 Hi, Lewis from Houston. Great. Got Carlton from Houston as well. Hi, everybody. Thanks again for joining TechSoup today for this special webinar, Acts the Expert, Amazon Web Service. Today's webinar is going to be about making the most of your Amazon Web Service credits and so much more. I'm excited to hear from our speakers and some of you may be here because you're like, I don't know what Amazon Web Service is so you may be here to find that out and we hope you get some tools from that as well. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. If this is your first time, I just want to share with you how you can engage today. If you need the closed caption, go ahead and type the CC at the bottom of your screen. It may be over in the more section and we'll be able to turn on the live captions for you. If you have any questions, you can type them in the chat room or use the Q&A. Please check your email within 48 hours. We'll be emailing you the replay of this recording. I'm going to move out of the way because I love these webinars because I learned so much. I'm going to turn it over to the experts from Amazon and welcome Jamie. Thank you so much and hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you today. Avinah, I'll ask if you want to share your screen and we can jump into things. But hello, hello again. My name is Jamie Gluck and I am a program manager helping support nonprofits all over the world helping them use AWS. As Aretha spoke previously, this is an opportunity to learn more about the ways you can use your credits, the ways you can use AWS in general, and to ask the experts, myself, Avinah and Carlton, a little bit more about what AWS is and how it can add value to your organization. Avinah, if you want to swap the way you're sharing your screen and in the meantime, while that's happening, I want to ask the cool question to everyone. In a scale of one to three, being one, you're just starting and three, you are an expert. Put in the chat, what do you know and how do you feel about your competency of using AWS? Again, one is just getting started and three is I've got this. Okay, excellent. So a lot of ones which is perfect for this session. This is a great opportunity to learn what is AWS and why are so many people talking about it. So you are in the exact right place. Thank you so much. In terms of making sure you get the most out of this presentation, I just want to let you know that you can zoom in at any time with by pressing the control button and then your plus or the minus to zoom out. Additionally, we'll be speaking about different links and programs and opportunities and I'll be providing those in the chat. So definitely take advantage of those links. In terms of the agenda, I'm going to be speaking about a little bit of the AWS programs that are available to your organization. So certainly, at least hopefully, you know about the credit program through TechSoup, but we also have other programs that help support your organizations use and education when it comes to using AWS. Then I'm going to pass it over to Vina who's going to go into a little bit more about what does that experience look like getting started on AWS and what are some of your peers doing on AWS to achieve their goals. And then I'll pass it over to Carlton as well, who's from a nonprofit himself and is an IT decision maker to speak a little bit more about how did disability rights Texas decide to move to AWS and what are the benefits that their organization are gaining from using AWS? Again, this is a really interactive opportunity for you to ask questions. So please type your questions in the chat throughout this entire presentation. If we don't get to them during the actual session, we'll certainly get to them after. And this is totally your time. So please, please speak up. So now onto the programs. A little bit about the programs here for nonprofits. The first one, like I mentioned, is the nonprofit credit program. So sometimes costs can be a prohibition to your adoption and growth on AWS. And we understand that. So all nonprofits all over the world have access to $1,000 in AWS promotional credits via TechSoup. I'll provide that link in the chat, but this is a great way to get started, to test and learn, and to really not risk any costs when you're just beginning your journey on the cloud. Additionally, we have the AWS Imagine grant program. And this program provides not only credits, but cash as well to help influence and empower your organization to build its dreams and its aspirations on AWS. So I'll provide that link in the chat to learn all about it, but they're accepting applications now. So it's an excellent opportunity to apply for that grant and to tap in to some additional funding. Additionally, we have once a year an Imagine conference. And this conference, while it's already happened, is a great way for organizations to be inspired about the different ways that nonprofits are leveraging AWS, everything from environmentalism to helping find missing and exploited children and everything in between. AWS provides solutions for organizations, big, small, and medium, so that it can achieve its goals on the cloud. So I'll provide that link where you can visit on demand videos of this most recent conference. And again, we'll have the conference next year as well. And then the last thing I want to speak to is what I'm most proud of when I think about AWS's support for nonprofits. And that's that we have an entire team, not just myself, not just Vina, but an entire team ready and excited and eager to help your organization, no matter its size, no matter its budget, take access of AWS for mission impact. There are ways you can connect to speak to someone live, you can set up a meeting. No question is a bad question. And we are here to support you and help you use AWS to achieve your mission and business related goals. So those are a little bit about the programs. Now we'll jump into what it's like to actually get started, as well as what are your peers doing to leverage AWS to achieve their goals. So Vina, I'll pass it over to you. Thanks, Jayman. Yeah. And thanks everybody for joining today. I'm really excited to be here. I've been an attendee on these sessions before, but I've never actually gotten to speak. So I'm super excited to see what it's like on the other side. So the session that I'm going to go over in the next maybe 25 minutes or so is really about designing a roadmap for your nonprofit cloud journey with AWS. And I heard you in the chat. I saw a lot of ones in there. We're going to keep this super high level. We're not going to get into the super techy stuff. That's not going to be helpful for you. So I'll make sure that we we're all understanding what's going on here. So I'm a solutions architect with a nonprofit team here at AWS. And we'll talk about what that actually means in a second. But first, let's just do a 10,000 foot view of what actually is AWS. What is the cloud? So as you may know, AWS spun out of Amazon.com. Basically, we were operating on Amazon.com for hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. We did this for over a decade and we discovered that we had gotten pretty good at one specific thing, operating massive scale technologies globally. So we decided to embark on this mission to offer this as a service to other organizations, just like yourselves. So basically, that's where the AWS cloud came from. But what actually is the AWS cloud? Basically, it's everything that you might find in a traditional data center environment. So think basic building blocks like servers and routers, storage devices, databases, all that kind of stuff. But without you actually having to own or manage or maintain the data center and all the physical things inside of it. So we keep all of that for you in a secure environment. And then businesses, organizations, nonprofits like yourself, access these resources via the internet or private connections. So let's say normally, if you wanted to build a website, you'd have to get access to a data center. You'd purchase servers. You would stack them all up on top of each other or wire them together. You'd have to deal with air conditioning throughout the whole data center. You'd have to hire folks to do all this work. And as you can imagine, the costs for all of this get really, really high really, really quickly. So our model is quite a bit different. We actually work similarly to the way that an electric company works in that when you flip a switch, you get access to lights, the power company sends you electricity. When you turn it off, the lights turn off and you stop paying for it. But in our case, instead of lights, it's a server that you get access to in a data center, wherever you need it to be. And you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can host a website, you can run really complex data analytics, you could stream videos, pretty much anything. And when you're done, you can just turn off that server and you'll stop paying for it. So that was just a quick primer. Now I want to go into some stories of what other nonprofits are doing. And you'll notice I purposely pick nonprofits that have very different missions, different use cases. They're using vastly different technologies, because I want to help you understand that there's a really breadth, a wide breadth of offerings that AWS provides that customers are taking advantage of. So by no means is this an exhaustive list of our nonprofit customers, nor is this an exhaustive list of the services we provide. This is just to give you a sneak peek of some of the things that might be available to you. So first off, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Rock Hall established this library and archives in 2010. The goal of it was really to try to digitize all of this physical stuff that they were storing for so long. So this is mostly physical. The storage is sometimes on tapes, sometimes it's off-site backups. All of this is outdated, it's expensive, and it's prone to failure. So the Rock Hall knew that they couldn't afford to lose such unique performances that they had by some of the greats, Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springtein, Prince, all these different guys like they're amazing, right? We want to keep that stuff. So basically what they wanted to do is upload some of that into cloud storage. They wanted to set up a centralized digital media repository capable of handling whatever types of assets they might have, whether those are videos, documents, images, really anything, and not rely on dated technologies to do that. So they built that on Amazon S3. It doesn't matter if you're not familiar with the service, just know it's for storage. And then they were able to build on the success by building some tools that will help them search through things, really help to pull out metadata from these files. And keep in mind, some of these are two to three terabytes in size. So these are not small files, and they're able to store it no problem. So using AWS and working with some partners, they were able to preserve 2,000 files, 300 terabytes of their most valued digital assets. So pretty powerful. The next case is code.org. So if you're not familiar with code.org, basically their mission is to help students all around the world learn computer science concepts and skills, given that we are moving into the digital age. So code.org is really trying to expand access to computer science education. And so they provide free K through 12 computer science curriculums to students all over the place. One of the biggest events that they do is called Hour of Code. This is one hour during a year, where they really, really push some exciting tools for new students to use. And they're really trying to reach as many people as they can and get them in quickly, right? So the Hour of Code takes place during computer science education week. It reaches 100 million students in more than 180 countries. So it's no joke. You can imagine this is a pretty large scale event. It requires a lot of servers and tons of technology running behind the scenes to keep that up and running. You can imagine. I think we've all been in situations where we try to go on a website. There's too many people on it. The website crashes. It freezes. They cannot have that. This is their one chance to get kids interested in computer science. And of course, since these are students, these are kids, security is extra important to them. They take it very, very seriously. And so do we. So by running their website and Hour of Code in the cloud, Code.org was able to save $1.3 million per year in operational costs. So they're only paying for what they're actually using. They're able to scale up their infrastructure just for that Hour of Code and scale it right back down when the event is over. So they're able to spin down resources that are no longer needed, which therefore saves them a bunch of money. One more case study I want to talk about is the LA LGBT Center. So four years ago, the LA LGBT Center decided they wanted to establish a call center to better support their community. So they decided to try out Amazon Connect. Again, doesn't matter if you're not familiar with the service, just know that it's a virtual call center that's hosted on EWS. So they found that they were actually able to build a basic call center in just a matter of minutes. And within a week, they had a fully operational call center, taking live calls for their health services programs. You can imagine this is a game changer. Depending on the time of day, hundreds of different individuals are calling the health services department. They can call with questions about upcoming appointments, prescriptions, mental health services, really runs a gambit. And they serve over 30,000 clients in the clinic with the help of Amazon Connect. And during COVID-19, this need was amplified and they were able to meet it. And one more thing I want to mention is they actually ended up using the same technology to power their first ever live telephone, which helped them raise $1.3 million. So pretty cool stuff. All right. So we talked about this. I think we got the answer to this already. I've seen a lot of ones in the chat, but with some exceptions, I saw some twos and threes as well. I also saw zero. So hopefully you feel a little bit better about your comfort level with just what is the cloud? What is AWS? And of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat. So I talked through a bunch of stories, but the important takeaway here is not, it's not really about the services. It's not really about the technology. It's not really about the specific use cases. Every nonprofit is going to have a very different mission. You might not be able to just take what they did and apply it to yourself. The most important thing is that each one of these organizations was staying laser focused on their mission. And they're just using AWS to help them move a bit more quickly and more efficiently. So I mentioned before how AWS provides basic building blocks, so servers, databases, storage, routers, but there's also so much more. We have fuller solutions such as translation services. If you have a website and you need to need to make sure that that's translated on the fly in various different languages, we can do that. We have call center services like I talked about before. We have artificial intelligence for personalized marketing. So if you want to put together a marketing campaign for maybe for your donors or for your community, you can do that. You can use AI to make it even more powerful and make sure that they're getting exactly the message that they need. So we really offer the tools for you to build almost anything that you can imagine. And one thing that I promised I'd come back to, I'm a solutions architect. So what that means is my job is to really deeply understand your organization's mission and then figure out how AWS technology or other technology, frankly, can help you meet your goals. We learn the ins and outs of these 200 plus services so that I can help to support you and educate you as you experiment and build applications. And we actually provide a free service to you. So working with the solutions architect, totally free. What Jayman was talking about before that you can connect with different AWS experts, a lot of that stuff is free. So having conversations with us, talking through ideas, putting together architecture diagrams, even sometimes building out demos, a lot of that stuff can be done for free. So super powerful. And as we go throughout the rest of this 20 minutes or so, I'm going to be calling out different ways that I as a solutions architect, and then of course, the rest of the team can support customers in different stages of their journeys. So real quick, I just want to talk about five different benefits that nonprofits see when they move to the AWS cloud. The first is the ability to experiment with new ideas. So let's say that you want to create a nice new search engine for your nonprofit's website. So you can try out our services often for free. And if an experiment fails, you can always shut them down without the risk of any long-term contracts, lingering costs, nothing weird going on. If you don't want to use it anymore, you shut it off and you're done. The second reason is cost savings. So like I mentioned before, there's no contracts. There's no upfront costs. You're only paying for what you're using on a monthly basis. And also, we have reduced prices at least 111 times that number actually might be outdated since AWS's launch in 2006. And I don't see that stopping anytime soon. The third is scalability. So let's imagine that you have a fundraising application, maybe like a telephone, that launches next week. So you're expecting lots of traffic, but really only during the nine to five business hours. So what you could do is you could provision enough resources to make that peak load 24-7 to keep your application from crashing. That's great. That would work. But what would be even better is if you could only provision the right amount of resources for the right amount of traffic. So with AWS, we actually make that really easy. You can instantly scale up or down with the needs of your business, which also reduces costs because you're not paying 24-7 for resources that you're not using. So this is really similar to what code.org had to do. The fourth benefit is the pace of innovation. So we are constantly building out new features, new services, and our roadmap is determined by what our customers are asking us for. So you are benefiting from our continuous evolution, and we get to benefit from your cool new ideas. If you have something that you really want to do and you talk to us and I tell you, actually, we don't have a service that can do that. What I'll actually do is I'll go into our internal website. I will enter this in as a product feature request. And our service teams, depending on the demand, will actually go and build that. So the benefit of this is that we've got the tools so you don't need to build from the ground up and you can focus on what makes your nonprofit unique instead of focusing on annoying things. So think about, you know, if you're interested in translation services, if you're interested in a way to easily send out push notifications, all that stuff we've built already. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. The last is that AWS enables customers to deploy globally in minutes. That is not an exaggeration. I was seeing a lot of folks who said that they were based out of the United States, but you might actually have customers or users or community members that are located in different parts of the of the world. So sometimes it's important to make sure that each one of those different groups are going to get the same great experience. And so you can actually launch right now from wherever you're sitting, you could launch a virtual machine or kind of a server in Asia if you wanted to, and it would take the same amount of time as if you were going to launch one right here in the United States. So that's really useful for nonprofits with a global presence who want to make sure that all of their users are getting the same great experience. And all this sounds really nice, whatever, but we realized that using the cloud is not the answer to every question. And nor does it come without challenges. So I just want to illustrate some of those. One of them is cloud sprawl. So if you don't have folks that are leading at the top that are leading the charge and defining best practices for your organization, you might end up leaving individuals largely on their own working on AWS. So this might technically work, might be totally fine. You might have a lot of different applications that are great and functional. You run the risk of creating sprawl. So I actually see similar issues with nonprofits who are used to using various third party solutions right out of the box. So it's nice because you have a lot of solutions that are ready to go, but they might all have different data sources, they might have different security requirements, different logins, basically a lack of consistency. And this is a problem that you could see with anything, but I definitely have seen it before on AWS. The next is small or non-existence IT teams. So this is something I see all the time with my customers. And the last is the perception of not enough funding in order to get started or make meaningful progress. But you might be surprised to learn that with the right mindset, there are ways to move past these challenges. We have been working with thousands of customers for years on these exact problems. And so you're definitely not alone. All the folks in the chat probably are familiar with some of these things as well. And between all of the different programs, the partners, the support offerings, the grants, like you mentioned, the Imagine grant that we have, we can definitely help alleviate all of your concerns. And so we're really ready to get started whenever you are. And we've laid out this framework that we're going to explain in just a second, which will hopefully help your organization feel ready to. So we talked about other nonprofits and what they're doing, but obviously your nonprofit is unique. So how do you actually get started? Enter the cloud transformation journey. So each organization's cloud journey is going to be a little unique. We're going to hear a story of one organization later today. And that's going to be super interesting. But I want to try to explain to distill most of our success stories into four cyclical steps. Cyclical. To be clear, this is not a one and done transformation. Being okay with an iterative approach like this is going to help you build momentum. It's going to help you learn from experience without setting goals that feel unrealistic or unattainable. So real quick, I'm going to go over these four stages, but we're going to talk about them more in detail. The Envision phase focuses on what do we want to do and why. So this basically is all about prioritizing different goals and associating each one of these goals with a senior leader who's able to drive change. The Align phase focuses on identifying gaps across your organization. Do you have the right skill sets in house? Do you have existing technology that you need to consider? All of these concerns getting them out into the open early really helps to build trust among all the different folks that are going to be involved. The Launch phase focuses on delivering pilot projects and possibly more importantly on demonstrating value from these projects because you can build a bunch of stuff, but if you're not able to draw those back to your goals, have metrics to prove that something is working, it's really hard to justify continuing. The Scale phase is exactly what it sounds like. It's expanding your pilots, scaling them out and making sure that you're seeing the value of your investments. And if you're not, let's figure out why. You can work with us and we can figure out why you're not hitting your goals and see what we can do to change that. So one thing I want to make totally clear before we dive further into this, I want you to think of these four phases not as rigid steps in a schedule, but rather a way to look ahead and make progress and offer some structure to what can feel like kind of an amorphous process. So real quick, just want to pause and see based on those quick explanations, where do you think you are? Where do you think you and your organization are right now? If you feel like you're in the Envision phase, you're putting together goals for the future, enter a one in the chat. If you're in the Align phase, you're getting everybody on the same page about these goals, trying to lay out requirements, put a number two. If you are currently launching, if you're building things, trying things out, put a three. And lastly, if you are already running cloud applications at full scale and you're maybe looking to wrap around and set some new goals, throw in a four. Okay, I've seen lots of ones, some twos, some threes, less than a one. Okay. Well, that's good. Hopefully I'll be able to explain how we can get you fully into one. Cool, cool, cool. All right. So having a goal is oftentimes all you actually need to get started. So what do you want to get out of building applications in the cloud? Are you looking for better efficiency? Are you looking for cost savings? Are you looking for access to tools that you don't normally have access to? Once you've identified the why of your cloud journey, you can work on aligning the vision across your stakeholders. But what does that actually mean? Let's come up with some tangible next steps to get you hopefully into the phase of one. So lay out a list of goals or projects that you want to take on and assign a senior leader to each one of these, someone who can really drive change from the inside. If you don't know where to start, I recommend looking to your organization's mission. It can really inform the goals that you lay out for yourself. So let me just give an example. We're all nonprofits here and a lot of nonprofits are not able to deliver on their mission without a certain level of funding. So let's say that an objective that you lay out for yourself could be increasing fundraising this year. So there's a lot of different means to an end on this. You can do better donor management. You can put together personalized email campaigns for your donors. You can maybe create a public dashboard to show the impact of your donations. So lots of different ways to get there and the how is going to really depend on what you want to do. But this is just a general idea of the types of goals that you can set for yourself. And one thing I just want to note because this is something conversation that I have all the time. We often have customers that are coming to us and saying, what should I do with AWS? You know, you've got these tech soup credits now. You've got $1,000 to spend. But like, what are you going to do with that? And so I just want to share some thoughts on that question because it's super valid. We are not in the business of prescribing tools to nonprofits as a whole. A nonprofit that provides health and human services is going to have vastly different needs and questions and missions from, you know, a different one. The one that specializes in nationwide public media, which again is going to be so different from a nonprofit that does medical research. So the nonprofit community is so vast and diverse that trying to push services or solutions just because is not helpful for you or for us. So what we prefer to do is start with the customer and work backwards from there to try to see how technologies can meet the needs that you have. That being said, I know it can be hard sometimes to come up with ideas if you've never used the cloud before or built any new applications. So I usually like to ask the question, what annoying tasks do you have to do that take away from your ability to deliver on your mission? Think about what could be better. What are you currently spending a lot of money, time, precious resources on? How are you doing things like donor management, fundraising? Is there manual work happening on these that we could maybe automate or make more effective? How are you interacting with your community right now? Could they benefit from more or better channels of interacting with you? Maybe a chat bot, maybe better email, maybe a phone system. How are you storing data? Are you storing data? And if so, what kind? Why are you storing it? Is there some useful questions that we can answer using that data? So this hopefully gets you thinking about the types of goals that you could be setting out. But this is really what you want to do in this phase. Getting alignment is probably the hardest part of any cloud journey. So in many cases, you're asking people to change and change, even good change can be difficult. So it's critical to have a single threaded leader who is responsible for the cloud adoption effort. So this is what we were talking about before, making sure that you have projects and goals laid out, but you assign a senior leader to each one of those goals so that they're able to really drive change and push for change. So if you're a larger organization, that leader could ideally oversee a cloud team, but if you're a smaller organization, one, two people, probably good enough. That leader should be responsible for answering the types of questions that you see on this slide and making sure that everybody is on the same page about the answers. So how are you going to do the work? Who's going to do it? When will it be done? So let's say that you're at this phase right now, you've got your goals, you've assigned them to a senior leader, and now you're trying to lay out requirements. So how can you move forward? So I recommend that you work on laying requirements out for this project, working with all the different stakeholders for that project, making sure that you include folks who interact with all different aspects of the project is crucial at this phase. Who are the end users? Often there are many types of people that are going to be the end users. You might have, let's say that you're building out like a fundraising application. I keep going back to that because I'm hoping that it's going to be relevant to everybody. So let's say that you have a fundraising application. Some of your end users are going to be internal folks that are administrating this application, but then you also might have donors that are on the other side of that fundraising application. So making sure that you understand what all those different folks are thinking and then as well as the people that are going to be building this application and operating it over time, getting all those folks together and understanding any fears or concerns that they might have about putting this project together is really important because then we can come up with ways to overcome those fears. So let's just come up with an example. One is that you might not have the right expertise to build a better donor management solution. So it's really our job to help you find ways to overcome those fears and blockers. This is why we're here. Remember, solutions architect provide a free service to you. So in this example, we might help you find a good partner to help you build or maintain a solution. Another might be to, you know, if you've got folks in-house that are interested and capable of learning new things, you can, we can actually bring folks in, we can train you, we can get you certified to make sure you're comfortable using all these different services. But at a high level, the point I'm trying to make is making sure that you get all the concerns out into the open early will make sure that everybody's on the same page and feels ready to get started. Okay. The next step would be launch. So launching your pilot project, but what does that actually entail? Ideally, you're going to be working with us at that point. You're going to have your own account team with your own solutions architect, and you'll be able to identify a pilot project that you want to build. And then you start building. So hopefully by then you've got either some folks in-house, or you've got a third party that you're working with, or you're working with us to actually physically go in and build something out. So identifying a challenge, working with us to design a solution and building out a pilot. The most important thing to note here is that the pilots should have really specific goals and metrics. We can help you put those together. Basically, these outcomes are going to help you prove the value of all the work that you've put in and also determine when you're ready to scale to full production. One thing I want to mention, we talk a lot about working backwards at AWS. This is something we get internal training on. We do sessions on this for customers. But all this means is that you have to know the end goal really, really well in order to figure out all the steps you need to take in order to get there. This helps us stay laser focused on the end goal and then maintain flexibility in how we achieve it. We're all non-profits here. We're not like tech companies necessarily. And so it's really not about the technology that you're using. We don't want you getting stuck in the weeds of all that stuff. Everything that you do should tie back to specific goals which tie back to your mission. So keep the focus there. And you should always be asking yourself, where does the value lie? And identify the technical constraints that help you from realizing it, whether that's whatever it might be. My website is running too slowly. I don't have enough space to store all this data that I have. You can talk to us with those kinds of problems and we can identify the ways that AWS solutions can help make it easier to get to your goals. And then lastly, I'm going to talk about the scale phase which is all about measuring your progress against your original goals. Did you meet them? Are there still some gaps? Making sure that every part of the organization knows their role in making sure that the project is successful is going to help you. And it's going to make sure that everybody is educated on the aspects of AWS that they need to know. So for example, your finance org doesn't need to know all the technical details of what you're running on AWS, but they might need to be comfortable going through some of our building services, setting budgets and analyzing your spend. And one thing I want to note is if you're like most of our customers, you'll find that this initial win is going to spark many other ideas and projects. The first one can be the most difficult, but once you begin, it's going to be an almost immediate flywheel effect. And Jamon already went over a lot of the help and resources you have, but don't forget, there's lots of people that are available to you. You can always reach out and we can point you to the right direction. So here's the call to action. Identify your what and why. Figure out what the blockers are to helping you achieve your mission or the things that are slowing you down that you don't want to do anymore. Figure out what those things are. It'll help you put together a project. It'll help you identify who should be responsible for that project. And then try things out, launch a pilot, make sure you're measuring the success against your original goals, and then iterate. Feel comfortable with this being something that you're growing on. You're not going to get it all right the first time you try to do it, and that's okay. That's expected. And use your AWS team. We're always here to help you. And I think that's it actually, Jamon. So can I pass it back to you? Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic, Nina. Thank you so much for that explanation. And before we jump into some Q&A, I want to first go on screen. I think hopefully you can see me now. But invite Carlton on. Tell us a little bit about his organization, The Disability Rights Texas, and what his experience was like choosing AWS, growing on AWS, as well as some best practices for our audience today. Thanks again, Nina. And Carlton, if you want to jump on screen, that'd be great. All right. Hey, everybody, I'm Carlton Whitmore. I'm the IT manager here at Disability Rights Texas. I've been here for 24 years. I'm the IT manager here. So Disability Rights Texas basically advocates for people with varying disabilities. It could be school-aged kids. It could be seniors. It could be intellectual issues. But they take on the full game. And we have an intake line, and a number that people call into. And if their case meets within our priorities, we'll take on the case or, you know, we'll at least provide some information for them. But when I started here in 1998, you know, typical for IT people, they worked someplace for two or three years, and then they moved on. And that's what I thought when I started with Disability Rights Texas. But when I found out what they did and how compassionate the people were, they worked here and how much they believe in the mission, you know, I'm still here 24 years later. But our cloud strategy started actually back in 2013. We moved into the building right now in 2012. And at that time, we're in Austin, Texas, and we're close to this complex called the Domain where a lot of the high-tech companies are moving to even today. There's a huge shopping area over there. And at the time, there was a lot of construction going on. And we started seeing outages. They weren't long outages, but, you know, it was concerning because we had all of our production servers here in this building. So I went to upper management and said, hey, we need to really start looking at moving our servers to the cloud. And their response back then was, you know, we're really concerned with security in the cloud. You know, what's the cost going to be? There's a lot of questions that came up. And then I want to share a picture with you guys here. Let's see. Hey, Dana, can you unshare your screen so I can share mine? Yeah, you got it. Thank you. So hopefully you all can see that picture there. So in 2013, we had a really bad electrical storm here in Austin. And that's actually the fuse box for the air conditioning unit on top of our building. So this is how we actually got to move to the cloud. The computer room got up to about 90 degrees. Everything started shutting down, which is my great opportunity for mates to express to them, okay, you saw what happened. If we moved to the cloud, we can move resources around. We don't have to worry about air conditioning and backup air conditioning. We don't have to worry about maintaining servers and, you know, renewing hardware licenses and all that stuff. So 2014, 2015, we moved, gradually moved our production servers into AWS with the EC2 instances. And then we built on top of that. We started using some of those services, like the site-to-site VPN service, so we could connect through our network. And then we also, another example is that we got a social security grant and we were not able to provide laptops for them. So what we did was we utilized the AWS Workspaces, which is a virtual desktop infrastructure. And so we could have tablets. They could have tablets, but they couldn't have laptops. I don't know why, but anyway, that was their role. So we used Workspaces for a while. Then we, you know, we also use the AWS Backup and they also have something called Elastic Disaster Recovery. So the production servers that we have in AWS were able to mirror those from one part of the country to another part in case that region goes down. So, you know, through the years we've used different services and it's really, I think, paid off for us. I will say that the credit was a huge motivator for us. And I think we just take advantage of the credit and spin up a few things and AWS and do a trial, figure out what, you know, how it works. When we first started, we were using, you know, we have all Windows servers and people are like, you're going to spin up a Windows server and AWS, that's all Linux, but that wasn't true. So, you know, we were able to spin up these Windows servers and then we were able to run a Python Lambda instance and shut those servers down at night automatically so we could save costs that way. So I think it's hard to see the big picture when you see how the services that they provide. But if you start simple and then start thinking about things that the venue was talking about, like, what are your pressure points? What are the things that, you know, that you're concerned about? And I saw somebody in the chats talking about building a website. You know, you can build a website on S3 storage and then use CloudFront to distribute that website all around the world. So anyway, that's our story. If anybody has any questions? Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much, Carlton. It's a pleasure always to have you with us and for, you know, hearing your story. I am kind of happy, but also scary about that picture you showed. Like, it sounds like it was a bad thing that happened, but ultimately helped you progress in terms of migrating to the cloud. So maybe our audience members don't have to go that far in terms of convincing their leadership. But again, thank you so much for having us. And I'll ask now, Vina, if you don't mind just resharing your screen and we can go to that last slide, if you will. And I, again, want to thank both Vina and Carlton for speaking today. And I thank you, audience members, for attending today. You know, the theme, I think, largely was that we're just getting started. And I want to speak to that point because it's important that you know that that is totally okay. And you are in the absolute right place. I'm confident when I say that it's largely a matter of when cloud becomes the unanimous norm, not as much an if. So the fact that you're here, despite being very previously unaware of the value of AWS, means you're taking the first step to leading the pack and being ahead of a curve in terms of cloud adoption. So I really want to congratulate you on doing that. And also emphasize in a similar spirit in the message that what Vina said, and we're focused on providing you solutions, the services and the technology. That's, in my perspective, complicated and sometimes boring. And luckily we have people like Vina to help us actually deploy those services. But what you bring to the relationship with AWS are those pain points and those ideas. You can come to us without knowing anything about how, but knowing everything about why and in what ways technology might be able to help with the solutions for your organization. So again, congratulations for being here for taking that first step and come speak with us to be inspired. I put the chat, or excuse me, the links in the chat. And now I will speak through some questions. We have about 10 or 15 minutes. So please, if you have any questions, now is an excellent time to ask them. Vina, if there's some that I don't see, then please jump in as well. And these questions can be for me, for Carlton, or for Vina. So I'll start with the first one. And they discussed that they attended the AWS conference virtually. And they reviewed the Imagine grant. And I think this one is for you, Vina. When they're redesigning their website, in what order or what's the process for redesigning a website and how it looks versus moving that website to AWS? Sure. So I'm going to address at least the part about the Imagine grant. There's no should here. There's no you have to move your website over. You don't have to run all of your infrastructure in AWS in order to imply for the Imagine grant. The Imagine grant, you can apply for that no matter where you are in your journey. You just need to really have an idea. So there's no requirement that you need to migrate all of your stuff over to AWS in order to apply. So just to make that super clear. But in terms of what it looks like to redesign a website, if you were to move it to AWS, a lot of times you can actually just pick up a website from wherever it's hosted. It's going to depend on some of the technical details of that. If you're working with a third party provider versus if you're hosting it on your own versus if you're hosting with a cloud service provider already. So you can sometimes just pick it up as is and run it on AWS. Sometimes it can really be that simple. Sometimes you might want to go a little bit further. You might want to architect your website a little bit differently to make it run to help it take advantage of all the benefits of AWS that I shared earlier. So to know you don't have to move your website to AWS. If it's not part of your imagined grant proposal, nobody is forcing you to do that. You should definitely apply to the grant whether or not you have resources in AWS already or anything. But yeah, if you're interested in learning about how you can move your website or how you can redesign your website in AWS, feel free to reach out to us and we can have a deeper conversation. Excellent. And while we're on that topic, a question that I think is probably common among our audience today is point blank. What are the benefits of moving the website to AWS? Why even bother? Sure. So I'm going to go back to this slide because I think it hopefully explains most of it. And I'm going to particularly highlight a couple of things. One of them is cost savings and the other one is scalability. So cost savings, meaning that you're only paying for what you're using. There are no upfront costs. We're constantly cutting costs for our services. We've done it 111 times. And as we continue to get more customers on the platform, we are able to basically purchase stuff in bulk, which means that we're actually able to cut costs very consistently. Basically, this is just using the economies of scale. So a lot of customers find that if they migrate their websites over to AWS, sometimes they're able to save money immediately. Sometimes it requires a little bit of extra tweaking to take advantage of these benefits. But that's one major benefit. Another benefit is the scalability. So being able to meet traffic load, whatever it might be, whether you've got a website with 100 users or if you've got a website with millions of users, we can make sure that you have the right amount of resources running behind the seams to make sure that everybody has a good experience interacting with your website. So those are probably the two biggest ones that I would highlight. But in general, all of these benefits apply. Excellent. Thanks, Veena. Another question has to do with migrating licensed softwares. They talk a little bit about the context of the credit program, which covers all on-demand services. So perhaps you can just elaborate on, if someone in the audience is thinking about migrating licensed softwares, where might they begin? How might they benefit from working with Solutions Architect in AWS? Sure. So it depends on the license. I hate saying it depends, but it really does. It depends on the license. It depends on what you're actually using. So I'll give you a couple of different options. And the first thing you should do, feel free to reach out to us. We can have a deeper conversation about this. But just for everybody in the audience for you to understand, at a high level, licenses sometimes can be migrated over to AWS and sometimes they can't. So it really depends on the intricacies of that third party, how they're choosing to put all the legalese together for the license. Sometimes they make it really easy to just port that stuff over to AWS and sometimes they don't. So we've got what's called the AWS Marketplace, where you can see a bunch of third-party products that have already been basically posted on AWS. And so particularly if something is on the AWS Marketplace, it makes it really easy to migrate that license over. That's not like 100% true all the time, but oftentimes if something is on Marketplace, it makes it a little bit easier because it means they're already working with us. But yeah, so in long story short, sometimes you can migrate a license over, sometimes you can apply those credits to the licenses and sometimes you can't. So it's just something that we're going to have a deeper, have to have a deeper conversation on. Fantastic. Appreciate that answer. And the way to get in touch with either Veena or Solutions Architects like Veena is in the chat. It's that first link I put up there with chat with an AWS expert. So certainly reach out to Veena's pointers. It all depends, as they say, but thanks for that information. So the next question we have has to do with the phone solution. Can you talk a little bit about how AWS might solve for nonprofits problems or goals as it relates to using the phone? Yep, sure. So our call center service is called Amazon Connect. So feel free, while you're on your laptop right now, just go into another tab, open up Amazon Connect. You can look up FAQs and things like that. But I'll just give you a high level overview. Basically, it's a virtual call center. So almost anything that you can do in a standard call center. So being able to review transcripts from a phone call, being able to see notes about a particular call or as they're calling you so that you know, like all the previous conversations that they've had, being able to transfer them to different, you know, have them call in and they say, like, press one, if you want to do this, press two, if you want to do that, all of that stuff built into Amazon Connect. And it actually uses this really cool drag and drop editor. So it makes it really easy to put together how you want a user to interact with your phone line. So you can have them come in just through your phone line standard. And then you can have like, have this like really nice drag and drop flow chart, basically, that illustrates their journey that they make through the call center. So they might call and then they might need to talk to a specialist and then they get routed here. Maybe they get put on hold. So they get routed here. Maybe they play some music. So they get routed here. It's really nice to use actually and pretty fun. But that's our service. I would recommend that you take a look at it. And if you have any questions about it, of course, reach out to us. We're always happy to do demos of this service and any service. Happy to do demos, happy to explain how this could relate to you. And like I mentioned before, the LAL GPT Center was able to experiment with the stuff in just a few minutes. So if you have an AWS account, or if you don't have one, please make one. It's really easy to try this stuff out. And oftentimes you can do it for free. So highly recommended. Fantastic. And we had a question come in, which I think is a great kind of addition to everything you just said, Veena. And it asks about the $1,000 in credit, whether it's once a year or recurring. So I can take that one and explain that organizations have the opportunity to receive a promotional credit from TechSoup once a year. So it's $1,000 for your one organization once per TechSoup fiscal year, which starts in July. And a little bit behind the $1,000 to inform your decision in getting this credit is that we chose $1,000 because we know that the solutions and the services that Veena are describing are largely covered by that value. So don't feel like your costs are going to be 10x that and it's only a mere fraction. I want you to feel secure and comfortable knowing that this credit can really help your organization get started and get some momentum in understanding the value of AWS for your mission. So I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. I'm going to jump up and ask if we could speak, Veena, a little bit about speech recognition, you know, maybe in terms of translations or just a little bit about those services at a high level. Yep, sure. So we've got a bunch of different services that are kind of like adjacent in this space. One is a translation service. It's literally called Amazon Translate. You can look that one up. It's super simple. If you've ever, frankly, if you've ever looked at Google Translate before, it's really similar to that. So you type in the whatever the sentence is in a particular language. It's able to output in English or whatever other language you need it to be. So this is a service that you can integrate into your websites. You can integrate it into your call centers. You can integrate it into chatbots. So it's a service that's, of course, it's a building block, right? So you can really integrate it into whatever service you need it to be. And then I think I saw something kind of similar way, I guess, is the call center available in different languages? Yes, it is. So there are lots of different languages that are supported by different services. And so if you're interested specifically in Connect, you can go and type in Connect supported languages that'll come up. If you want to look at AWS Translate specifically to see the potential source and destination languages, you can look that up as well and see a full list of all the languages that are available. Fantastic. All right. As we wrap up, I want to address one question that kind of speaks to that marketplace. They asked if we design the websites, and correct me if I'm wrong, Avinah, but while AWS doesn't do the designing in terms of how it necessarily looks on the front end, we do have certain partners and a marketplace that can help them receive the support to do just that. Is that right? Or can you speak a little bit about designing a website? Yeah, totally. So we have loads of different ways to do that. And I won't go into all of them. Actually, see folks have asked about multiple different ways to host a website. So it seems like people are aware of it. Sometimes you can host them just plain and simple. Like I said, you can pick up whatever you've got and drop it into AWS. Sometimes we have services that make it a little bit easier for you to build one from scratch. So we have a service called Lightsail that makes it really easy for you to just launch a website. Makes it super simple. It launches all the required services that you need behind the scenes so you don't need to necessarily worry about all the different building blocks required. So it depends on the needs for the website and what it actually needs to do. But that's generally how you would do it. And then I think Carleton mentioned earlier that you can actually host a lot of websites on a service called AWS S3. So that is one of the cheapest and simplest ways to do it as well. That is specifically for static websites, which just means a website that doesn't change very often. If you just have a simple webpage that has a bunch of information on it, you can host that on S3. Somebody can be able to navigate to that website. And they can see for the most part the same stuff. Maybe you'd change it once every week or so. That's totally fine. Well supported. So yeah, loads of different ways to host a website. And then I saw what is the name for building the website. There are multiple different services that are involved here. If you're interested, I would recommend that you type on your search engine, just type in like AWS web hosting. And it'll give you all the different mechanisms to host a website on AWS. Excellent. Well, thank you all so much, Vina, Carleton, and all of the attendees. To Aritha's point in the chat, please do take the survey. This helps us improve and continue to support you all better every time we come on the screen. So one last push in the chat. Those are the resources to help you get started. We're here. We are ready. And we are excited for the opportunity to connect with you to help you achieve your mission on AWS. So thank you again for your time. We look forward to connecting with you. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Be well.