 Welcome to What Our Managed IT Services, and When Should You Use Them? Today we will be joined by two people, Linda Wittop from Tech Impact and Nancy Millard from the Rodel Foundation of Delaware. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 6 years in May, and I have taken on a variety of different roles here from writer and blogger to now managing our webinar program. And prior to that I had been staff at three small nonprofits based in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California, where I was often the accidental techie who had to work with outside tech support and experts to help us make the best tech decisions and learn on the fly since tech stuff was never actually part of my real job, which is often the case of many staff at nonprofits and smaller libraries. Also joining us today is Linda Wittop. She is the Director of Technical Services at Tech Impact, a nonprofit that's based in Pennsylvania that serves other nonprofits with their technology needs. She will give a little bit more on her background when I introduce her in a few minutes. And then also we will be joined by Nancy Millard who is the Administrative Manager at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware. And she will be sharing her experience of working with Managed IT Services and how that has helped their organization when it has worked for them and how, and she will share some examples. You will also see on the back end assisting with chat questions, Ali Vazdikian and Thomas Nutsband both from TechSoup who will be here to help grab your questions and escalate them up to us throughout the webinar. A quick look at today's agenda will be doing a quick introduction of TechSoup who we are in case you are not familiar with us. We will talk about what Managed IT Services are, what that means, and what they entail. And then Linda is going to take us through whether they are right for your organization and she will give us some profiles of what kind of things to expect if you are a small, medium, or large organization, what the different expectations should be. Then we will talk a little bit about the cost and benefits of Managed IT Services. And then we will hear from Nancy about her case study from having Managed IT at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware. And we will also make time for your Q&A. We will also try and raise up questions that are relevant to what is on screen throughout the webinar. So if a thought occurs to you and you want to ask it, feel free to do that anytime throughout the duration of the webinar. So diving into the topics we are TechSoup. We are a nonprofit with a clear focus. We want to connect other nonprofits, charities, public libraries, and foundations to the tech products and services they need. And part of doing that is not only providing donation programs from companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Cisco, but we also try to ensure that you know how to use them and how to make the best decisions about what will work for your organization's needs. We have been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. We can read a little bit more about our impact on the screen. We have a variety of different offerings that we serve our fellow nonprofits and libraries with, including new additions like consulting services, the latest Windows operating system, and QuickBooks 2014. You can find all of these things and more at our website at techsoup.org. So to get into the topic of Managed IT Services, we want to get an understanding of who is currently using and managed IT service of some kind right now. And you might not be sure what that means. And if that's the case, go ahead and click Not Sure. But click those buttons on your screen and this will give us an idea of who's already engaged in some type of managed IT service contract or agreement right now. So I'll give just a few more seconds so that everybody has a chance to click one of those buttons on their screen. And this will help inform our presenters so that they know kind of what audience they are talking with today. So keep on responding if you see those buttons on your screen. It looks like about 46% are not using any kind of managed IT service right now. And so maybe you're considering that as something that could be an option for your organization, particularly if you don't have any IT staff on site, or you have bigger projects that you might need somebody with more technical expertise to help with. So that's helpful for us to know. And around 21% aren't sure. And so that's a great segue into introducing our first presenter, Linda Wittup from Tech Impact. She's going to help us by first introducing herself and then she's going to talk about what managed IT services are and give us some definitions so that we can all understand what that means. And you may find that you are actually getting managed IT services but you just didn't know that that's what they were called. So thanks so much for joining us Linda. Feel free to introduce yourself and a little bit more about Tech Impact. Thanks Becky. Hi everyone. This is Linda from Tech Impact. Some of you may have seen me or heard me do a webinar in the past either through Tech Super or through Tech Impact. That's my picture. Those of you who have seen or been on a webinar that I've done before may notice that the dog is not in the picture anymore. The dog is not gone. They just made me use a different picture this time so calm down. In fact, she's here with me now trying to be quiet. So my title is Director of Technology Services at Tech Impact. And what that means is that I work with people or staff or volunteers or board members from many nonprofits all across the country and even internationally to help provide information and guidance towards the use of technology at the particular organization. So I do a lot right now. I do a lot of speaking engagements and one-on-one consultations to nonprofits about cloud services, how to use Microsoft Office 365 as an email and file sharing and collaboration platform, and also talk a lot about managed services and how to continue to support the organization's technology needs ongoing. So that's what I do. I'm an obsessed bird watcher. And I also coach a women's ice hockey team so if anybody wants information about either of those topics feel free to email me offline. I'll be happy to talk to you about that. So Tech Impact, our mission, we're a 501c3 nonprofit. Our mission is to ensure that all nonprofits can use technology to better serve our world. Put another way, our mission is to help you meet your mission through the use of technology. So that's a little bit about Tech Impact. I'm trying to double-click these slides so bear with me just a minute. So this is a little bit about Tech Impact. We're a nonprofit. We consider ourselves a capacity-building organization because we provide services to other nonprofits so that you can do your work. We also have a workforce development program. We train at-risk youth in technology services so A-plus certification and that kind of training. The youth, the young people go through a 16-week course. Five weeks are as an intern at local corporate offices. Then we help them get job placements. We've been around since 2003. I've been here since that time. We started as N-Power Pennsylvania. If anybody remembers the old N-Power network, we like to say we were number six. We rebranded as Tech Impact in 2012 somewhat to get rid of the PA and the Delaware name so that we could offer our services outside of our region. With the advent of cloud services, we feel like we can provide help to nonprofits really globally, similar to what TechSoup is doing. We also have a brand called NP-Cloud. So if you see NP-Cloud offerings on TechSoup, that's also us. We have about 100 nonprofits that we provide managed services to. We've been doing this for 11 years now. And I'll talk a little bit about what that means to us in the upcoming slides. So here's a more defined, more definition of what we do. We do managed IT support available through TechSoup's catalog. We do Office 365. We have projects with email implementation and SharePoint online implementation. We also do admin and user training to Office 365. We do data management. We provide a cloud backup solution. So if you've got a server or a dedicated workstation that you wanted to have backed up to the cloud, we provide an enterprise level cloud backup solution, again through TechSoup. We provide cloud servers and hosted desktops. In some cases, it may make sense for you to not have a server in your organization's office. Rather, you might want to have that hosted at a data center and connect remotely to that. We do that work as well. And then finally we do voice over IP phone service. We resell a service that provides voice over IP in a business class situation to nonprofits. We have one application that we manage called Volunteer Connect. It helps nonprofit organizations manage their volunteers with shifts and signups and all that kind of stuff. So all these things we do, not to belabor the point, but I feel like it's important to let you know that we do a lot of other services. So what are managed services? Managed services are proactive management of an IT asset or object by a third party on behalf of a customer. I copied and pasted that from the Internet somewhere. Basically what managed services are is not you call us or somebody, you call a provider when everything is on fire and blown up and crashed and not working, but rather you engage with a provider and that provider does proactive management. So they do the patch management and the security updates and all of that stuff behind the scenes before you have to call. So here's a list of some of the things that are included in managed IT services. I'll skip to the second point. Proactive management and monitoring of all devices in the network. So this means that there is a tool that is run on your network and all of the devices on the network are monitored. Software updates and security patches are automatically done to all endpoints. Asset management, there's an inventory so that we can see all of the devices, not only the hardware inventory, but like a lot of information, the serial number of the computer, whether the computer is under warranty or not. We can see what software is loaded on that computer. The software that came with the computer plus all the stuff that your user might download on their own and install on that computer. Helpdesk, fully managed helpdesk so that users can call in and have someone help resolve an issue and also connect to their computer remotely. Application support, things like, I forgot my password, or hey, we wanted to upgrade from Microsoft Office 2007 to 2010, that kind of stuff. Antivirus and malware protection, that's included in the management program so that there's a console that our technicians can look at to see if there's a trend in antivirus infestations, etc. Data backup, ability to send a technician on site if needed. Then I'm going to jump back up to the first bullet point which is a part-time CIO or trusted advisor. A managed service provider should include what we call here at Tech Impact an account manager. That account manager should be your one stop to help you plan for technology projects, budget for technology projects. Have a relationship that you can call and ask a question about possibly moving to a new database solution or something like that. So these are some of the things that are included in managed IT support. So how does a managed IT service provider do what they do? Well, the big thing is that we use an enterprise tool to do that proactive management and the inventory and the antivirus and the backup. These are enterprise level tools. What makes it effective is that organizations or companies like Tech Impact buy one tool and are able to manage multiple clients under that tool. To give you an example, I stated that we had roughly 100 nonprofits that are under our proactive management. That equates to about 2,000 endpoints. So rather than have to manage 100 different environments separately, we put them all into the enterprise tool and we get to see all 2,000 endpoints and manage those endpoints in either groups, which we have ours grouped into obviously the different customer or organization names, or entirety. So maybe we can push patches out to all of the Windows XP machines regardless of which customer they're involved in or they're with. So we can do that through the enterprise tool. That enterprise tool usually ends up as a little agent that's installed on all the devices so that we can not only get an inventory report, see alerts. We set alerts usually on servers, but also on some critical workstations within the organization. We set alerts such as, let us know when 80% of the hard disk is filled up. Let us know when the processor is being overworked. Let us know when memory starts when the computer starts to run out of memory. This way, when we get that alert, we can contact the user or the customer and say, we need to do something about your hard drive, you're running out of space. We can either delete some stuff off the hard drive, clean it up, defrag it, that kind of stuff, or let's get a new hard drive installed into that unit. So that's why the alerts are pretty important to us. It also allows us to run reports. We can run a report for a particular organization. Maybe they have 45 computers in the organization. We can actually run a report which by the way we're doing now. Show me all of the Windows XP operating systems that are in that particular organization environment. Why is that important? Because Windows XP is coming to end of life April 1st, which means that on April 2nd, hackers, viruses, everybody is going to start attacking those Windows XP machines. So we started this in January to contact all of our clients that have Windows XP machines in their network and work with them to get those machines either upgraded or replaced so that the network is more secure and not vulnerable to those attacks. So that's where our reporting comes in to play. Antivirus and malware software, we roll out the same antivirus and malware across our client networks so that we've got a centralized control panel. We get to see patterns. We know when the viruses are hitting in patterns or in trends. We can see, again, we get an alert that says such and such a computer has been detected with a virus. Without the user even having to call us, we can just connect to that computer, run the scan, clean the virus, and then send the user a report that says, hey, just to let you know, we cleaned a virus off of your computer. Data backup and recovery tools, that's included in our enterprise tool where we push backups to the cloud so that we have some control over that. Again, we can see backups and do restores of OOPS. I deleted that file accidentally. We can do that restore right from our console. So that's using the enterprise tools. We also provide an in-house help desk. So this is fully staffed. We, ours is fully staffed with full-time nonprofit experts that work here in our office and provide phone support and connect remotely to computers when needed. So some managed service providers do that in a different way. They may outsource their help desk situation to a larger corporation, or they may not have in-house help desk. But we feel like because of our circumstance we need to have people who are on our help desk who are committed to understanding nonprofit software, nonprofit constraints, nonprofit user questions. And so that's why we have fully in-house people. Account manager, the account manager will help you plan your projects and budgets and anything else that's tech related. We provide an account manager that helps our clients do anything and everything. We try to meet with someone from your staff at least once a year to get a sense of what's coming up. Are you adding programs? Do you need to change your accounting system? Did you lose funding and have to close down a particular location or something like that? We need to know these things so that we can help you manage transition in your technology. We are also providing the new trends. So we're always looking for better solutions. An example of this is Microsoft Office 365. We've been installing and implementing Microsoft Office 365 for over three years to nonprofits whether they're on our managed service list or not. Because that's what we do. We want to find enterprise level software solutions at low cost so that we can help you find a better way to do things. So that's another part of what managed services does. Rather than having the reactive or wait-and-see approach, no I don't need a managed service provider. I'm just going to wait until things break and then I'm going to call the guy down the road and see if he can come out and fix it. The difference there is when you do that the guy comes in and it may end up costing you more to have the guy fix something that has been let go for months or years or whatever it is. Rather than have a management a proactive approach where we can see what's coming down the pike and fix it before it becomes a major issue. So that is that. Just to jump in quickly, we've gotten a bunch of really great questions but we will hold some of them for later. But a couple of them that refer directly to the slides you've just covered before we get into the next section. We had Alex asked, what software does Tech Impact use for each of the services you offer? They would love a list to know what kind of software you're using to manage your enterprise tools and your asset management and the things that are listed on this slide. Do you have some insight you could share on that? So there are a bunch of tools that are available for managed service providers. They are usually what they call whitelisted and branded to the particular vendor. We use one that is called Enable. To run ours we've also used in the past a tool called Kaseya. Microsoft has one that is used by some larger managed service providers that are like we're dealing with hundreds of clients and thousands of endpoints but some managed service providers are dealing with thousands of clients and hundreds of thousands of endpoints. So they would use a different tool. So it just depends on what you use for your enterprise tool. We use Salesforce.com to run our help desk and ticketing software. So that's how we do it. But if you're interested in providing a ticketing or a help desk software in-house, one that we recommend highly is called SpiceWorks. So if you just look up SpiceWorks on the Internet, it's good for organizations who want to run their own internal help desk. So there are a couple of the tools that we use there. Becky, I can't read the fine print of these questions. Are there any other things you want to raise now? No, I think a couple of the questions were kind of around what are the benefits of doing it with managed IT services and how can I cut down on those quick billable tech support calls. And I think that's some of what you're going to cover in this next section about whether managed IT services are right for you. So I'll let you go ahead and move forward with the slides. And then if we don't get those questions answered, we'll make sure to cover them in the Q&A. So go for it. That's like a great idea. Okay, thank you. So I'm going to run through the next couple of slides that I have are I'm going to try to present small, medium, and large organization case, and maybe talk through some of that. So a typical small organization has no IT staff, sometimes relies on a volunteer to provide service when the volunteer can get there, nights and weekends or whatever, or use ad hoc service, call the guy when something breaks type of a situation there. Typically these organizations have little or no budget. Normally when I speak to small nonprofits, I ask them what their tech budget is. And then what they do is they go back to last year and they add up all the receipts of what they paid for last year technology-wise, and they come back and they say something like $1,400. That's not a budget. Budget means you planned for that expense and you knew why you were going to use that money. Not I had to go out and buy these things on the back end. So normally a lot of times we are making do with what we have. And overall their approach to technology support is reactive rather than proactive. So I try to work with organizations like this and ask, first of all let's develop a plan. Let's talk about your business needs and how technology can help you meet those business needs. Who's providing the guidance? Is it somebody's brother-in-law, is it the brother-in-law of the board president that may or may not be able to help you? Is it somebody that is on your board of directors that is the CIO of a large corporation and really can't translate what they know in that environment down to your six person small nonprofit. So that's the kind of things that I talk about. We talk about support. I'm going to ask, how do you approach the support? And again, I've put a little blurb here. The blurb in the blue box, we don't actually have a tech budget. We operate under the if it breaks, it's replaced business model. That is a quote that I took directly out of the nonprofit technology network survey that they did 2011 or 2012 I think on IT support. So these blurbs that I'm pulling out here are from N10.org. So what happens when you really need support? Can you call the IT guy, the guy down the road and get support? Is he or she? Mostly he, let's be honest. Is he going to have time for your small nonprofit or does he have larger clients that he would prioritize over yours? So how much service interruption are you willing to endure rather than have a relationship with a managed service provider who's always there and treating you equally to all of their other clients? A couple of questions that you would want to ask yourself there. Our next is a medium-sized organization. So in the medium-sized organization, sometimes, and by the way, medium to us means 25 to 75 users. Small organization is usually 10 or under, 15 or under, something like that. Medium-sized organization normally has what we call an accidental techie. This is a person that is on staff but has another title but figured out how to make the printer work one time and now it's the go-to person for the organization. Again, there's probably no real technology or IT budget in this organization. And typically we rely on ad hoc purchases from big box stores to fill the technology need. A lot of times this kind of organization has an IT guy on a pay-as-you-go or retainer plan. And then, again, I think reactive to tech purchases. So a lot of times we want to ask, I feel bad for the accidental techie. They call me all the time and say, you know, I'm the tech person but I don't really know anything which normally isn't true. They know a lot. They just don't know how to quantify what they know. But certainly can't know everything, can't know about all the new trends, can't know about how to solve all of the issues that come up within the organization. Once again, I try to work with people within this organization to try to get them to develop a plan for technology. Again, asking, what are your business needs for the next year? And then let's figure out what technology you need to accomplish those goals. And then put a plan together and try to work with a budget. You know, the account manager would talk to this organization about what's available. Did you know that you could eliminate the exchange server in your organization and move to Office 365 or move away from a pop provider maybe to a Google email thing? Did you know that you can do instead of these access databases which are old and outdated, do you know you could move to another fundraising platform or something like that? TechSoup, most of the time people in the medium-sized organizations know about TechSoup and use it heavily. But still, there's a need to parse out that information. And so that's what we provide a lot of guidance to that. In terms of managed services, an organization like this can definitely benefit from getting connected with a managed service provider because this managed service provider can work to eliminate some of the stress that's put on the accidental techie. The accidental techie in a lot of these organizations, everybody goes to them all day long. I can't print. I forgot my password. How come I can't? My screen went black. What do I do now? All of these things which detract from that person's actual job which might be the bookkeeper or the accountant or the program manager or whatever it was that you were originally hired to do. So by hiring a managed service provider takes that stress off of the accidental techie. Users contact to help us directly, not the accidental techie. And when we work with these kinds, this is how we do it. Not all managed service providers do this. When we work with this kind of organization, we take all of the calls from all of the users. I'll talk in a minute about how we approach the fee for our services. We do a flat fee where it's just a flat fee. There's no limit to the amount of times that people can call us on the help desk. However, if we get an issue that needs approval then we contact the accidental techie and we say, okay, Mary just called with a problem. She needs a hard drive replacement. We're going to have to have someone authorize the purchase of that new hard drive so that we can get her set up. So then the accidental techie becomes a partner to us. And we're working with that accidental techie. We're providing reports back. We're providing the hardware reports back to that accidental techie. We're meeting with them either remotely or in person to talk about replacements and upgrades and that kind of a thing so that this person can get back to the work that they've actually done. And again, it's a good relationship for us to have. So any questions about that before I go on to the large? Nope, I think you're good. All right, cool. I see a lot of people self identifying here as the accidental techie. Congratulations to you. So the large organization, these organizations have an IT person on staff. Their role is, they're the technology person. Maybe they're called the IT manager or maybe they're called the director of services or whatever. In the IT staff here, once again, these people are brought on as full-time staff and they do everything. They set up the wireless connection. They change the paper and the printers. They maintain and manage all of the servers and networking stuff and they provide end user support. In a lot of organizations, I just last week read a job description that was posted about an IT director, not that I'm looking. But that person was also responsible for social media for the organization, running reports out of the razor's edge on fundraising and that kind of a thing. So it's a lot to ask one person to be expert at. Here again, providing managed services, we can outsource the mundane, the patching and monitoring of all the computers in the network, the routine maintenance of the servers that are in the network, help desks. So end users go to a help desk and again we come back and work with the IT manager in this situation to say, here's what we found, or let's do some planning, or three people called us about the printer on the second floor, somebody's going to have to whatever, get the maintenance guy out there. And oftentimes in large organizations, we got that question earlier, what tools do you use? There's no service desk tools in place at these organizations. It's all done by kind of whoever picks up the phone, I run and take care of that person or take care of this person. We would recommend that a service desk get put in place in this situation and we've talked about it, SpiceWorks is a good one to use. These organizations, larger organizations already do things like contract out larger projects to outside firms. We would want to be involved in that planning and we can also help find firms to do larger projects like software implementation project or something like that. So again, I think it's a good way for us to have a relationship with a larger organization and take off some of that burden that's placed on the IT manager and allow him or her to do the other more important pieces of their role like planning, like finding the new solution for fundraising, like trying to connect the social media tool to the website thing or whatever that is. So anyway, I wanted to give you a profile of three situations and why managed services may help in those situations. Does anybody have any questions? Becky, anything bubbling up before we move to the poll? Becky Well, not necessarily questions specifically to this, but we did have quite a few people chiming in on the chat questions asking who identifies as an accidental techie or as a self-identified techie. And most of the people that chimed in really said that it resonated on the accidental techie thing. And the terminology that I have found that I really like now is the rebranding of it as the purposeful techie, that even if it's not something that's part of your full-time job, you try your best and do it well and try to find those answers even if it's not a part of your everyday job or is intended to be. We only had a couple of people who chimed in as full-fledged techies. So we're glad to have them join as well. And one person had commented that they are the, let me go back to the comment, the best available techie. So I like that. And I think every organization would be lucky to have a volunteer who identifies as the best available techie and dedicates their time like that. We did have one person who asked a question about the budgets for what kind of tech budget would a medium organization have? And I think that's a great segue into our next section where we'll be talking about the costs and benefits. So if you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about that. We also have a poll to gauge how much people are spending now. So take it away, Linda. So our next section we're going to talk a little bit about costs and benefits of managed IT. And so before we do that, I'd like to run a poll. Do you know how much your organization spends on tech each year? We're not asking you for the numbers, just the yes or no. If you'd like to go ahead and submit your answer there, that would be great. And we can see counting up, wow, look at all those yeses. Yeses are flying off the shelf, man. That's great. So a lot of people on this call know how much they spend on IT purchases or on tech support every year. So that's terrific. We're climbing slightly. If you haven't put your answer in yet, go ahead and then I'm going to click to show everybody the results in about a second. So here's our poll results. We've got 66% of people on this webinar stating that they do know how much they spend on tech each year. So I'm going to do a little spin on this. I'm not necessarily going to spend a lot of time on the actual dollars that are spent, but rather look at IT spending as percent of annual operating budget. So again, I've stolen this slide here from the N10.org survey of nonprofit technology. And they've broken down, they have four categories for organization size here. And if you wanted to read the report, I'll try to send out the link to this if you wanted to read the full report, which is a lot to read through. But we're looking here, average tech in 2011 for a small organization, so they spend $13,000, which is 8% of their total budget. And you can see the different answers there. The average is a 5% spend on technology. What if using managed service provider could actually reduce your support cost? So in other words, take that 5% and actually make it a lower number. By using managed service, we think that we can get you to reduce your overall percent of tech spend in relation to budget through using the proactive support, knowing so that we're fixing problems before they're actually big problems. We're noticing alerts. We're taking care of viruses before they're spread across the network, that kind of a thing. You're not paying an hourly fee for anybody to come in and fix that after it's really too large. We're providing account management so that you're not doing things like going out and buying a server from Best Buy when you really don't need a server, or buying things from big box stores. You can get a perfectly good refurb from TechSoup.org or a lower cost computer. Our Executive Director right now, I'll give you an example. Our Executive Director is working on his day-to-day work, a $400 laptop because he doesn't need anything big. But in the past, he may have gone out and bought the $1,500 laptop thinking that he needed all that power. So that's the kind of thing that we can do to provide you with the information that you need to make smarter purchases with IT, and also take care of issues before they come big problems. So that's the kind of thing that we're looking at. So answering, I'll answer a question about typical costs in a minute. So what's wrapped up in this IT cost? Hardware, connectivity, software, support, staffing, licensing for your donor database, and purchasing your software through TechSoup. And if it's not available on TechSoup, finding that and putting all that together, how much are you spending on your Internet connection? Do you really need to replace that server? How many workstations are you going to have to replace next year? All those kind of things are involved in the IT costs here. So with managed support, as I said, we do a flat monthly fee. The flat monthly fee is based on number of users in the organization, number of computers. Do you have a server? How many servers do you have? How many locations do you have? We take all that information in, and then we provide back out a cost per month that's flat fee. And that flat fee includes all of the things that we've talked about today, including unlimited help desk calls. On-site service does cost extra in a lot of cases. And from a lot of providers, not just us, the on-site service does cost extra. So I'd be happy to give you some more defined costs. But roughly, for an organization with 10 computers and a server and one location, you're looking at, I'm trying to do math in my head while you're all sitting there waiting. It's $600-ish. Let's go with $600-ish per month. So what's $600-ish per month times 12? I can't do that math either. $7,200. So for $7,200 a year, take $7,200. Those of you who are in a smaller organization, take $7,200 or even $10,000 and divide that into your annual operating budget and see if that comes out lower than 5%. It probably does. We're aiming for 1%, roughly 1% of your annual operating budget you would spend on support. This way you have extra money to leftover for those other purchases that we talked about on the previous slide, the hardware, the software, the licensing, that kind of a thing. So that's just a rough estimate there of what it would cost you and how we would work with you to try to figure out whether or not managed service is financially a good fit for your organization. There's predictable cost. We talked about that less expensive than a part-time IT person. In most cases, we're not trying to put anybody out of work. We're just saying that if you're in a situation where the accidental techie is overwhelmed and you're thinking about hiring a person, think about comparing the cost of hiring that part-time person with the cost of having enterprise level support through a managed service provider. Making better purchasing decisions, again, that whole, you don't need to spend $1,200 on a PC when a $400 PC would do just fine. Expert advice and buying power. We have buying power where we're getting enterprise level pricing because we were going to vendors and saying we have 1,000 desktops or whatever. Any questions before we're going to roll it over to get Nancy on? We do have a bunch of questions, but I'd like to give Nancy an opportunity just to share her experience quickly and then we'll get to Q&A. So keep those questions coming. We have them all flagged. We will try and make time to make sure we get to them. But I'd like to go ahead and introduce Nancy Millard from the Rodel Foundation of Delaware and have her share her experience of using managed IT services and how it's helped their organization. So welcome to the line Nancy. We're glad to have you. Thanks so much Becky. I am here representing all accidental techies because that's what I am. I joined the Rodel Foundation about five years ago. And on my first day they said, oh by the way, you're in charge of the computers. And I was like, okay, well what does that mean? And they said we'll just call the IT person if you have a problem they can help you. And what I quickly learned was I was selected for this position because my desk was closest to the server so that's why I became the accidental techie. And every time I called the IT person they charged us a lot of money. So calling the IT person became increasingly difficult because every time I called they would charge us an arm and a leg. So about I'd say four years ago we partnered with Tech Impact to take on our organization, take on our tech needs and I work with them to make sure that happens. So to give you a little bit about what we do and the size of our organization, we are a small foundation located in the state of Delaware and we're working to build one of the finest public education systems in the world. We have people here that work on policy, people that work on funding, and people who are working with partnerships in the state. My primary responsibility is to make sure that the office runs, make sure that the people have the things that they need to do the job for the kids that are in the public school here in Delaware. We have 15 users including me, the accidental techie. We actually have 20 computers in the office. We have some extra laptops that we have for one in the conference room or more if we have some people that come in and need to have some access to a computer while they are here. We have one server and then we also have a terminal server which we currently use for people to remotely access our system when they are not here in the office. We use Tech Impact for cloud backup so they also provide our backup system. We use Office 365 for our email. And in the spring of 2014 we will be moving to SharePoint so we are working with Tech Impact on the changeover to SharePoint as opposed to using our server as we do now. So that's a little bit about who we are and what our technology picture looks like. As I said about four years ago, we partnered up with Tech Impact and worked with them to solve our IT needs. And it has been a godsend particularly as the accidental techie everyone seems to come to me when they have a question. And I now have this big organization behind me helping to support the things that need to be done here in our office. So I made a list of some of the things that we work with Tech Impact on and I just thought I'd give you a couple of examples of the things that we've done with these. The help desk is an invaluable tool. There's a whole staff of people behind me to help solve problems in the office. So I'm not the only person who can fix things. Now anyone in the office can pick up the phone, send an email to the help desk, and they'll be able to help them solve their problems specific. I should mention that we have a variety of different computer abilities on our staff of the 15 people. Some people are great. We have one person who wants to bring his own computer with him to work. He wants his own technology. He probably knows more than I do. And then we have some other people who can't even seem to remember what their passwords are. And I spend a good chunk of time helping them remember what their password is. So it's helpful that the people who are strong in IT or comfortable with IT can call Tech Impact directly and get their problems solved. And then some other people who like to have a little bit more hand-holding I call the help desk for them to get those problems fixed. And one of the things that I have enjoyed the most is that not only are we getting our problems solved, but the person on the other end of the line is helping me and explaining how we're going to fix the problem. And that's really because that's what I want. I want to know what they're doing. I want to see how to fix it because maybe sometime I can just fix it if someone has a problem and not have to go through the help desk. So I really appreciated kind of that whole learning process. We have relationships with the Tech Impact team. When I call, I usually speak with the same group of people who answer the phone. I say, hi, it's Nancy from Rodel. And they automatically bring up my profile I guess, and they know what kinds of questions that I'm going to be having answered. And they understand the organization that I'm working for, that I'm at a small nonprofit, and they know what we're doing. So I appreciate not having to explain everything every time I call the help desk. We work with them closely to help figure out what are some upgrades that we should be doing, whether it's in our hardware or in our software, and helping us work through the donation process by TechSoup and different projects. I know that Tech Impact worked with us to get Office 2013 donated. So our whole staff got upgraded to Office 2013 through our work with TechSoup. And Tech Impact helped me with that. I didn't have to do that on my own. We have an account manager who I work with a lot. Mark is a great resource for me. He stops by the office every once in a while. He calls me, he checks in, wants to make sure that things are running smoothly here, and helping us plan for the future. So sitting down with me and talking about what we were doing, and really coming up with the solution that maybe our office should be working towards going on to SharePoint. And that's what we're going to be doing in the spring based upon conversations that I've had with Mark throughout the past couple of months, and him having a good understanding of what we're doing here at the Rodel Foundation. All of the maintenance and backups, they just happen. I don't have to do anything. So it's kind of magical. And if there's a problem, someone will send me an email and say, look, we're having a problem with such and such a computer. We need to log in and take care of that. So it's really nice that I don't have to think about it. It just happens in the background. I've attended webinars. We've had people from Tech Impact give specific training sessions to our staff. It's been great to have this resource and tools of things teaching us about things that I don't know anything about. And the greatest thing according to our Chief Operating Officer is there's a constant cost that can be budgeted. We don't have these surprise, unforecasted, oh no, I've spent an hour on the phone with somebody and it's now going to cost us an arm and a leg. I know that I can call the help desk, or someone in our office can call the help desk. And it's included in the monthly fee. We could call every day if we wanted to and sometimes it feels like I do. But they're very helpful and there's no unexpected cost. And that's probably for an organization that is really trying to use our funds to do greater things for Delaware students. We don't want to have these unexpected costs that are really going to take away from our mission. And that's one of the things that we really appreciate. Becky, I'll turn it back over to you. Becky Thank you so much for that Nancy. And I know we're just a couple of minutes from wrapping up and Linda is working furiously on the back end to try and answer questions that were asked. But I want to just take a second just to let people know that they can also talk to Tech Impact directly. We have an offer through TechSoup with Tech Impact. So rather than calling up an IT person separately and getting charged their $100 fee to have a phone assessment or support call, you can access a $10 assessment through TechSoup that gets you a phone interview with somebody like Linda that can talk about your organization's specific needs and talk about what the support would include. If you decided that you may want to go with a managed IT support service, you don't have to do it with Tech Impact by any means. This webinar was really intended to talk about what these services are and when to use them no matter who you do them with. But if you're interested in learning more about the program directly with Tech Impact, you can do so by looking at this offer through TechSoup as well. Jumping into the questions, feel free to keep typing them in your screen. We have just a couple of minutes left, but I'm going to go ahead and ask a few here. So for Linda, we have a question about does the fixed amount per month include things like the install of office 2013 upgrade on the PCs, or is that a separate cost? So that's funny Becky because I was just typing back to Graham. So upgrades are included if they can be done through our tool. So if we can push out software upgrades which in many circumstances we can, there are a few circumstances depending on the software itself where the software provider doesn't allow us to do that kind of an upgrade. So if it can be pushed out, absolutely. If we can't, if we have to send a technician on site to do the upgrades in person or something like that, that would be considered a project. Great. And then Susan asks, is there a menu of services so that you can choose which things you might want managed and which things you might not? So the answer to that is yes and no. It depends on, it would have to be a conversation there. We wouldn't necessarily want to manage three people in the organization and have six people not be under management because inevitably it's the six people that are going to have the trouble, not the three. But we do provide service to say one particular office, maybe have several locations, and one of those locations really doesn't have anybody on board that's the accidental techie or whatever, so we could do that. Great. Now we are past the 12 o'clock hour on my clock, but if people are interested in sticking around, I don't know, Linda, if it's okay with you, we could stay on for just a couple minutes longer and try to get through a couple more questions. Okay, so we have Kahn asks, how can I cut down on the quick 15-minute billable tech support calls? Would each call to you guys be something that's billed separately, or would that be part of like a monthly service contract? Nope, that's part of our service contract. There's no fee to call into the help desk. Your users can call us all the time. In fact, we encourage it. We would rather have five phone calls about a problem than none, and then it becomes a problem. This gives us an opportunity to track all those calls and find trends as well. So if we get phone calls from the same person on a weekly basis, every Tuesday at 3 o'clock they're calling because they're disconnected, that tells us that there's a trend or a pattern in there. Or if five people from the office call us to complain about the same printer, we can see that trend and pattern there. It's all at the same fee. There's just a flat fee. You can call us all the time. Great. We have a couple of questions asking about the service area. So do you serve people on the West Coast too, all across the U.S.? Yes, we provide our services all across the U.S. and Canada because our service our proactive support and our help desk is all remote. And if needed, we partner with a national field service technicians. My God, that was hard to say. So if we do need to deploy, we have people across the nation that we partner with and we deploy that way. Great. We also have a question asking, Alex is wondering does tech impact and other types of managed IT service providers work mostly with Macs or PCs? Or do you work with both? So if an office has both, do you manage both? We do. We do manage both. Our tool and most of the managed service providers, the tools that managed service providers have do more with the PC than they do with the Mac. Our tool will manage the Mac up to a point. It will provide us with the inventory for the Mac, and it provides us with the remote control to the Mac. So we'll do all that. But it won't do the things like the scripted install of the upgraded software and stuff like that. The Mac just doesn't allow it. Okay. How do you deal with an organization that John asks that might have only volunteer staff and they are using all their personally owned hardware? Do you work with organizations that don't have organizationally owned hardware? We absolutely will. It's a conversation that we'll have to have to make sure that the organization is willing to have us manage that hardware. It's a little bit more difficult for us to provide the account management and say to a volunteer, hey you need to replace that computer. That's a little bit more challenging, but we certainly can. Great. And I do want to try and wrap it up here. So I know we haven't answered every question, but we're already a few minutes over. So I'm going to go ahead and just show some additional resources about the donation program through TechSoup. Again, if you want more information about how to access the specific assessment that Tech Impact offers, you can do so following these links that you'll get in the PowerPoint in the follow-up email later today. You can also learn more about their eligibility and restrictions for that program, which kinds of organizations can access it, and more about managed IT services through Tech Impact at this link at the bottom. We hope that this webinar provided some good information for you to take out into your community no matter what kind of organization you want to work with. And if you're looking for managed IT services that you can take this and apply it to interviews that you might do to vet those providers. Thank you so much for joining us on this webinar today. I'd like to thank our presenters, Linda Widdup from Tech Impact, and Nancy Millard from the Rodell Foundation of Delaware for taking the time to share their experiences. I'd also like to thank Allie Vazdikian and Thomas Nutsmand on the back end here at TechSoup helping to field all of those questions. And I'd like to thank ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing this webinar platform for us today so that we can host webinars like this and provide them to you on a weekly basis. Please join us again next week. We have a webinar scheduled on the best types of assignments for managing and working with online volunteers. So if you have a lot of volunteers, please join us for that event. And when you close out of this webinar, please take a moment to complete your post-event survey that will pop up in the window so we can continue to improve our webinar program. Thank you so much everyone. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye.