they were doing that of course the other clients coming in would have to stand there waiting. Then after that they would have to go back and enter all of that data into their systems. So basically do the same piece of work twice and then go through manually figure out okay what furniture do we have, who is that going to go to, do all that magic up and follow up. So they did a little calculation. They found all of that manual work equated to about a loss of 50 working weeks per year. So some of you guys were asking before about buy-in whenever you can actually calculate some of the impact of the manual processes do some time estimates and make a calculation like this to present something to management and say 50 working weeks. That's how much we are losing here. That's often a really compelling way of articulating the impact that technology can have if we invest in technology to improve the process. So that's exactly what they did in this situation. So their solution that they chose is a combination of using Salesforce. Salesforce is a CRM if you guys aren't familiar with it. It is cloud based. They implemented CRM for their organization and they also got a bunch of iPads. So the iPads can run the Salesforce mobile app. So instead when a client came in the intake person had their iPad which connected directly to Salesforce so they were able to fill out the information right on the iPad. So this was already a lot faster and it decreased the client time to five minutes. So it's a lot better experience for the client not to mention that the staff person doesn't have to do the double amount of work of going back and doing all that data entry later. So that saved them on both ends. And because of all this time saving, they were now able to serve an additional 500 clients per year. So again, seeing how this change in the technology foundation was able to improve their programs and services and ultimately make a difference to the mission up there at the top of the house. So to wrap up, the last section I'm going to talk about is aligning technology with your strategies. And this is where it does get a little bit more abstract and a little bit more up to that leadership and board level. But as you mature as an organization that's using technology, this is really the key piece to maintain a good technology plan and attitude going forward. So I've come up with three key questions that I would get you to ask yourself about your organization and of course ask and then if the answer is a quick no, how can you work on that? So first of all, does your strategic goals have accompanying technological goals? So if you have a strategic plan, hopefully, go through it and say, see what the areas are. Maybe you're planning to expand the program next year. Maybe you're planning to launch a new program. Ask yourself, well what technology is going to be required in order to make that happen? Maybe we're going to add a whole bunch of new people that's going to strain our network. Maybe we need to bind new computers. That's an infrastructure problem. Maybe we need a better database to manage that. So a data challenge. Maybe we need to put in place some custom software if you really have the resources to run this new program. So linking technology goals back to strategic goals is another way to show the value that that technology is playing rather than just being a cost center. Next, are your leadership and board supportive of technology? And this can be a really tricky one for a lot of nonprofits. So of course there's no easy answers I can tell you about how to get leadership and board buy-in if this is a challenge for you. But I will say some of the things that we've seen worked are A, being able to really quantify the amount of time that technology could save. And another thing is to get those small wins. So when you can do a little experiment, get a few of your coworkers on board who are a little bit more supportive, sometimes that can help better demonstrate the value that technology can provide. And lastly, do you have a technology budget? We do recommend for every nonprofit to at least have a line item consistently in the budget for technology. And that can really help make sure that technology is a discussion that is always on the table. Now I realize I have one minute to wrap up, so I'm just going to quickly share the case study of an organization who is making fantastic use of technology and is incredibly strategic about how they do so. And this is an organization called TimeRazor. Again, it's a Canadian charity. You won't go into the details of what they do, but you can find more about them on their website. What's really interesting about TimeRazor is their commitment not only to technology planning, but to openness. So you can actually find out all of the details of their technology budget published online that is updated in real time. And this they make really easy to do because of the tech tools they use. And their approach has really been if you look at some of their technology budget line items you might think that seems a lot, especially for an organization that has just a handful of staff on it. Now the flip way of thinking about it is that because they make these investments in technology, which aren't too big, but for some of you depending on where you're used to may feel a bit large, because they do that they can only need to have a few staff and they can run a ton of programming all across the country. So again, making that investment can really help increase your impact. So they're a neat one to check out. We'll just leave you with a few more resources. So again, especially when you're trying to find that right tool or find the right way to save on cost, a few really good resources are the donations program. It's a lot of great open source software out there. There's a lot of good, your peers will have really good suggestions. So on Twitter using the MP Tech hashtag using the communities of N10 to get ideas and of course other nonprofits like the TechSoups of the world and like Idealware that provide well-researched thought-out recommendations on technology specifically for nonprofits. So that is our framework that we're hoping to leave you with and we do want to have a few minutes to ask questions. So I'm going to stop talking and hand it back to Becky now. Thank you Tierney, and thank you Joyce for the breadth of information that you've shared. We did a webinar last week with some people who have expertise in grant writing. And one of the things, they always get questions about how do we get people to fund the infrastructure? How do we get people to fund and help pay for the technology? And this is one of the big challenges. And what their answer was very succinctly was that when you're writing grant proposals, when you're seeking funding that you need to build in the technology budget into your programs that in order for you to deliver on that program you need to have maybe two laptops upgraded. Or maybe you need to have a donor management system to better help manage a program that you're delivering on. So keep that in mind because I know that it's a really difficult challenge to build out that budget that was listed on that page that you just showed that it's hard to get the funding and the buy-in from leadership. And that is actually one of the first questions that was asked. How do you get your leadership to support this? So maybe your leadership isn't super tech-friendly or tech-savvy or doesn't see the value in it. How do you encourage that buy-in? And maybe this is a good question for Tierney since you're still on the line with us. Well, you know, only the hardest question to share, but just joking. Yeah, I responded, but it's a million-dollar question. We'd all love to know how to make that happen. So yeah, I mean I will say some of the things that I shared earlier in terms of being able to quantify the value that the amount of time saved with technology solutions. So an example of – it can often be a good way. So just one example of that a little more concretely. I have a friend that works for an organization that does – basically supports you through high school. And he was really super keen about technology, one of these accidental techies that really wants to create change. But he was struggling to get that leadership buy-in. There wasn't really a lot of interest in talking about that. So he kind of went off and did his own thing a little bit. I mean, I don't totally recommend going completely off the radar. But he said, you know what, I'm going to take the situation into my own hands and I'm going to think about how I can do something that will get people's attention. And so Zachary references another comment I mentioned. What he did is he found they were calling their youth to let them know if there was a change in the time of a program or any other information they needed to provide to their clients who are youth. They would give them a phone call. And that would create a lot of time wasted because just being on the phone, like listening to the voicemail, often the youth wouldn't be there trying to leave a message with their sibling, with a parent that probably wouldn't be getting through to them. It was a really inefficient way of doing that. So he actually calculated how much time that was taking. And then he basically proposed that he started actually conducting the youth in his portfolio on social media. So he created a separate Facebook account for himself in this case. This was back when more youth were on Facebook. Now they do more on Twitter. But he created that account. And again, keeping in mind good social media policies and was using that to contact youth instead. And he found basically the calculation he did was it saved the equivalent of two full-time staff per year just by not making these phone calls and using Facebook instead. So when he brought that stat to his executive director, all of a sudden they were really interested. So just one idea that may or may not work for you, but hopefully that will be an inspiring story, but those kind of things. If your leader is willing to do a little training in education, that can be really helpful too. I'm personally hoping to see more and more things. One more training opportunity is for leadership. They do have technology bundled into it. And also helping to raise those questions early. Sometimes change does take time. So getting them to come around to that technology lens does take time, but it is a key competency in today's nonprofit leadership world. So I certainly hope that you can help play a role in getting your leaders there. I know it's not easy. Absolutely. I would say that that's very true. And one thing that some of the apps and tools that were mentioned by both Tierney and Joyce today are free. And so we know free, there's always a cost to any new tool that you implement whether it's in staff time or labor. But sometimes proving to a leadership, or someone in a leadership position that, hey, there's value in this happens just by diving in and doing it, where maybe you don't need to put money down to try out a new tool even in a small way and say, hey, look at the impact of this small thing. If we put some money towards this other thing, maybe it would be even bigger or better and get the license to dedicate some more staff time to it. We are at the top of the hour. And we've actually answered pretty much all of the questions in the chat already. And I will go ahead and follow up with all of the links that we shared out in the chat in this follow up email. But just to show a couple of other resources, we have some business and tech planning sections on TechSoup.org where you can continue to learn more. We have Tech Planning and Policies Community Forum where if you're looking to try and develop technology usage policies or those types of personnel type things in your organization, there's some great conversations happening in there. We also have a webinar that we did earlier this year that talked about tactical technology planning. And we have this guide for disaster planning and recovery that it is kind of couched in how to prepare for disasters. But so many disasters that come upon us are not earthquakes or tornadoes. So many of them are, oh my gosh, the server died. Oh my gosh, that employee left and nobody knows how to get into this important critical mission data that we need. So that's a great guide that has a lot of interesting worksheets to help you prepare and plan your technology as well. And then we also have Idealware offers an online training series in Tech Planning and they have a discounted offer on our site that we'll go ahead and share in the follow-up. I'd also like to invite you to join us for our upcoming webinars. Next week we'll be doing one on telecommuting and tactics tips and tools to help you whether you work remotely one day a week or full-time or whether you have staff distributed all over the country. We'll be talking about how to manage and what kind of tools are available. Then we'll be talking about why Internet freedom matters for nonprofits and libraries and how you can fight to keep it on February 12. We'll be doing some in-depth library work on the 18th around inclusive information access and assistive technologies and how they're being used in libraries to help provide access to all patrons. And on the 19th we'll be talking about Tech Donations for Faith-Based Organizations. You can also explore our webinar archives for the huge range of webinars we've done in the past as well. And feel free to connect with us on TechSoup at TechSoupGlobal.org, TechSoup.org, or on our Facebook or Twitter channels. Lastly, thank you so much to both Tierney and Joyce for taking the time today to join us and sharing their expertise. Thank you to Allie for helping on the back end, and thank you to ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar by providing the free use of their platform where you're using their ReadyTalk 500 tool today which you can also get in TechSoup's donation catalog. When you close out of this window please take a moment to complete the post-event survey that will pop up so that we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you all so much for joining us. I hope you have a terrific day. Bye-bye.