 Welcome everyone to Disaster Prep and Recovery for Non-profits and Libraries Using Technology. We are glad to have you joining us for today's TechSoup webinar. Before we get started I would like to make sure everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk, the webinar platform we are on today. Feel free to chat your questions in using the box on the lower left side of your screen at any time. No need to raise your hand. We will be here to flag those questions, help you with any technical difficulties, and get those questions queued up for our presenter during the webinar. We will keep all lines muted so you get a clear recording to refer to later and share with your friends and colleagues. Most of you are hearing the audio play through your computer speakers, so if you are hearing an echo you may be logged in more than once and will need to close additional instances of ReadyTalk. 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My name is Becky Wiegand and I am the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup and I am happy to be your host today. I am joined by Lars Eric Holm who is the Disaster Preparedness Coordinator at Eden INR which is a nonprofit that provides 2-1-1 service linking Alameda County, California families, and individuals to community resources, referrals, information, and services throughout the community. I know Lars Eric from going way back probably 6 or 7 years before joining Eden INR. He was the lead community educator and IT specialist at CARD coordinating – I'm sorry, I think it's collaborating agencies responding to disasters. Correct me if I'm wrong there Lars Eric. They are a nonprofit in Oakland, California that had worked on addressing emergency preparedness and disaster response needs of service providers. So they helped make sure that the providers of services to communities had their disaster preparedness plans and response plans in check and ready to go so that no matter what kind of disaster struck people were prepared to respond and support their communities. He has conducted trainings for a diverse range of communities including children to seniors, visually impaired, and deaf and hard of hearing. We are really glad to have him as our expert presenter today. You will also see assisting in the chat, Susan Hope Bard from TechSoup. She is our Training and Education Manager and you will see Sarah Finnegan who is joining us from Eden INR as their deputy director. So thank you to both of you for helping on the back end. Looking at our objectives for Day Day, we hope that you will come away from today's event and will have learned some about 2-1-1 and other already existing technology resources to help you support your community, whatever kind of community that is, in an emergency or disaster. We hope that you will be able to consider whether your organization has already got a good setup for your backup, your power, literal power like your ability to power on devices and technology in an emergency, and communication strategies to help plan ahead of any disaster. And we hope that you will discover some types of mobile apps available that will provide support and response during an emergency. And for the sake of today's event we really are defining emergency or disaster pretty broadly. In TechSoup's mind an emergency can be it floods in your office and your server gets rained on. It can be a former employee maybe maliciously attacking your technology. That probably doesn't happen too much but it is the kind of disaster you want to make sure that you are prepared for. It can be a major catastrophe like a hurricane or a tornado, a natural disaster. There are so many different varieties of things that can happen. And we want to make sure that you are not afraid to move forward with steps today that can help you better respond and be prepared ahead of time so that you can continue to be a resilient organization, whether you are a library, a church, whether you are a nonprofit, whatever community is that you connect with or serve that you are able to support them and keep your staff and people in your office safe and connected. So before we get into the topic at hand, a little bit about TechSoup. We are a nonprofit 501c3 and we have been around since 1987. And we now serve every place in the world on this map that is blue which is almost all of the world, 236 countries. If you are joining us from outside the United States, I recommend visiting our TechSoup.global site. But go ahead and chat in to let us know from where you are joining us today. Susan and I are based in our San Francisco headquarters here. And I believe Lars Eric is in the East Bay today, maybe Hayward. We've got people chiming in from all over the place. So thank you so much for joining us. We may mention some resources and products or tools that may only be available to organizations in the United States. So like I said, if you are from outside the U.S., I recommend checking out TechSoup.global and selecting your country from the drop-down to learn what different resources may be available and donated to organizations in your country. With that, I'd like to go ahead and hand it over to Lars Eric to take us through some of his disaster prep and recovery for nonprofits or libraries. Thanks so much for joining us today Lars Eric. We are really glad to have you. Becky, everyone, thank you very, very much. So just as Becky indicated, this slide deck is meant to be a resource. So I'm going to be moving fairly quickly through things because part of the idea is that you guys will have this slide deck to then look at at your leisure in more detail to look things up. Also, I'll have complete contact information at the very end. So please do feel free to reach out to me. Email is a great way to reach me for example for any questions you might have. First, just a really quick, hold on here, just a really quick little bit about my background. Any since I was born to have my current career, my current calling, I grew up in Alaska where I learned a Yupik phrase which basically translates as always getting ready. When you grow up in a rural place like Alaska, you're really comfortable with the idea of how it's important to just always be ready to deal with any kind of a situation that might happen on your own. I worked for a number of years for a company that made backup software. So I lived and breathed backup for quite some time. As Becky mentioned, I was the lead community educator and IT specialist for collaborating agencies on disaster are focused on helping nonprofits prepare to prosper. I am now working for Eden INR as a disaster preparedness coordinator. But because Eden INR was one of the co-founders of CARD, I'm actually able to offer CARD's innovative curriculum for free actually which is great within Alameda County for nonprofits. That being said, for those of you who are outside of Alameda County, outside California, or even outside United States, please don't hesitate to contact us because CARD especially in Eden INR and 2-1-1s all do like to reach out to each other. I am in fact a little bit of a preparedness geek as you can see from my favorite mugs. Okay, so Eden INR just a little bit about us. We have been successfully linking people and resources for 40 years. We are the centralized resource for health, housing, and community resources in Alameda County. Do know that 2-1-1 is in fact a national program. One of our primary functions for the past 10 years has been to be the folks who answer at the other end of the line when you call 2-1-1 asking for help and when you call within Alameda County you get us. Why would you call 2-1-1 in general? It's because it is a free 24-7 multilingual completely confidential phone number and you can actually get any kind of community resources in everyday life as well as before, during, or after a disaster. We constantly are vetting and verifying our resources. We basically help people with a wide variety of issues, legal referrals, we're getting a bit of a spike in things about having to do with immigration law for example, counseling services, housing, family support, we partner with organizations like First 5 and so forth. And the most important thing about this is that we actually provide in-depth assessments. When you call 2-1-1 for help we don't just say, oh let me look that up for you. We actually ask some questions, again as I said completely confidential, to guide you not just towards the things that you're asking for but also for the resources that you actually need. So sometimes when people call looking for a housing we may find during the assessment that they also have a need for food or for childcare or for counseling or for employment opportunities. So it's actually a much bigger picture. It's a holistic, compassionate ear that you get at the other end of the line when you call 2-1-1. One of my favorite quotes is from an author named Neil Gaiman who once noted that Google can bring you back 100,000 answers but it takes a librarian to bring you back the right one. Eden I&R is that librarian for any kind of health, housing, and human resources. In a disaster, where the number you would call? If it's life-threatening, if you have to have something out there you obviously would call 9-1-1 but it's really, really critical to note that you want to actually be able to reach information without tying up the lines for 9-1-1. So we'd be giving you all kinds of news and updates on health advisories for example, should you evacuate or not? Where can you find food, water, or shelters? It's also important to know that we have a very important role post-disaster. Those of you may have seen the news about the San Jose floods and we actually have a roving specialist who despite the fact that it's in San Jose which is outside of Alameda County we have one of the top housing databases in the country. And even though it's focused on Alameda County, a lot of folks still need some housing opportunities plus we're advocating with landlords on trying to help people find housing now they've been flooded out. So life-threatening emergencies, you obviously still call 9-1-1 but everything else you call 2-1-1 and that's national across United States outside the country. I'd be actually interested in hearing from some of you folks where some of these similar services might reside. So we're basically the number to call. That's really the essential takeaway from this. Keep in mind too that we are extremely active in disaster preparedness. We constantly participate in drills. We're constantly making sure that we're available in times of crisis. We have our own backup and preparedness efforts which is one reason why we can talk very intelligibly about this because we have to make sure that we're prepared to be here to serve the community. Now keep in mind that a lot of the people we focus, youth, non-English speakers, domestic violence, disabled, homeless, and we actually also will help people, human service agencies who are themselves seeking service on behalf of their clients. So it's entirely possible that you actually might call 2-1-1 on behalf of someone. And it's really important especially during an emergency because we can actually help steer people in proper directions and that actually leaves other agencies free to respond in the ways that they can do most efficiently. Here are a couple of slides that I have borrowed from my time at Card. And we'll just take a short moment to look at this. You'll see that there's basically a whole group of people who often get labeled as having issues. Seniors, low income, single parents, deaf heart of hearing, special needs that have emerged because of the disaster, homeless, chemically dependent. I mean there's so many ways that we can label people. You can see we actually did cram two slides worth of it. People who are fearful of governmental agencies, perhaps people who are in fact reentry out of the system, they're developmentally disabled, people who are transients. Pets or animals are often a very big issue. Culture is a huge, huge issue during this. So what I like to do now is this is a point where we'd actually do a quick poll. Please indicate, if you have any of the people listed on these prior slides, are clients that serve by your work? Yep, go ahead and check off. Click that radio button on screen that whether you're helping people who are listed on those slides, and it may be that you have a House of Worship where people come, and those are folks that may be on some of those lists. It might be that you were in a community center, or an animal shelter, or any other type of nonprofit. You may be an education nonprofit where you do policy and advocacy, and so maybe you don't have direct service to people, but maybe the issues you touch on serve people in those lists. So take a second and we'll go ahead and share the results here in just a moment. The great majority of the people on the line today are serving people who are on that list, or on either of those lists. So it really does touch everybody almost. One other question we want to ask and get an idea of who you are on the line today. So take a second and select which of these roles or primary area of focus you fill within your organization. And this is you personally. So are you the IT person? Are you doing operations, finance? I didn't put every role that there could possibly be on here. Are you the decision maker? Are you an executive or board member? Are you managing your marketing or communications? Fundraising? Maybe you work at the circulation desk, or you do intake or direct service delivery. Or like many of us in nonprofit life, maybe you wear many hats. And again select which most applies to your role. And this just helps us get an idea of who you are because no matter where you sit within an organization you have a role to play in helping ensure that your organization is prepared and has thought about your IT and your technical resources and how they can stand up to a disaster of any kind and how you can use them and leverage them to respond more appropriately. So let's go ahead and show the results on this one. It looks like 30% are IT today so that's great. And followed pretty closely by 20%, almost 21% who wear many hats in the organization, not atypical. And then we've got another big group of more operations admin folks and another big group of decision makers on the leadership and executive side. So that's helpful. So thanks for chiming in on that. And I'll let Lars Eric take it back away. Thank you. And by the way, I think I forgot to mention that EDEN-9R and the 2-1-1s are all nonprofits. So we basically are here to serve the community which is an emphasis on folks on the community. So because disaster preparedness, IT or otherwise is often other duties assigned, it's one of the many hats you often wear. My prior job I actually had no fewer than three job titles. So some of the resources that we can basically make available for you guys, if you go to EDEN-9R you'll actually see some information that will be listed there. We'll be having some more links at the end. I also want to point you guys to the really wonderful IT disaster planning recovery that TechSoup has prepared. In fact, CARD, the agency I used to work for was involved in the initial drafts of that. I think you're on the third draft now. Anyway, so this is going to be all about resources. Now here's the really critical thing about this. Whenever you're approaching a conversation because you guys are probably going to need to go back and basically encourage people to take some of these steps, it's extremely important to make sure that you don't talk in a way that even begins to sound threatening or intimidating or overwhelming. And talking about disasters this way, talking about technology, a lot of people actually find technology to be extremely scary as well. So it's kind of funny how information technology and technology and preparedness for disasters can really overlap. So I'm not going to go into this slide in too much detail. It's just keep in mind that a lot of this is about looking at this in a really positive and empowering way, how to make good decisions under stress, and how to actually have fun with this to build and empower team back where you're at. A lot of the approach that we like to advocate for, that Card offered, and that I offer in the trainings that I do, is what we like to call a culture of preparedness. It's basically making sure that it's just your way of being. It's not something that you think about only at special meetings. It's actually something you kind of build into your everyday culture via things like signage, via things like taking a preparedness moment at the beginning of staff meetings, via things like actually making preparedness part of your new employee orientation, making sure that they actually sign in the technology that you guys have in certain ways so you can recover easily. So it's the same thing. It's really culture of technology as well, especially since it's now become really permeated almost every single aspect. And do keep in mind that a lot of this stuff has actually changed. Things have changed a lot from the way they were in the old days. If you've been watching into the older TV shows or older movies, like my youngest daughter is, it's kind of remarkable. They're trying to figure out what things like VHS tapes are. What's a VCR? So let's talk a little bit about what mobile technology is. It's basically anything that isn't nailed down. That cuts across all ages, all populations, all demographics. I mean young children, people who actually aren't even high income often still are very dependent on technology. And here's a really important thing to kind of find out when you're talking about embracing technology for empowering your outreach and your resilience. It's something that they call the law of diffusion of innovation. You basically will have folks who are at the end of the curve, at the top of the curve, what they sometimes like to call the bleeding edge. They're the innovators, the people who adopt the new things as soon as they come out. Then you have your early adopters. And then you tend to have a lot of folks who tend to go get on the board when things become more common. So like when iPads first came out, you had some people who got into that very initially and then you became very ubiquitous. Then you have the laggards. And then you have the people who are consistently against virtually everything. Folks that basically are still unhappy that we don't still have rotary phones, for example. And it's actually important to have folks that are on this end of the spectrum because you don't want to just do change just for the sake of change. So I'd like you guys to take a moment and basically indicate right now on the view of the poll where you feel you are on this curve. And it's entirely okay to be honest. There's no judgment here. Judgment's free room. We just want to get an idea of kind of where you fall because oftentimes because of limited budgets, limited resources, limited time, limited staff expertise, particularly in smaller organizations, it can be really tough to get on the bandwagon and adopt some of the newer technologies. So that's not excuses, but that's just saying there are some really legitimate reasons to sometimes be in the late majority or be a laggard, or maybe be resistant to some of those changes. So we want to give credit where due that it is useful to have kind of everyone across the spectrum. But we're going to talk about some of the technologies that can help you that might already be in your pocket. It might be something you're already carrying around with you that can help you better secure and help your organization be more resilient and stable in a disaster. So I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results so everyone can see. I've got a lot of early majority people in this group and pretty close to even on early adopter and late majority. I consider myself an early adopter, sometimes early majority. So good, good. Great. Okay, thank you. And that makes perfect sense. That's why it is a bell curve after all. Okay, so getting into the meat and potatoes of this now, I mean it's really important. I spent a few moments talking about the framing, talking about what Eden 9 R is and why it's important to have a positive framework for this. But now some of the down under details. When I worked for Dance Development, our motto was to go forward, you must back up. And I've seen over the years a lot of changes in how backups happened ranging from tape-based backup systems to I mean now cloud-based is much more. But here are the really, really key important points. To have a good backup, it's fairly important that they need to be automated. They need to be monitored. They absolutely must be redundant. And it's very important to decide then to be redundant that they are rotated. So automated because if it has to be manually run, if somebody is sick, not there, it doesn't happen. Monitored, a thing I often would see happen is that people would forget about their automatic backups and not realize that some kind of a problem existed. It's very, very important to have multiple copies. And we'll talk a moment about how it's important to have those off-site. So these are really, really the four criteria. So please come back to this when evaluating your own backups. I like to think of this and just note that when you guys go looking at the wonderful, resilient organization from TechSoup, the terminology I'm using here is a little bit more based on the type of thing that you'll hear in consumer-based products. So my terminology is a tiny bit different than what you're going to be seeing when you go to that guide, but it's highly analogous. So holy trinity backups. This is a backup strategy I use myself. There are version backups. These are usually provided by either incremental or differential backups where you basically recopy only the files that have changed and you have accessed two files over time. Bootable backups. This is especially important for critical machines like your accounting machines or your machines provide the databases for your essential services, something you can basically plug in somewhere else and get up and running very quickly. And then of course it's highly, highly critical to have backups that are stored far away from where you currently are in case you had to relocate. So version backups basically allows you to have copies of your files at many points in time and some of the things it protects against are also things like file corruption or user error. You can also get that earlier version of your novel if you don't like the changes you made. These are most commonly done in some kind of external hard drive. It's not recommended to do internal drives or stack of CDs. And this kind of thing should be at least once a day. And a lot of people will have their incremental backups run several times a day or hourly. A lot of the automatic software that's included with Windows or OS X in fact do precisely that. Four, bootable backups. Sometimes also known as a clone. It's basically the exact copy of your startup disk that you can boot up from right away even at a different machine. This kind of thing actually requires specialized software. It's not something that you can actually do just by dragging files off to an external hard drive. You should definitely run these kinds of things minimum once a week and I frankly prefer daily. Also it's the type of thing that you should do before you do any kind of a major upgrade such as going to a new version of the operating system. And this type of thing often having multiple drives that you rotate off site can be important for your especially critical machines. You might not do this for your everyday workstations but for your really critical services machines, multiple drives that get rotated highly highly critical. Now we've talked a lot about already about having rotating backups. It's something that's stored far away. And I kind of combine both cloud or physical in the same category. Some people actually like to have these two separate categories but to my mind off site is in fact off site. And the whole idea here is that you have protection from your local catastrophes such as a fire in your building that perhaps destroys all of your hardware. It's fairly important to have this in a secure location. So make sure you're using a secure cloud backup service, whatever that might be. And if you're doing rotating drives or rotating media back in the old days people used to do tape backups for example. Please keep these in ideal storage conditions i.e. make sure they're secure and not in place that are hot, cold, wet, etc. Depending on how secure your location is consider using encryption as well. It's actually a really good idea to make sure that these types of things aren't too easily gotten to if something should happen to one of your media especially if it's being in transport. A great time to verify your backup. This is a little bit of a joke among IT folks is that every Friday the 13th is a great time to verify your backup. What you can do is try restoring a few files to confirm the backups are actually working. And by the way when you choose backup software it's really really important I'd say to make sure that your backup software includes some kind of a verification pass anyway. It's also a fantastic time to try making sure you can do a test boot from your bootable duplicate either not just from your own machine but perhaps an alternate machine so you can establish things off-site. I do know for a fact that the Alameda County Community Food Bank does a strategy very much like this where they actually have off-site backup drives and off-site machines that are already pre-installed with the software they would use and they could actually therefore function from a remote location if their machines aren't available off-site. So I went through this pretty quickly but this can be a very very big topic. So I just want to do a fast pause and take a look and see if there are any kind of questions or comments. Sure. Yeah we had one question from Meg asking should you keep versioned backups of your bootable backups? So what I do personally is I keep these separately. I have one hard drive. I'm a Mac user so I have a hard drive that's fairly large that I use Time Machine and that's my versioned backup. I have a second hard drive that's pretty much the same size as my computer's hard drive and that's my bootable backup. So my bootable backup basically is a hard drive that I could then pick up and walk with and take that to another machine to boot off of. Or there have been two occasions now when my personal machine suddenly went bad and I had to reformat the hard drive but I didn't have time to reformat the hard drive and restore it because I had to get work done. So I booted off the bootable backup, did my work for that day. And when the weekend came I was able to then fix my machine and get running again. Great. So I've started many separate. We have a couple of other questions that are just coming in on backup too. Debbie asks what software do you use for bootable backup? Is there anything that's free? I don't know of anything that's particularly free right now. I'm actually in a process of doing a reassessment of backup software. I personally use something called Data Backup which is done by ProSoft. You're not going to see that in this deck yet because I want to verify that they're still kind of up to date. And I'll be doing like sort of a follow up on this to see how they are. But the one reason I chose them is because they're cross-platform. They have both Windows and Mac versions and they were very highly, highly regarded. I think one reason I want to do a reassessment though is I've been finding that their interface is a little denser than I think the average end user would like to do. So I'm doing a bit of an assessment on that but there's that retrospect is still around. That's the software company I worked for. They're a little bit high-end but if you're backing up like groups of machines like a small group there's still a great way to go. Great. And we do have other questions coming in on backup but I do want to be conscientious of time so we may try to get back to some of those. But one thing I chatted out that TechSoup really helps to try to promote in our guide on disaster planning and recovery in the backup section is the 2x2x2 rule to try and keep it really simple and think about having two copies. So whether it's one onsite and one that's backed up someplace else that at least two people can access. So two copies, two people, and two different locations. So maybe you have an onsite server. Maybe you have something that's being backed up in the cloud. You're using a box.org account to backup files or something like that. So 2x2x2 is a simple way to remember and to make sure that you're duplicating those efforts, that you're not having just one person who can access it or one location that is accessible or only one copy. You've got to have 2x2x2. I hope that helps as we move forward. As a matter of fact you'll notice I'm going back to that one slide. I actually will talk about the redundant. So 2x2x2 is a great example of being redundant in the department of redundancy department. Yeah, that's highly, highly, highly critical. I absolutely 100% agree with that. Okay, we'll go ahead and take some more questions. I'll just note too I'd be more than happy to answer a lot of these questions via email and such as well. Okay, second part of technology is communications. It's been shown that in disasters, it's just absolutely clear that in disasters it's really, really, really important to be able to communicate. It's usually people's top concerns. And a lot of the thing that we found is people are going to basically communicate using the methods that they're already accustomed to using. So something that's going to be available soon, we're in the process of reworking E9R's disaster resources page. But right, we're going to be putting up a series that we used to call Potty Posters. That was the thing that CARD did where you basically placed information about safety and preparedness anywhere you had a captive audience. And one of them was about this program, your cell phone initiative. This was a very, very popular initiative. All the things that you can do that make your portable personal technology into awesome, awesome preparedness tools. Something I would like to actually ask you guys to do after today's training, like right after the fact, is to go ahead and take at least one of these actions that you will see. ICE, this is something that's been promoted for quite some time. You know, creating in case of emergency contacts on your phone. And that used to be for people who picked up your phone if you were unconscious, if they could access your phone, would be able to look this up. And even on a locked phone, it's interesting, even on a locked phone you can sometimes convince Siri or one of the other things to bring up these contacts anyway. So there's actually ways of making these contacts still accessible even on locked phones. But it's also very, very handy because under stress you might have trouble remembering these own phone numbers. Your brain under stress, things just really start to go out the window. And just making sure you've got all your friends, families, and neighbors, and doctors, hospitals, and medical conditions, daycare providers, locations, and rally points. Having that stuff already on your phone means it's pretty much always with you because you tend to always have your phone with you. Over here on the right side you'll actually see an example of a little initiative that we had done. I'd like to see this picked up again. There were little sized pads, the size of bookmarks, that are very low cost to print out and very, very easy to distribute. It was really successful. People really liked this sort of program. Something else I'd like you to do, especially if you have smartphones and many, many people do nowadays, oops, trying to get to the other side, is on smartphones having photographs and important documents and first aid and CPR apps. Anything that will help you remember the things that you need to know how to do. So smartphones actually can be also prepared as tools. It means that your phone is actually useful even if you don't actually have cell phone reception. Now another really important thing to keep in mind is that if you're going to be using technology, you're going to have to be able to make sure that your technology still has power. So I want to talk, make sure I did briefly talk about how you make sure that your personal technology still actually has power available to it. And there's a plethora of products. I double checked this. It's funny, the first time I did this webinar back in 2015, this was a URL that gave a nice rundown of some of the best portable battery chargers you could buy. I did a fast check and this article is still up to date as of February of this year. So they actually are constantly reassessing this. So please use it as a resource to get a sense of some of these products, which I've noticed tend to have very quixotic and unique names. They tend to have names like AXA and Sintar and Morphe case and so forth. I mean you name it. It's quite fascinating the names they do use. A power case for your phone is a great way to go because you just flip the switch and you're good to go and it's actually a part of your phone. Car adapters, highly highly highly recommend having car adapters. A habit to please adopt. Making sure that you basically plug your phone in whenever you drive. It's not too dissimilar from the advice you often hear about making sure you always have at least a half a tank of gas. Another habit is give your friends car chargers as gifts because that way when you're riding in their car you'll know they have a car charger. It's a little bit of self-adjustment but it's a great thing. Also you'll see here these are examples of pocket-sized keychain batteries that are great stocking stuffers and they're great for giving your phone a single charge. And sometimes that's all you need. Becky mentioned earlier examples of emergencies is very broad. This actually got me through a commencement ceremony at a university when my phone was low on power and the emergency is I still need to be able to take photos. And this little guy right here helped me be able to take photos of my daughter's graduation. Sorry there was a little calcitrant there on the slides. Also keep in mind especially for your higher technology last time I was at REI the solar power chargers are really dropping in price. And the part of me that wants to camp in order to get away from technology is sort of like no, no, no. But the part of me that wants to make sure I can still be up entering an emergency really likes this stuff. And it's actually amazing how much you can run off of some of these guys. And the costs are dropping. So this could be a cost effective way for an agency to make sure that they have a couple of pieces of technology that still work. So that's about our power. And I just want to take a fast look about contents. Yes, you do privacy security with information on the phone. Yeah, having stuff that's locked on your phone, keeping your phone locked is highly, highly recommended. But most phones have an app or a way of still being able to bring up an emergency contacts only so that you don't end up having all of your other information not being secure. So that was a really good question. Okay, so in an emergency we're still talking communications. Besides having your technology we're talking about social media. So there are several kinds of social media. The thing that I've noticed recently is with Twitter. It's one of the things that public information officers now tend to use in order to get news out quickly. I actually saw this recently with the recent floods that we were having here and the Bay Area here in California. If you went to certain web pages for certain organizations, what was there was an embedded Twitter feed. And they were basically posting their updates via Twitter. This is often a great way to actually kind of keep your finger on the pulse. I've often found for example that cases of civil unrest following my local public transportation was the fastest way to find out something was going on because you would see things about how certain stations are closed due to an incident. So it's been used in a large number of things. So Twitter really is actually a very useful tool for staying abreast of situations. It's something that a lot of the agencies actually use. Facebook is not a bad way to stay in touch. In fact I actually had a colleague who was on a trip to Japan a number of years ago and everything was going great. And then they had an earthquake followed by a tsunami, followed by a reactor meltdown. And we started panicking because we didn't know if he was okay. And it turned out he was and the way we found out was via Facebook. So the way that you can basically let your loved ones know or some organization will do this as well, they'll actually set up a specialized page that they then let other people know is going to be their page to give the reports on their status. I've known that there are several daycare centers that do this for example. Some libraries and several food banks do exactly this. It's also a great way to engage with agencies prior to disaster so that you actually know what kinds of plans are in place. And tied into that is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is really all about professional connections. And something I found over the years as I've done trainings is that a lot of emergency preparedness is really about relationships. Having relationships in place is infinitely more valuable than having detailed plans that people actually then forget about. In fact there was actually a really great quote in the Disaster Resiliency Guide about how you need to make sure that all the staff members know about your plan. Don't let them forget about its existence. And this kind of thing is a way of making sure that you are actually staying connected to folks who'd be able to help you out in disaster. Just to give you an example this was actually a real world response for a number of years ago for Occupy Oakland. You'll see on the one side this is a little tool called Twitter Fall which is a way of monitoring tweets to see exactly what's kind of happening. And over here is Hootsuite which is allowing easily posting to multiple platforms. So it's actually a great way for an agency to be able to post simultaneously to Twitter, to Facebook, to LinkedIn so that whoever is following you is likely to be able to see your postings and it makes it possible with a lot less effort. Okay, next. In the world of preparedness. And I'm going to go through this fairly quickly because this is really just sort of to give an indication of the kinds of things that you can have on your technology because there's an app for that. There are all kinds of preparedness apps or apps that can help you out. I should point out that a lot of these apps or apps that I either have used or are currently using although I think a few may be getting supplanted but this is really just to give you ideas of the types of apps that you want to look for. And if any of you guys find apps that you guys prefer to anything that's suggested here or an app that you found really useful, I'd please love it if you guys would share that either in the chat or post this event by contacting. Here is, so where you see this is pretty fast, Nixle. I'll wind up Nixle. There you go. So Nixle is a service that allows various agencies, a lot of law enforcement, some fire services to post to the community. Many communities actually have their own alert systems. Here in Alameda County for example, we have something called AC Alert which is very similar to Nixle although it's not precisely Nixle. So in addition to installing Nixle and then following things, make sure that you also know about any kind of local mass notification systems you may have in your area. Pretty much everybody has something like that. Similarly transit information. So here in the Bay Area we have something called 511. It's a transit planner. It actually allows you to know what things are up or down. They tend to follow the major lines so the back roads won't necessarily be covered by that. Great way to keep in mind how transit is going however. Weather, knowing what the weather is all about, what the weather is like. I know some areas of the country where you want to make sure that you know all about your tornado alerts and your storm alerts. GroupMe is something that I recently used until I found out that was just as easy for me to just maintain in a live active texting group. But things like GroupMe or WhatsApp which is probably superseding GroupMe and popularity nowadays is a great way to maintain groups of folks in a text group. And what's nice about these is that people can a bit more easily opt in or opt out. Slipboard is a news aggregator. This is actually a great way to keep track of various kinds of news. So every day of life you may actually follow things like tech or news or Twitter or various Facebook feeds of various agencies. And it's actually a very nice way to actually see things in one place without having to go around too far. Having some kind of cloud based storage this kind of ties into backup plans. If you're actually offsite and have to access files having something like a specialized Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive account that every people can handle. Some of these utilities also integrate extremely well with other apps so you can actually bring up your Excel documents or Word documents. A topic that is kind of near and dear to my heart, something I can talk about extensively and I believe actually TechSoup is having a cybersecurity webinar coming up soon. And I also am quite sure you guys have some in your archives. But I personally have used one password to maintain passwords. And what's nice about utilities like this is you can actually maintain groups of passwords. You can actually store these vaults on your cloud drive so that other people could access them. And you can keep your personal passwords in separate vaults from the passwords that you're sharing with the people at your agency. And this can be super, super, super critically important because a lot of agencies will actually have details in place on how to maintain their servers, how to maintain their email, how to maintain their databases. But without the passwords it would be very hard to get yourself off the ground. And again, the reasoning organization talks a lot about that in a general way. This is one really specific example of a tool that you can use that integrates very well in its very cross-platform. They have Windows versions, OXX versions, and they have versions run on your portable devices. So I also have this on my iPad and my iPhone. And I absolutely swear by this. Apps about first aid, apps that allow you to track public police channels. Apps allow you to make recordings, audio recordings. Come on, you can do it. Here we go. Actually making an audio recording that you can then play back so you can say the same thing over and over again can be a great way to guide people to a certain location. There is a topic called the incident command system. And there is an app for that. Incident command system is something that was developed in FireService, the way of organizing in an emergency. Even apps that might seem initially silly like iBanner, this is the way you could actually make a large message that you can then hold up and display. I actually have seen this used especially in the deaf hard of hearing community. But even if you're not deaf hard of hearing just having a way of being able to give people instructions. CPR, triage, things that basically help you remember what you should be actually doing medically. And then of course communications, things like Skype. And there are other utilities like Nexline. There we go. And even things that make noise on your machine. Being able to make loud noises to get people's attention can be a very good way to go. So some of these apps might seem initially silly. What I would encourage you to do is kind of think outside the box and think about how you guys might want to use these. Now here is an example that I think is a bit out of date, but I haven't been able to find what's happened since Djibogo has been acquired by Facebook. But the thing that's nice about this kind of translator as opposed to Google Translate is that it also works when you're offline, when you don't have an Internet connection. And the reason I left this in is just because it was just a reminder that when you have apps it's actually a really good way to see if your apps function in the absence of some kind of connection. So you should actually test that, turn off your cell, turn off your Wi-Fi on your iPhone or your Android phone, and see which apps how well they still work. A lot of these things will actually work quite well because they're local to the phone. So this is all about being easy. So the question I'd like you guys to do here is I'd like you to basically post in the chat, and I think this will actually get mentioned a bit later as well, just a single easy action you will take. And I know I went through a lot of stuff very, very quickly, but a couple of these things probably leap out at you. So take a moment, and I'm going to continue talking a little bit as I wrap things up. But while I'm doing that, please do post in the chat one simple easy action that you will take on personally, or that you will recommend that your agency take on. All right, places you can go for resources. So we are in the process of updating the page, but on our web page, EdenINR.org, you know, 2-on-1 Disasters Emergencies. There's some information there right now that talks about our role in disasters and how we would be accessible to help people out. TechSoup also has this wonderful, wonderful guide called the Resilient Organization Guide to IT Disaster Planning Recovery. I'm very proud to say that the agency I used to work for, Card, was quite involved in the first drafts of that. And it's invaluable advice, a lot of the advice I gave here, delved tales of that. It's just that right now what I was doing is a little bit more oriented towards the consumer end, towards folks that are not IT specialists. But if you're at all involved in IT in any way, if you perform, you will find this absolutely invaluable. And even if you're not an IT person, just so you guys have a bit of a biography, take control of backing up your Mac. And despite the title, it's actually not difficult to generalize advice. It's a great example of an e-book that's available for I think it's like $10 or $15. And a lot of my backup strategies came from that. There's also a book from a long time ago called the Complete Guide to Backup Management, and much of my time back in dance development when we did backup software came from this approach. A lot of it had to do with identifying your critical machines, testing your backups, knowing where things physically are located, etc. Another quick resource, I'm not going to spend much time on this, but this is also the fact that trainings, if you guys are interested in presenting this information to an audience, you need advice on that. Or if you guys are near the Bay Area and you'd like something a little more in-person, I can be located. And I'd also like to encourage you guys to check out our page to find out more about these really positive and powered trainings because it's really a very different kind of approach to disaster preparedness that's actually more sustainable. Here is my contact information. So please do download this deck and feel free to check how things are in social media. And more importantly, feel free to give me a call or drop me an email. From the generous support of the Walter and Elise House Fund, we're actually able to proudly present this curriculum that was developed by nonprofits and for nonprofits to help nonprofits and community-based organizations make sure that they stay strong and resilient. Please also do feel free to connect to Eden, INR via any of our various incendiary methods because we are here to help serve you. And also do go, if you go to 211.org that will help you easily locate the agency that provides 211 services for your area. And that's it for me. Wow, thank you so much, Lars Eric. That was so much really great information. I know we covered a lot, but I know that there are some great resources that you'll be able to refer to in this slide deck. I have this one screen up before we get to some Q&A just to let you know that on that disaster planning recovery page that we have for TechSoup, you can download our full guide that goes in-depth. It gives recommendations of different products available, different processes. So it's really a terrific resource that you could print out and give to an IT person whether they're on staff or contracted with you. And they could help ensure that you've got the resources you need technologically to help you better prepare and respond. These are a few that are highlighted on the page that exist within TechSoup's donation program, Mobile Beacon. These are hotspots that are wireless. So for example, if your cable Internet went down for some reason, you may be able to access Internet with a Mobile Beacon hotspot. And you can order these in bundles that allow you to access up to 10 of them so you can loan them out. For example, if you are at a library and people lose their Internet because of a disaster, you could offer a checkout program that people could have wireless Internet available to them with your mobile hotspot loaner program. Microsoft has a variety of desktop installed and cloud options available including storage online with their OneDrive. So a lot of different options there where you can have backup both on your desktop machines and online. We have box.org donations. So I know Lars Eric mentioned Dropbox earlier. Box is a very similar type cloud file storage and sharing program so you could have an online backup if you don't already. Even if you do, for example, somebody asked about Google Docs and most of their materials are created and shared in the cloud already. And what happens if Google servers goes down? Well, Google has server farms all over the world and they duplicate those and back those up. So in a lot of ways you are better protected than if you had just your own servers on-site. But you may want to have some of those files backed up on an external hard drive on-site. You might also want to have them backed up on a different cloud platform because in case something catastrophic happened at a Google server farm, you may find that you are unable to access stuff for a few hours until one of the other server farms takes over. So that's just something to think about. Also lots of hardware options available through TechSoup's catalog including things like switches and routers. And sometimes we have external hard drives and other hardware resources to help you ensure that you are secure and backed up. And then Better World Telecom is another program that we offer that gives access to mobile devices, cell phones, things like that if you need access to more options in that regard. And then I'll mention this recovery tool from Caravan Studios which is a project of TechSoup where they have a mobile app that they've created that helps make it easy to deploy volunteers and gives time sensitive tasks to them to help organize people in an emergency very quickly. So for example, if you actually have a response directly to a disaster you could use the Four Bells app to help coordinate your volunteer response. So those are just a few resources. And now I'm going to get to some questions. We have a variety of questions in here. I'll take Margaret's first because I think this is a good question for a lot of different organizations, not just the small library she represents. But she said, are there good basic guidelines for setting up a backup system for a very small library or any very small organization? Maybe you don't have an IT person on staff. What would you recommend for that large, Eric? You know, and I realize it looked very max and trick, but that backup guide that I talked about, his name is Jill Kissel and he's a very practical guy. And really, even though it says, you know, your guide for backups, a lot of that advice is really very generalized. I mean that's part of where I got the idea of threes, you know, the idea of having like three redundant backups. That also dates back to my days of dance when you wanted to make sure that you never had all your backups in transit. That's a common one. I'm also still doing a little bit more research on this to find out which other resources are really good for guiding that. But right now, if you check out, it's take control books. So if you look at take control on the web, they actually have a whole series of topics which despite starting off as being very Macintosh-centric and OSX-centric is actually very widely applicable, especially the information regarding backups and information regarding passwords. Great. Thank you for that. And we do have a lot in that disaster planning guide as well that gives some step-by-step advice on how to get started with setting up backups. Terry asked, is there a checklist that I could use with our IT company to go over all of this information? Something like, here are the five things you need to have done to get your backup and your disaster prep in line. Do you know of anything like that? Yeah, checklists are marvelous. One of our favorite books was The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gwande. That's funny you should say that because when I was looking at the new disaster, the new recent organization resource planning guide from you guys, a lot of the pages are, okay, so they're kind of like grids or spreadsheets, but they're very checklist-like. So for example, I'm looking at your technology's priorities assessment or your key recovery staff. It's basically a box that you would actually fill in to basically make sure that you actually have your contact information in a central place that you could do stuff. So I actually would start with TechSoup's own guide for that because it's very checklist-like. We didn't even plan that, and I was of course going to mention our own guide as well because I do think it has a lot of that kind of good resource in it in the way it's laid out, but I thought if there was anything else I would leave it to you. But thank you for the pitch to our own guide that we just created again. I do think it's a really great guide. Yeah, yeah, so meet your love and admiration here. Great, thank you. Anne asks, do you have any sample disaster recovery plans around IT? Yes, let me think about this if there's anything I can really sky, I'd have to redact some stuff. Although I'll actually say this based on what I've been seeing from the guide, I want to actually modify some of that a bit. What I actually have are continuity of operations plans for a group of East Bay organizations that really ran the gamut from being food banks to being faith-based organizations that were going to be shelters, to being crisis support services, to you name it. And it was really quite fascinating how the continuity of operations had differed really quite widely based on the type of organization we were and their size. And they all had some kind of an IT component. So it'll be a little bit of time before I can offer that in a template kind of form because it was something I was working on and then got sidetracked and had to focus on the trainings that I needed to do. But yes, there are some things like that. So I'll try to make sure those are available and go up on the disaster page that is reworking. Great. And that's good that that's coming. One last question. I know that there are a couple others that we haven't been able to get to but we do need to start wrapping up. But Debbie asks, do you have contacts or recommendations of people who can do similar presentations to this one in different places around the country? She's asking specifically about Vermont. But if somebody wanted to do something like this for their staff or for an organization of organizations or an association, are there resources that you can connect people to? Or is there a place where people can find presenters like you that can talk about disaster, prep and recovery? Yeah, it's hard though because it's kind of scattered. The approach that Card was taking was pretty unique. And it was funny because while Card existed, we actually, even though we were initially created to focus in Alameda County, we ended up going all across the country. So my boss often went to places on the East Coast and such. Let me do a little bit of looking for example. I'll start with Ramon as a physical example and see if there's folks like that. Barring that, I'd have to check with a few folks here to see how much of that I'd be able to do under the funding that supports me. But I could totally see maybe the possibility of me doing like a assessed customized version of this webinar for you guys. That's something I'd be willing to do if I can do that. So reach out to me via the email. Yeah, because we were kind of at a different point. And a lot of people have been adopting the approach. Also go ahead and try and give your local 211 a call and see if they have that in their resource database. Yeah, and I imagine that there are groups that do, any kind of groups that do disaster response and recovery may have connections to people that could do it specifically around the technology. I mean I can imagine Red Cross and places that specifically do disaster response may be able to point you in the direction of other experts too. Yeah, although I do know that here in the Bay Area anyway, Red Cross unfortunately had to cut back on the trainings they can offer. But yeah, if you started off with like, it's a funny thing, IT people have kind of a disaster mindset. It's one reason why people who are in information technology are often the people they get to wear that other hat. Because as you pointed out at the beginning of the webinar, definition of disaster could be your server room flooded. And I've noticed that IT people in general tend to be pretty resourceful with things like, gee, we have no diapers, or gee, my camera is not quite working and they know how to MacGyver stuff. So you also might want to check with like your local user groups because those are put off the box. Great idea. Well as we wrap up here at the top of the hour, I would love it if I know many of you chatted in one thing that you learned already but if you have other things you'd want to chat in to let us know what you learned, we always find that really inspiring to read after the fact, the things that you're going to take away and try to implement for your own organization's needs. We'd also invite you to share this content with your colleagues and friends who may benefit from it. And we'd ask that you complete the post-event survey that pops up when you exit the webinar. We'd also like to invite you to join us on our new TechSoup courses platform where you can see our full catalog of free and some low-cost trainings. These are 24-7, not a specific time of the day where you can log in. It's just like getting a library card once you've logged in. You can access all of the different trainings that are available in the catalog and check out what's there. We have everything from design for non-designers and how to use Adobe Photoshop 101 to how to train your staff on using technology and all kinds of other topics. And we're adding to it all the time. So please join us there. And Lars, Eric mentioned that we have an upcoming webinar on cybersecurity. So I'd like to invite you to join us for any of our upcoming events. Next week we'll be talking about the different technology hardware donations available through TechSoup's programs. We'll talk about nonprofit security best practices. Are they out to get you? Of course they are. And we want to help prevent them from getting your information. We also will talk about how nonprofits can stay and be compliant while using Microsoft Cloud. We'll also be talking about digital storytelling for libraries. And then coming into May we'll have a whole series of grant-seeking webinars. And I don't have on here, but we'll have a series in our TechSoup courses platform that I already linked to. We'll have a series of events that are 30-minute long, quick webinars with quick tips on using Adobe's suite of tools coming up in the next couple of weeks. So please join us for those. Thank you so much Lars, Eric. Thank you to Susan and Sarah on the back end. And thank you to all of you, our participants for joining us for today's webinar, and continuing to engage with your great questions. Thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor who's provided the use of today's platform for our benefit. Please take a moment when you exit to complete that pop-up survey to let us know how we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you everyone, and have a great day. Bye-bye.