 All right, so everybody can see my screen. Great. So welcome everyone to this special TechSoup host online discussion for courses and services tour. I'm Aretha Simons. I will be your host for today. I'm the webinar producer. And today we have some amazing speakers with us today. We have Erica Grawie. She's a program service manager for TechSoup services and solutions. And we have Gray Harmon. He's the director of learning programs. And we have Alicia Shadam. She is in the chat area. So a lot of your questions, she's from customer support. She'll be answering for you. I want to do a little bit of housekeeping if you don't mind. I know everybody is on mute. So if you would, if you have a question, type it in the chat room. If you have a question that you would like to answer like right away, type it in the Q&A. So I'm going to rephrase that type it in the Q&A because a lot of people type in a chat room and everything kind of moves up. And so your question may get lost. So if you like your question answered, type it in the Q&A. Otherwise, just continue to engage in the chat room and chat with each other. And there's no silly questions. So if you would like to still chat with us in the chat room, feel free to do that. At the end of the course, there will be a survey. It's only four questions. I would love if you would answer that for us and give us your feedback. We love to hear your feedback. So make sure you answer that for us. So what I'm going to do is get ready to introduce Ms. Erica. And she's going to start us off and I'll allow her to share her screen in just a moment. And continue to chat with everybody in the chat room. I'm trying to get my screen, my screen switched on me. So just a moment. And as you're coming in, type in where you're from. All right. Can everyone see my screen? I get a thumbs up for my co-hosts. I can see your screen. Great. Awesome. All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Erica. I'm a program manager for the solutions and services team. I'm here to just give you a really quick tour of what the solutions and services department at TechSoup does. So this is my introduction slide. I am from Peoria, Illinois, but I live out in Oakland, California now by way of Montreal. So I'm loving seeing the Canadian folks around. So TechSoup as an organization has a vision to create a technologically enabled civil society. This is our broader goal across all departments. But until recently, TechSoup has really been mostly just a software provider. So we want to focus on digital transformation of nonprofits through adoption of the cloud, data practices and making organizations digitally resilient and adaptive. So this is the nonprofit technology adoption journey. This is the journey that most nonprofits go along in order to actually get their techniques identified. One right here, this purchase tech option is where TechSoup has historically stood. However, when the solutions and services department came in, that's when we started identifying all of these other areas where we could really fit in. So we identify tech needs by going through assessments and consultations. We help organizations make tech plans. Purchasing the tech that is just a really small part of this whole adoption journey, because then we help with the implementation and the installation of your technology. We train your staff on the tech to be able to actually use it to its fullest potential and Gray will tell you more about that. And then lastly, we have options for you to manage and maintain your tech and to actually improve your tech and create technology plans. So the solutions and services department is really focused on this whole adoption curve, not just this little bump in it, which is also a very important bump and you can do through TechSoup. But our services are solutions and services team is really looking at this whole picture. So a couple of the services that we use to address that whole picture. So let's go through now. So the first one I'd like to mention is our help desk services so it's pretty self explanatory. It's just a option for remote phone support for any urgent needs that you have. This is really ideal for micro small and medium organizations organizations that have really low staff, but need just somebody on the phone to call and say, my SharePoint is it working for some reason can someone please help me. I advanced early. Oh shoot. Sorry. Oops. So the help this services, there are subscription services which allow you to have proactive maintenance and unlimited support. So you can call into the help desk at any time, and they will actually help you maintain your tech stack in a way that is proactive and thoughtful about what what tools are best for our help desk services also offer virus protection, secure cloud storage, regular updates and tune ups and security patches. And perhaps most importantly, our help desk offer offers technicians who know nonprofits so they know what kind of tech issues you're facing they know what kind of technology you work with. You know our technicians are familiar with little green light which which is something that not a lot of help desk technicians are. So just to give you an idea of of help desk services and how you access them I'm going to go to our link here on tech soup.org. It's just tech soup.org slash help desk services or not okay you can also find it through this drop down menu. So here's where you find your help desk services. So these are the kinds of things that are help desk providers can help you help you with hardware software security networking mobile access email and servers. Again, here are subscription services which will offer buyers protection security patches and ongoing unlimited support. But you can also kind of test out helped us so if you want to just start on that earlier adoption thing and you just need help with one tiny thing, or you just need help with one basic installation support. Or if your organization has a pretty technologically savvy staff but you just want to have like a bank of hours to be able to call in. We have these hours of tech support that you can bring down that you can call in and back from your total time by about 15 minutes every time you call in and you get that tech support live and on call as you need it. I see there's some stuff in the chat. Oh, tech soup services link thank you so much Alicia. Alright, so back to here so now we have managed it, managed it is pretty similar to help desk in like how it operates, it's usually for slightly larger organizations managed it is usually a little bit too expensive for micro organizations, but the really important thing that distinguishes managed it from help desk is the ongoing technology advice and planning with your personal tech advisor. So when you sign up for manage it services, you get the hardware or the security patches and the virus protection and all of that ongoing support also have an on call help desk technician who's used to working with nonprofits, but the difference between managed it is that you have somebody thinking about your technology future and putting in plans for your hardware putting in plans for your software, figuring out when you're going to want those upgrades and advising you on which hardware to buy now and which software to buy in a couple months and, and how to really plan out your technology growth strategy as your nonprofit grows, or even your just just maintenance strategy as your nonprofit maintains. They want to make sure that you're able to really your tech stack is able to move with you your tech stack should be as agile as your organization is. So to take advantage of managed it services you're just going to go to tech soup.org slash managed it, and you're going to have to get this consultation the consultation is totally free. But because it's such a one unique service it's not a one size fits all, you're going to have to get a consultation so we, we listen to we listen to your needs we assess, we listen to what your problems are and what tech you have currently. We assess your needs and think about not just now but a future plan, we build that plan for you and then we provide you with a proposal and pricing. Again, this consultation is totally free and it's a great thing for organizations to take advantage of. So next we have our Microsoft solutions. Our Microsoft solutions are really focused on migrating organizations to the cloud, and we can help you with every step of that process so that's been one of the biggest changes and technology in the past decade is everyone is migrating to the cloud and it's really vital for your digital resilience for people to be able to migrate to the cloud. Not only does it give your staff the ability to work remotely and collaboratively. It also means that all of your data, all of your important documents are protected from natural disasters or from, you know data breaches if you're if you are migrated to the cloud in a secure way. We have a couple different products that really help you migrate to the cloud. We started the cloud console, which will help you understand which licenses are right for your organization. After we figure that out we help you with a basic Microsoft 365 setup so we download everything on your computer walk you through the process of setting it up, and then we help with the migration of your email and your data, and then, possibly most importantly we set up your security. So this is another option that requires a consultation, and it's really important to migrate to the cloud so we have this whole Microsoft solution package here for you. Next we have a website services which is one of my favorite services because it's just really fun to see all of the different nonprofit websites. So the first thing from really small basic tuneups if you want to add a donate button to your website, for example, to full website overhauls. So we can do website security and hosting if you just need a place to host your website, or ongoing maintenance and we can help with creating content, like boosting your search engine optimization. One of my favorite services is to really accelerate your reach funding and impact online, I think we can all agree in the past year, your presence online has become unbelievably important. That is the main way that people people find your services that people find your nonprofit, also the main way that funders are starting to find organizations to fund. So having like a really nice website out there is really helpful to put your best foot forward. We can do back end integrations with your CRM. And also one of the most important things I think these days is adding mobile capabilities. So many people are searching for things on their phone to make sure that your website is really mobile ready is a vital part of putting your best foot forward with your website there. So these websites once again are built with nonprofits in mind and so when we look at your website we look for those really important nonprofit components. So there's the donate buttons, the mission statement, you know all of these pieces of nonprofits website that are really unique. Another thing about website services and this I just clicked the link at the bottom there you can also navigate to the website services page from the services bar at the top of TechSoup.org. We have a whole website wellness assessment that's completely free so you go to this assessment, and all you have to do is type in your name organization name your email and your phone number and your URL. So just type in www.techsoup.org and you will get an email telling you how strong your website is so we have some robots that crawl your website, and they're able to tell you tell us what the site speed is and how how easy the website is to navigate what the map is like. We can, we look for, I'm going to forget what it's called now, I think it's called micro text, but basically the text that is hidden on the pictures of your website to make sure that too is boosting your SEO and doing the things that it should be. So this wellness report is really helpful to figure out how healthy your website really is how much do you need to improve it you know is it is it just you need to add a couple pages or maybe a link here there a donate button button, or does it need a really big overhaul is it is it just so slow because it's been updated with patches in the past that haven't really given your website the full glam that it could have. So, yeah, I would highly recommend going and taking that website assessment and checking out some of our other website products so we again we can do everything from a custom package to just a really kind of tiny consultation or or tiny DIY solution. And then the last batch of services that I'm going to talk about today are our digital marketing services. So, these services are meant to give you basically a full marketing team. So, most nonprofits don't have the ability to have a whole team of marketers to work on their outreach and communication strategy. I've definitely been a by default communications person even though that's not my field. So you know it's really great in the past I mean before text. So it's really great to have these digital marketing services where you have a whole outreach and communication team, working for you to really get your message across to target the audience that you really want to engage. And the right community, engage the right community with your, with your marketing and outreach. So we can do everything from digital fundraising, working on your donation pipeline make sure that that's really clear, clean and easy. We can do remote event management online advertisement and one of nonprofits favorite is we can work with your Google ad grants. Often that nonprofits will apply for Google ad grants and they won't get it because their website isn't up to snuff or because they aren't using the full capability of Google ad grants so we can manage your whole Google ad grants campaign through our digital marketing services. So we also do branding design support email content marketing social media marketing and give some SEO advice. We can do everything from consulting to DIY solutions to full scale support options depending on your budget. So I highly recommend going and checking out our digital marketing services, which you can find again in the services drop down on our website. This is an example of a couple of the products we offer. We also have a digital marketing assessment so if you're interested in understanding how your digital marketing campaign how you're outreaching communication stack up to other nonprofits, you can take that assessment and understand like where there are areas for improvement. To learn more about either digital marketing services or website services. There's this form at the bottom of both page so here's the website services page also has this form at the bottom here. If you fill this out we will reach out to you and figure out what your goals are, what kind of campaign would fit you best what your budget is how much we can do for you based on those needs. And can you do Facebook marketing with discounted price. I'm not sure what you mean by with discounted price we do do Facebook marketing we can absolutely help you get your Facebook marketing up to up to snuff. Now we do have like all of our prices are already discounted for nonprofits. Is that the question I think I hope I answered that right. Okay, great. So yeah, I would highly recommend just filling this out just getting an idea of like where your digital marketing is at where we can help you. It's totally free to have this phone call. And then we can figure out what which of our services fits you best. So that's really all I had for today. If anybody has any questions about any of those services. We've got about three minutes before I have to hand everything over to Gray I think. So I want to make sure I give him full time to go over courses that other really big piece of the puzzle and we're talking about digital transformations. If anyone else has any questions I know I talked kind of fast there so I hope you understand. And you can always reach out to me directly. My email is right there if you have any questions about services at TechSoup I would be happy to answer them. Thank you so much Erica. If anybody have any questions will will leave time for questions at the end. And while great is getting ready to put up his slide deck. I want to let you know that this is being recorded so this recording will be available within 48 hours for everyone who's registered so you'll be able to see everything in a couple of days will be sent it to you via email. So Gray, I will turn it over to you. Okay, this is great. By the way I'm coming to you from a little bit farther away than a lot of the people I saw coming in because I'm in South America. So that's what you're seeing behind me is Uruguay Montevideo Uruguay. That's just an aside. Nothing to do with courses that because they can be taken from anywhere. So let me get started and by saying that TechSoup courses has experienced huge growth. And you can see the numbers here. I know that maybe these are not the latest there might be a few more every day we were adding some more. But but roughly that's where we are 64,000 unique learners. That means single individuals and you can see almost 150,000 enrollments worldwide. So I'm telling you this because obviously if something has this much growth and there's so much interest in it. If you have not been in courses, check it out because obviously there's something there. You know, some a little bit of the growth pattern before 2017 TechSoup did not have any courses or training for the nonprofits. So this is a fairly new program, but is growing awfully fast. A few questions that I'm going to ask are they are sort of rhetorical. I'm not going to expect each one of you to type in the answer or anything like that. But just as a way of getting us started, you know, in which forms does TechSoup offer courses and delivery learning. You know, there's webinars online courses blended in hybrid courses that blended in hybrid means that they have online component as well as on on site or other formats online and face to face events. And the answer to that is all of the above. So when you think of courses, don't just think of TechSoup courses being just an online course experience and nothing else. We do events, we do webinars and other things of the kind. Our courses and webinars are the same thing. Some people don't really know. And in fact, the first few courses that TechSoup did were basically webinars that were recorded and put online. But the answer nowadays is no, we don't, we make a clear distinction. A webinar is something like we're doing now. More interactive, you're hearing me and so forth. But I didn't spend time going through an instructional design process and designing interactive activities or anything else. So our webinar is fine for some things for information, but the courses are much more elaborate in terms of the much, you know, complex process, but also more of a greater effectiveness. Does TechSoup course or I should say TechSoup courses are available in what languages. Here I listed some languages. And the answer to that is that we have availability of courses in English, in Portuguese and Spanish currently with French coming just around the corner. It's going to be this month and beginning of July when you're going to see the first set of courses in French. And by the first set, I mean, you know, a number of them, quite a number of them, but we will have Arabic probably sometime next year. And that's due to the systems that are needed to support Arabic. So how do we develop our courses? You know, we don't capture things from YouTube or do we? Do we purchase all of our content? No, we create our own and we use non-profit experts. So that means that the content in our courses are geared towards your type of organization, right? So basically, you know, at the top of the line, you see what we actually do. Our end, our bottom is who we serve. We serve our own staff, we serve our own partners, and then we serve non-profit staff and volunteers around the world. The areas that we tackle are technology, processes and training and obviously at the heart of it is people. We are all about people. And we all, we do all this to support your mission. So your mission is at the top. We have a strategy and then we have verticals to support that mission. And in those verticals, you're going to find all kinds of courses. I'm going to show you a chart that I don't intend you to remember a lot of this, except to remember that we have a great variety of topic areas covered. From tech planning to data visualization to Google ad grants to grant writing, you name it. So we covered it. And so we have a lot to offer you. If you find that we don't have something, and I'm not going to say that you can request it and we'll run and get it. But it would be nice to know what your needs are so that we can put it on a schedule and at least address that need because if you need it. Others might as well. And here, you know, this is all comes from from that chart except I've broken it down on on two courses that we actually have. So, you know, just to give you a flavor. So it's not just all about technology because sometimes people associate tech soup with just very technical things. As you can see, we have social media marketing, and we have fundraising and grant writing and things that are not necessarily just technical, but, you know, our needs that nonprofits do have. And within the tech soup courses we have an area called the Microsoft Digital Skills Center for nonprofits, and people sometimes wonder what is that or they hear us talking about it. We call it sometimes the DSC Digital Skills Center. And that is an area that is funded by Microsoft through Microsoft Philanthropies, and but it's produced and operated by tech soup. And obviously the aim is to serve nonprofits worldwide. And you can see that most of the courses at this point are related to Microsoft products, but some are not. We've had some courses on organizing your remote working teams, for example. And so, so there's a lot of other skills that are thought that are not necessarily, you know, software related, but you have the software related courses. And some of them are very, very popular. Our teams courses I think in teams one on one I saw we had about 14,000 people that have taken that course. Excel was about close to 9,000 people have taken, you know, the beginning course in Excel and of course then it less as they go higher up. But we have a large number of courses and these are free right now until July and they're going to be very, very small chart after that because the grants, the way they come in. And we are changing our structure. So, the benefits, you know, and here I focused on the Microsoft skills center but it could be any tech support is that in the case of the digital skill center you have Microsoft instruction, they have looked at it, they, they okayed it. So you have, you know, the benefit of that backing of Microsoft which is also going to appear in your completion certificate. But you also have the contextualization of TechSoup for nonprofits. So you could take an Excel course out anywhere, but ours will have examples specifically for your nonprofit. And that's an asset. That's a little example of one of our characters. She manages that nonprofit in Ghana and has some challenges and she resolves and using some of the software we just show you courses about. Now, why are our courses effective because we go through a whole process of instructional design. We use a variation of the Addie model, it's a standard instructional design model so you can be guaranteed that when we go into taking a course from TechSoup. That is, we haven't winged it we have really thought it through with the nonprofit in mind and in fact, I, you know, just as a sample. It's not a real instructional design process. So you see that we really think of it and want engagement. But more importantly, we have developed personas. Okay, so when we're developing a course, we're not doing it in a vacuum. We're looking at, you know, who might be taking this course. And we've, you know, interviewed people around the world in nonprofits to find out and develop, find out their needs. Find out their challenges and eventually develop the whole profile of the persona so that when we create the course we can talk to, to those particular interest and needs and desires and goals. So that's a really important part of what we do. And we listen to our learners. And we have an example here of somebody that says that she didn't spend time in things that she already knew. And that's because we develop our courses in small chunks, if you will, micro learning inside you're going to find interactive activities and videos but they're all, you know, fairly contained, so that you can select what is it that you want and move forward efficiently. This is another example says, you know, self assigned learning paths and, and he didn't have the formal instruction, but he's saying, you know, he got reinforcement and he got what he needed. Another example of somebody that said, you know, he appreciates that he didn't have, you know, the specific timeline, you know, so he didn't have an end date it was an online course you could take it whenever you want it and so it was effective. And finally, you know, one example of somebody that took a course in one of our cohorts, you know, some of our courses have live sessions. So not all of them do. We have beginning courses that usually go by the 100 level designation 200 level or more advanced 300 level courses actually have a live segment. And so you meet for a six week period you go in once a week for an hour, and you actually can talk to the instructor, you know, communicate with your classmates in this case somebody participated not only on that but watched it later to, to actually further assimilate it together with, you know, a partner. So, part of the benefit of all of this is that you get a certificate of completion. So, this carries a weight of Microsoft for the, those courses are Microsoft and in their portable. So if you move jobs, whatever it is, you can tell your employer that you've, you know, your proficient on this particular software because you took the courses from tech soup and you're going to have the certificates to show. Now, how do you go into courses. We have a number of platforms so you go to the tech soup courses site, and will give you the links, but depends on which part of the world you are, you know there's going to be a slightly different link. You go to languages, look, due to currencies billing, you know, devices, procedures that are different in different parts of the world, if you're in Australia, for example, you'll, you'll pay a GST tax if you're in North America you don't. So we have those kinds of but so we'll give you the right, you know, link for you to go to the right place to register. Once you are in the in the site, you go in and there's a registration form and also post registration form that identifies where you are and what organizations you work with and so forth. So you're ready to look at courses. So it's not a very involved procedure, but let me go through some questions that are frequently asked. And so it'll help us to clarify things and then we'll see if you have questions in addition to the ones I have. If I have a TechSoup account, do I need a TechSoup courses account? And the answer to that is yes, because we're in a separate system at this point. You know, early next year that might change and a single account might do the job, but right now you do need to register into the courses of learning management system. So yes, I think yes to that. And we use one account for multiple people sometimes people think well you know we are a small organization about 10 people maybe we can get one account use it for everybody. But remember that there's completion certificates there's tracking of your work. You want that personalized to you. So the answer is no the system is made so that each individual has its own account. And at this point, that's the way we're working. We will eventually have subscriptions and other things are coming down the road but those are not, you know, live yet. So, have your own account and get the benefit of your account. Right now, an official of an organization can have an account. We don't have an overall, you know, management system so for example, your boss could not be managing your learning in our system currently. So, so, but, you know, he or she can have an account and look at the courses for him or herself or see what you're taking if you tell her or and but we don't have organizational accounts, however, if your organization has multiple individuals that that the organization wants trained, whether it's a one course or a number of courses. Yes, we can serve them. You can have your organization contact us. The email address is right there. Learn a text.org, and you will be able to contact us and we will reach out and see how we can accommodate your needs. Here are the platforms in the event that anybody, you know, wants to go in the URLs are very similar so you know that usually there's only two characters that are different, depending on the other part of the world that you're in. And, you know, for North American Asia we are sharing the same, you know, catalog. And this is all I have for now. I want to know if you have any questions or comments or. Great, that was great, Erica, both of you that was really great so are there any questions I mean, I don't have any questions, because you guys covered everything. You really cover everything. That was pretty fast though but it's a fast tour but you know, hopefully, if somebody has questions we'll be glad to answer. Yes, if you have any questions please put them in the chat room or put them in the Q&A section. And if you don't have any questions please write down one takeaway today one thing you learn from today. Thank you so much for putting all the links inside the chat box I really appreciate you were fast so you all have the links. Again, I do want to remind you that this is being recorded and you'll receive the recording recording within 48 hours. Okay, questions are coming in. Agatha, will you have a presentation recorded. Yes, yes. Great. I said a face to face event was mentioned can you explain more. So far we have produced only face to face event in Houston, due to a grant we had but we are not opposed to them and we had a lot of fun. It was done in a hybrid model and in the sense that most of the people that went to that session took a few of the courses they were disaster resiliency related. So we were trying to help Texas prepare for hurricane season, and we had a whole days session in Houston for the folks in the Texas Gulf area. And remember Agatha there are other types of learning that we have we have the TechSoup connect groups. So you may have a local group near you if you go to the events.techsoup.org page. It'll kind of find your it'll find where you're near so if you're in Florida it will show you TechSoup connect Florida. And we were doing face to face events right now they're online but we plan to eventually start by doing face to face event so continue to visit TechSoup.org website to find out any face to face event. The seed of life foundation I love how TechSoup is always there for guidance for nonprofits, especially for us like first times and we don't have any experience. Well thank you. You're, you're one of the reasons why we do what we do and we love what we do. Any other questions or comments. Awesome comments. This is good. If there are no questions that means you all did a great job, Erica and Gray that means you were fabulous you with me in your presentation you answered questions. I want to ask Erica if you have any closing bars or reminders for people for the solutions and services department that I'll ask the same thing of Gray. Nothing really just. If you have any questions. Please please please feel free to reach out services at TechSoup.org, or any of the, any of the forms that you find on our website. We're really happy to talk to you and figure out which which service will really fit your needs best. So just feel free to reach out anytime. That's, that's all I've got. Great any closing comments or remarks. Sure. You know, I would encourage everybody to if you haven't been in there and you think you might need one of the Microsoft courses to go in now because I told you there will be some changes coming. So right now you can get all of those courses for free is an awesome, you know, you can go wrong with free. It would be good for you if you do it after July. Then there may be some small charge not not it's not going to be very significant but we need to cover some basic costs of operation but right now you know we're still under the grant from Microsoft and you can get that great deal. So go and check them out and feel free to check other things and I'm more than willing to to get back to you if you tell us you have looked and you don't find what you want or we will or you need some support or tech support people in our courses support people are great either learn at TechSoup.org. And we'll get back to you. I agree and I want to echo that because I know that a lot of nonprofits you may have, you know, Microsoft, and you know how to use word or PowerPoint but if you go and take the courses you'll learn a little some little tricks that you may not know they may see that your process, especially with Excel and things like that so. And like Gray said if it's free is for me so I think I might go in there take some courses to. So I do want to remind you to fill out the survey is only four questions we would love your feedback. We always try to improve on, you know what we offer you and we appreciate you fill out the survey. So if there are no more questions or comments we're going to close this out and I do have one more thing sorry. It's free for me and it reminded me and then talked about a survey, the website assessment and the marketing assessments are totally free so you might as well do them you might as well just see how good your website is. That's great. I would do that too. We know we know when Erica is doing part of the presentation I'm doing another, but we're not totally in separate buckets, because she talked about you know number one we're in the same department number two, she talked about you know for example the cloud starter kit. So when you buy the cloud starter kit, we will give you some courses or you can train your staff at no cost to you. So, you know when I mentioned a good deal about courses there's a good deal about services as well, you know because we try to support you in your efforts to stay up to date and embrace a new technology. Just another little bit of information and another tip another thing that might help you if you're considering that that you if you go with the cloud starter kit you will not have to pay now for to get all of your staff train will give you courses that are going to help you out. Awesome, awesome. So I always tell my nonprofits, I know you're busy taking care of everybody else make sure you take time to take care of yourself and drink your water. I want to thank Grave for being here with us today Erica, Alicia and so but she's been in the background thank you all so much and we will see you next time on one of our courses or webinars. Bye bye everybody. Thank you. Bye bye.