 This training is made possible thanks to a TIG grant to the Northwest Justice Project in partnership with Perbononet and LSNTAP. So welcome to the webinar today. As some of you may have seen from the description, this features 50 tech tips focused on project management, collaboration, communication, and a few fun ones thrown in. We'll also include a segment with some homegrown tools towards the end and resources developed by and for the legal aid community. And we hope that you walk away from today's webinar with some tools and tips to empower you to do the great work you are doing more efficiently. And today, in terms of our panelists, we have Rhys Flexner from the DC Bar, Samantha Kyrkostas from Illinois Legal Aid Online, Willnita Negron from the Florida Justice Technology Center, Jenny Singleton from Legal Services State Support in Minnesota, and myself, Jillian Thiel from Perbononet. And we also have Brian Rowe and Ketting from the Northwest Justice Project who will be popping in with various comments, et cetera. So we'll go ahead and turn it over to our first panelist today, Jenny Singleton. Hi, everyone. Thanks. My name is Jenny Singleton, and I am the Legal Services State Support Legal Technology Project Manager here in Minnesota. So I'm just going to share a few tech tips. The first one is a browser extension called Grammarly. And I first started looking for something like this when I ran into some problems with typo showing up and different items I was posting on our pro justice site that I wasn't catching since there's not a built-in spell check editor and a lot of online editing software. So Grammarly just installs into your browser. I've used it with both Firefox and with Chrome. And then it'll act just like a word spell checker would act so that it'll highlight any misspellings that you have. And then if you hover over that, it'll pop up suggestions for how to correct the misspelling. So I've really enjoyed using that where there isn't a built-in spell checker, but I am having to type things in, usually in a browser setting. The next tech tip I have is creating a template email and outlook, which seems like a pretty basic thing, but it's a little bit buried within outlook. And one of my coworkers actually showed me how to use this. But if you're ever sending out kind of a stock email, so for example, I do one for people who don't qualify for a pro justice membership, then you can create a template email to address that. And the way you do that is type in your email as you want it to appear and then click save as. And then under the save as type, choose outlook template. And that'll save your email as a template email that you can then pull up later. And then once you've got your template saved, to use it, this is also a little bit buried within the functionality of outlook. But if you select new items and then choose more items, then you can choose choose form, click on that, and then you'll be taken to a pop-up box and you'll look in user templates and file system. And then that'll bring you to a screen that will list all of your template emails. And you can just choose to open that email and then you can edit it and send it like you would with a normal email. And there's a quick question, which version of outlook or is this across to all versions of outlook? You know, I've only used this in the 2016 version, but I believe that you can use it in other versions as well. So the next tool that I wanted to share is a presentation software called Prezi. And this is an online alternative to PowerPoint. And it's set up a little bit different from PowerPoint in that instead of advancing different slides, you have an overall picture. And then you zoom into different parts of that picture to walk through your presentation. So it's really great for showing the information within the context of the broader idea. So it's really good for example, if you're trying to show how a process works, and you want to zoom into different steps in that process, but still show how they fit into the overall, it's a great system for that. And it's also just something that's a little bit different from the typical PowerPoint presentation. You can have a free account, but if you have a free account, then all of the presentations you create are available to other users to see and to reuse. They have paid options that allow a bit more privacy, but I've been good with just a free account. The next tool is called City Maps To Go. And I recently stumbled upon this when I was in Europe last year and was trying to figure out a way to navigate different cities when I didn't have a cell phone plan that was working. And City Maps To Go provides you with downloadable offline maps. So when you do have an internet connection or you're back home and you have your cell phone plan, then you can download the maps that you're going to use. And then once you're out of range, you can still use those maps and then it'll use your phone's GPS to show where you are on the map. You can also select different points of interest that you want to have saved onto your maps. So then once you're, say, wandering around Paris completely lost, you can pull up your City Maps To Go and it'll show you where you are in relation to wherever you're trying to go, which will be one of these red or blue stars that you can see here on the screen. So I've found that to be a pretty fun tool for traveling. And that's also free. The next tool is a website called Codecademy. And this is, again, a free website that you can use to learn basic programming skills. So I recently did a JavaScript course and I have, you know, very little programming experience, but it was a good way for me to become familiar with a lot of the basic commands so that when I am coming across those and some of the quasi-tech work that I do, I have a little bit of a more understanding about how everything is working together and functioning. And they have courses on a variety of programming language. And then they also recently, I think, launched a course on building a website and managing a website. The next tool is an app that's called IFTTT, or which stands for if this, then that. And this app basically integrates various other apps and devices so that you can select a trigger that will then cause something to happen. So, for example, on my phone, I have it set to pull the NASA image of the day and make that my wallpaper on my phone. And there are just so many applications for this. But, for example, if you have your house set up as a smart home with different Wi-Fi integrations with your, say, your alarm or your lights, then you can have your location trigger various settings within your house. So, they have a lot of stock recipes and then you can also build your own. You can use it to keep track of different types of news items. You can have it keep track of when a keyword appears in the title of an article on various websites. So, like the New York Times, or I've used it when I'm hunting for something used on Craigslist. You can have it send you a notification anytime a search item comes up. The next tool is also kind of a fun one, but that's Bitmoji, which is another app. And this just allows you to create an avatar, and then it can, it puts your avatar into different clothes and then has different messages that your avatar can be saying. So, one of my coworkers also has Bitmoji, and we like to send each other funny Bitmojis during conferences and things like that. The next tool is called TweetDeck, and I'll give a shout out to another coworker of mine, Emily Good, who told me about this one. And I'm not much of a Twitter user, but for those of you who are, TweetDeck allows you to have a column view that you can see different columns with different categories of things that are coming through Twitter, like search results or likes for different users, hashtags, etc. And it can be useful at conferences too. You can have various people who are sharing one account and have different levels of access, so you can have those people doing different things with your Twitter account. And then you can also schedule tweets to go out in advance with TweetDeck. Next I have PictoChart, and this is a website that allows you to create different graphical representations of information, and it has a series of stock templates that you can use to make your information look pretty. So we've used this for, this is an example of something that we created when our Law Help site went mobile that just uses pictures to show everything that Law Help does. And this also has free basic access, and then if you want to do more or have more templates, then you can upgrade to a paid account. Next tool is Optimizely. Optimizely is a really, really cool tool that perhaps you've heard my colleague Mary Kachorek talk about. She did a presentation at TIG on Optimizely, but we've used this to run experiments to figure out how changes that we're making in our websites are impacting traffic to different parts of the website. So we've used this a lot on our home page with the right hand buttons that lead to different parts of the website to see what happens when we rearrange those buttons, what happens when we make the buttons look different, give them different wording, etc., to see how we can manipulate the site to make sure that people are getting to where we want them to go and where they need to go. We've been able to run all of our experiments with just a free basic account, but again, if you want more access, then there are paid accounts that you can get. And then finally, the last tool is called Office Lens, and Office Lens is a scanner app that integrates with Office 365. You can take a picture of notes, you could take a picture of a whiteboard, and then the app reformats it so that it's more legible. So you can see in this example, it's kind of aligned it so that the perspective is correct. And then within the app, you can sync it and upload that document to your Office 365 account. So that is my last tech tip, and I'm happy to answer any questions that I can. Go ahead, Brian. There was a quick question over Prezi, and they were asking for a little bit more detail on how it works for you or what some of the positives are on it. Yeah, so basically, you create a presentation. So what you see on the screen is a presentation that we did to explain what our office does in Minnesota. And then if you clicked on the right hand arrow, it would zoom in to where you see those brackets. And then if you clicked on the right hand arrow again, it would zoom in again to a little bit lower where you see the next graphic or the next set of brackets. So the advantage is that you kind of have more of a graphical presentation of what your presentation is. And then you have control over where the presentation will zoom to. And then you can have it, for example, zoom into a set of brackets and then zoom back out into the full screen to give the user an idea of how what's in the brackets relates to what the full picture is. So hopefully. We'll look at doing a short video on LSNTEP that the demo's this. I've used this for other projects outside of legal services where you're trying to tell a story. You've got a progression. You kind of have a map, and you're moving from spot to spot. It's much more fluid than PowerPoint, and it works really well if you're creating videos with voiceover. Just it's less jarring. I really like the program a lot. Caroline also commented that she, that at her organization, they use IFTTT to respond to people who text mass legal help to say that they have been denied an interpreter, and it works in five different languages. Wow. That's a great use for the program. And we also had a couple, we also had a couple, I know that Jenny shared in some great ideas for user experience. And so we had Kate sharing in some ideas that I've shared out with folks. Around some other resources around user experience, and thinking about good ways to present information in a couple other good tech tools. And then we also said Molly mentioned that she has used Prezi for content on their law help site in Colorado. All right, so we'll go over to our next presenter, Wilnita. Excellent. So I'm Wilnita from the Florida Justice Tech Center, and I've split up my tips into different sections. The first section involves digital security. If you guys are in the LSN tab listserv, you probably had seen that we did a few kind of data ethics and data security webinars last month. And one of the things that came out of that is that people were rightfully so they were interested in learning what they can do with like limited information about these issues. What kind of things they can implement in their offices. Basically a lot of this information offices realized that it was important and they needed to look closer at it, but they wanted to have a resource to, if they don't have the information in-house, like where can they go to. So I had to ask around a few colleagues that do in this area, and they actually made me aware of AccessNow, which works on data security issues both in the US and internationally. And they actually have a digital security helpline which is available to civil society groups. I checked in with them, legal aid groups would be part of that. And it's basically a free service that they do where they would actually do a general assessment of an office's digital security risks. And then they would probably through like a series of phone calls, just try to put together a very simple kind of plan of areas that offices should look into in the months to come should look into increasing security. So the information for that, if you visit AccessNow, the website, in their digital security helpline, you will be able to get the information on how to contact them. It's mostly through email that you initiate, and then you would set up some phone calls. And then depending on the location of the legal aid program, they even do in-person consultations and training for staff. So when I found this resource, I wish I had had it when we did it, the webinars last month, but I'm now passing it around to different programs that are interested in exploring their digital security risks. Great. So then the second tip is it's another add-on that you can add to your Firefox or your Chrome or your Opera browser, and it essentially encrypts the communication with that your browser has with like major, most major websites, not all of them. And so it's, if you're on your website, and this is a resource that you can also pass on to clients, but if you want to be able to use some of the major social media sites, but you want to protect those communications, make them more secure, you can add on this browser, which was developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which again does a lot of international advocacy around encryption and making communications between civil society groups and journalists more secure. So this is a really interesting tool that it's protection, it's invisible, you don't get like a tangible outcome from using it, but it's essentially a way of increasing your knowledge and your awareness of how the various, like the websites that we use could be added on with layers of protection to protect our browsing of certain sites that we wouldn't want. In most common contexts it would be government surveillance, but it just increases awareness and knowledge about these kind of security issues that arise when we're just browsing and using websites like Facebook and other major social media sites. The next set of tips are dealing with increasing the accessibility of the resources that we develop. One of them is, and many of you guys have been using this already, but sometimes a lot of our clients are using browsers that are not the most current ones, and so I know for myself when I've created websites or web pages or content, I've often had to try to find tools that let me see like Firefox version 11, just to try to troubleshoot issues that people might be encountering. There's this website now, browsershots.org, which is free, lets you basically test out website compatibility issues for all of the browsers at once, and this is, for example, I tested Floridalawhelp.org on here and then tried to see if there were any particular browsers that are still fairly current, that may be affecting the way that content is showing up in the usability of the website. So I found that resource really useful as far as, because there's already a lot of tools that let you test a small selection of browsers, but this one does all of them, so it's pretty comprehensive in that sense. The next tip I really fell in love with, because in this, in the Legal Aid community, when we think about increasing the readability of our content, we often think about font size or the size of the text, sorry font style, and there's actually a really popular tool that I found that based on study and analysis that they've done, the best way that they have found to increase readability is actually the color, making the colors of the text differently, and there's a whole science to that, which you can go to beelinereader.com and it goes into their whole study of how they found that when there's large chunks of text, what help people the most is that it's kind of like that color variation that has high contrast levels, so as you can see it goes from dark blue to lighter shades of blue and breaks it up with red, so it interchanges between various levels of blue and red, and this is actually a plugin for Chrome as well, so it's, for me, when I'm looking at producing content, I use it for my own, to increase my own readability, but also I'm looking into how to make that available for maybe the Florida Law Help website, how to feature it somewhere as a tool for people to also be able to increase, to be able to download it and just increase your readability, but generally I thought that the concept of using color as a way to break up large chunks of text, I thought that was like a really interesting and new way to think about how we can increase the readability of our content. Just a quick comment, Willnate, I think it's interesting that just announced the California Public Library System has adopted the BLN Reader browser plugin. That's great, yeah, so it's, I would definitely check it out and then just use it for your own start-off by just using it yourself on the various websites that you use, especially like news articles. The next tool is dealing with content development and internet marketing. A tool that's really interesting for looking at content ideas is AnswerThePublic.com and what they've done is that, I'm sure that if you go to Google you can see the variations of whatever you're searching for that are the most popular. So what they've done is that they've taken, they take the information from the Google search engine and if you, in their website, if you put in keywords it will visualize and list all of the popular variations for that particular phrase as questions, but it'll kind of break it down into really interesting lists. So like right now if you were to put expungement in Florida in Google it might show you just a couple of them and they've kind of taken all of the ones, even the ones that are not that popular and then broken it down. So you can get ideas for content and also you get interesting little visuals which you guys might not be able to see that break down the various topics and it's too small to look at it, but if you guys look at the one that looks like a spider web it shows what are the how questions which are related to expungement in Florida, which are to the left and then what are the which questions that's on the top and then the who and the what. When people are searching for expungement in Florida what are those different types of who, which and what questions related to that and if, and then that gives you an idea for producing content and then maybe had of like how to also gives you like ideas for titles for that resource and it's also free to use and this one is it's also a free tool and many times you may when you increase or decrease the size of a photo, if you don't put in the right pixel information most times it'll get distorted. So this tool just if you're creating content for social media or for print materials you can upload pictures and change reducer size and be able to not lose the quality of it. So it'll basically it'll essentially do the automatic pixel correction that needs to go on so that you can change the size of a photo without ever losing the quality of it. And yeah and that's the website. This tool was a one born out of academia that's available for free now and it's socioviz.net and there's similar tools to this to be able to map out Twitter conversations and Twitter the relations of different conversations and who the players are. I find this one to be very comprehensive in the sense that you can get a lot of this information all of those charts and diagrams are all available in their WAN dashboard. All you have to do is when you visit here you have to create an account. There is an option to pay $9 a year to be able to search a higher number of tweets I think like over a thousand and more but otherwise if you don't want to pay the $9 a year there's you can search up to five or six hundred of the past tweets for whatever term that you're looking for. So I think I for this example I had I was using I was researching just conversations related to A2J and it identifies who are the most active people, who are the most influential, what are the most common hashtags if you look towards which is really interesting to know like what hashtags you can piggyback off. If you look at the diagram on the right bottom side it shows you it breaks down what the specific tweets are who did it and the hashtags that they used. So again you can scan conversations related to a topic and then try to piggyback off them using common hashtags that are being used and then you can also if you look at the social network map you can map out and see which is you get a really good oversight of what online discussions related to access justice what they look like like what does a community look like not offline and see if they resemble real life so that those charts in the top are like the various people that are talking about these issues and how they relate to each other. So it's it's really a pretty comprehensive and it can really help your make your interactions in Twitter be a little bit more strategic and maybe more fun than just kind of like the retweeting of stuff that we all kind of fall back to on a day-to-day basis. And then my the next section is like cool things that you can do on Google Docs and Sheets which I really love as well there's I if you guys haven't been on the add-ons list for Google Docs I would suggest you check it out because there's there's a wealth of really interesting add-on tools that you can use that you can integrating to your Google spreadsheets and your Google Docs just to make increase their their effect and how their usability for their functions and ultimately to help you reach to help you achieve what you're trying to do faster and easier through a lot of the add-ons that are there. This one if you're anything like me you probably have hundreds of Google Docs of files on your drive and you can actually get a complete list of all of your files on your Google Drive on a spreadsheet if you add on the files cabinet by awesome table again you would search you would open up a Google Doc and and select add-ons to be able to and then you can search by the name and for example you can see this is just a small snapshot of what my Google Docs list which was like hundreds of rows long and it shows me the link it shows me who the owners are when I created it and and then I kind of I kind of do this kind of auditing every six months just so I can delete things that are not needed anymore and make my Google Drive more manageable. The next add-on that I like is the Google Drive audit report add-on and if you are working with many different people and sharing Google Docs it's good to again every six months run this tool and this one differs in that it shows you who has access to that file and and it's just a good auditing thing to be able to just get a hold of like how much information are you sharing and with who and you know is it shared being shared with the appropriate people so this is a sample of the audit report that you get after running this thing it shows you the title the link and then it shows the editors and the level of control it's hard to tell on this but there's a column for who has access and it says you know anyone with a link can edit it's private and then specific editors are is on the last right hand side column there so it's again I do this like every six months just just kind of review who has access to my files and whether I want to continue to make things public so that's a useful tool if you have a lot of Google Drive files this one I'm currently experimenting with and there's actually an ability to send SMS messages from Google Sheets by using cloud com SMS and I'm exploring this for Florida Law Help for our website and the way that I started is that I'm just collected a bunch of my friends telephone numbers because I'm kind of testing it out and and then I'll run through the experiment but essentially once you download this cloud com SMS all you need is the name a column for the name of the person their telephone number I got the phone numbers of friends from across a country so that I could test you know would it reach someone in California and New York and Florida just kind of just testing the limits of this tool and then as you can see in the box it says what's what's your message and in this particular case I'm just kind of seeing you know can I send someone a link to like an eviction the eviction page on Florida Law Help and so my friends essentially it works and I've been sending my friends weird Florida Law Help link SMS text messages and they've just been like what what is going on but now now they're used to it and that the pretty exciting part is that it it actually works and I would definitely ask you guys to download it if there's something that interests you and then just play around with it in your office there's you could use it for communications with your with like your staff you could use it if you wanted to do a little pilot know your rights pilot SMS program where maybe you wanted to get people's phone numbers and send them particular resources at different times there's a there's a way to schedule these obviously when we want to send information to our clients there's there's more protections that need to be put in place as far as like their telephone numbers and making them aware that they would be receiving this and that it wouldn't necessarily say this is from the you know this legal aid organization is it's cloud.com which is a service but it definitely works and it's something that that I'm going to explore and I'm happy to report back on on what happens with Florida in the months to come so that's cloud.com SMS add-on the other add-on is and this one people may have been using already but it's it's a you can add on the translate feature and then be able to instead of going to the the google translate page just be able to do all of the translation within the google doc the translations are inputted immediately there's a way for you to to select for the translations to be input onto the google doc this is all in one dashboard and then you can go ahead and it makes it just the tweaking and the the changes in the review that need to be made to google translate translations it's done it's it's helped me to do it a lot faster and a lot easier with uh with this google translate feature that just helps to input the translations and then I can just kind of review them and make edits and then yeah that was it excellent let's move on to rice hey guys i'm rice flexner from the dc bar pro bono center um and my tips are a lot more abstract what everyone else has been sharing um so bear with me a little bit um first of all when you are considering a project um the planning stage is very important because you need to get all of your needs and wants out on the table beforehand and what i mean by that is that you have your needs which are the core functionalities that your project needs to serve um but don't just stop there because a lot of times people aren't ambitious enough with their original plan for their project because you know the startup cost of a project and putting in all the resources to starting it a lot of times it's one of the biggest expenditures just getting the whole thing moving and so you also want to identify your wants and your ideals and any cool thing that you could possibly think of that might make your life easier or might make your tool better um and the reason for that is once you get your core functionality down um it might turn out that implementing one of these extra features actually is really cheap or is really fast or ends up being much more important than you thought and it actually wasn't just a want it was actually a need and it would have been something that had you not thought of it beforehand now would have to be integrated backwards into this big system that you've already mostly built which is very inefficient and a huge pain other way um and then the counterpoint to that though is don't over build things um talk to the people who are actually going to be using your program and once you have a prototype and once they've started to test it if there's anything that they that they feel just isn't necessary or doesn't really help them don't be afraid to kind of undo some of the hard work that you've done and just cut it um don't keep developing something and perfecting something that the actual users don't want or don't need um and a big reason for that is um going into the future that part of your project is going to have to be maintained it's might have the opportunity to break other parts of your project or make them less efficient um a lot of times if you have um say like you're even if you're just working on a website for instance if you have a link there that sounds like it does something that it doesn't do a lot of users will click that one link see it's not the thing they wanted and then just exit your website um and so you want to have as few kind of dead ends in your project as possible and one way that you can accomplish these things is to keep your projects very modular try to build different parts that do different things um keep all that together and make it so that those different parts interact with each other in a very standard way um that's going to make it a lot less painful to trim off a feature that you decide isn't worth developing anymore or to add on new features that um ended up being more important than you thought it would be and also going into the future if all these parts interact in the same standard way it's going to make it easier for future developers of your project to plug things into it um and another kind of key principle that kind of underpins all of what I've been saying is that iteration is the key um you want to constantly be making incremental steps and giving it to the people who are actually going to be using it or you know to team members or friends and family you can just bug them into looking at your stuff and seeing what they think of it um because really what it comes down to is a you don't know what's actually going to be helpful or most useful your users actually don't really know what's going to be helpful or useful until they start trying it um and a lot of times some small feature or something that was just kind of a throw away or even just like a tool that only the administrators thought they would use but that you left open in the beta end up like becoming a core part of the project and can shape the future of where the project's going um and another advantage of iteration is you don't go too far before you figured out that you before you figure out that you've messed up um because you will make lots of mistakes when doing any sort of project um and the quicker that you can figure out what those mistakes are the better uh then finally this is very important document everything that you do um so all these things I've been talking about the needs and wants um how the different pieces interact with each other things that you have tried but ended up not working have some sort of standardized way to keep track of all of these because you're probably not going to be working on that project forever um if you have a contractor you might not hire them back again um then the future when you want to either change your project or improve it um or develop it in any way if you don't have really good documentation they're going to go down all the same dead ends you went down and they're going to have to reinvent reinvent the original vision of what the tool was supposed to do in the first place all right so that's all for me I only had five great great so I just um noted a couple things in the chat box but um there are some really good tools to assist with um some of these some I think that are really good best practices um I found the insta page and strikingly are two really good tools to help develop some minimal minimum viable products so to speak so you can just whip something up really quickly um and get a a web page that's up um online just to see how that would look and and you can use it to distribute it to users um there are also some really great um business Reese you talked a little bit about gathering business requirements there are some really helpful templates online um if you just do a quick google search um for for gathering that information um my personal favorite resource is closing it's a website called closing the gap or yeah closing the gap it's a business um or excuse me it's called bridging the gap it's a really great business um analysis uh tool resource it's a blog but they also do a lot of posts and have a lot of materials on that so great we'll go ahead and turn it over to Samantha hi there everyone this is Samantha Kyrkostas can everyone hear me and see my screen we sure can great so I am Samantha Kyrkostas I'm the development director at Illinois Legal Aid online and Illinois Legal Aid online uses technology to increase access to the legal system we make sure that people can make informed decisions and understand their legal options when they have to go to court on their own and we are actually in the process of completely tearing down and rebuilding our primary technology which is the website Illinois Legal Aid online and so some of my first tech tips that I'm going to share with you today are actually related to some of the rebuilding and some of the decision points that we've addressed and the the choices that we've made as we've moved forward to rebuild a resource that is more user centric hold on a sec and so the first thing that I want to share with you are user personas and many of you might use user personas they are representatives of the types of people who are coming and using your services we've actually got five user personas the two that I'm going to share with you here today are our public users so people who are coming to our website Illinois Legal Aid org to access information and we found through a lot of deep digging into our analytics and some user testing that we actually have two primary types of users one is a person in crisis and that's Christina and then the second is a motivated learner and what these have been really useful tools these have been really useful tools in order to make some decisions about how we're building things they have not only their goals and challenges listed there but we also see what operating system they're using and what browser they're using what type of access they have to a mobile phone and whether or not they are using it actively what their level of comfort is in using that device and this informs how we are building tools for mobile and for desktop and all of this is based on user testing and the next tool that I want to share with you is optimal workshop and this is a tool that our user experience team uses to test some of the new navigation resources that we've got on our site so this is a great tool if you want to figure out whether or not the navigation or decision or language that you're building is actually true to how users experience it so we create these tests and we send users through them to figure out if our way of thinking is the same as our primary user base so here for example is a task on one of our user tests an optimal workshop and it's a way that so the prompt is you want to learn about student loan forgiveness and our prompt to the tester is in which category would you search for this and then following they go through the top level navigation the second level navigation and then they find it there and the results are really valuable because they can show us if only 20% of the people actually clicked through to the correct spot and if it's split if 50% of people go through school and education and another 50% go through money and debt well then perhaps we need to build in on the back end something that allows for them to reach it from two places and so this next tool is called balsamic and it's something that we have used to start user testing from the very beginning one of the things that we have found so valuable as we're sort of building a new tool that's really based on who our users are is testing right from the onset and so we have you know even before there was a website or a prototype or anything we could go out into the street all we needed was balsamic which is free to download for nonprofits onto your hard desktop and we could go out for example and say here are two versions of a mock-up page in one place the buttons at the top for legal professionals in another place the buttons at the bottom and we can ask people on the street in the courts where it seems most accessible to them and then we're getting user data that is true and it can help inform our decisions in terms of how we design and build our site the next tool some of you may have used it's a web accessibility evaluation tool and it's a way to make sure that you are similar to the tools that will shared make it you are making your site as accessible as possible to all users and you can type in any this is our home page but you can type in any link and it will identify for you areas where there's perhaps missing alt text or one of the really interesting things that we found is that the link color that we chose for our new website actually was the contrast between the white background and the color of a link was not up to second level accessibility guidelines so it's a tool to sort of check your work to make sure that if there are folks consultants or contractors working for you that whatever you're building is meeting those same accessibility guidelines and this next tool I got from our technical director Gwen Daniels and this tool that she has been using quite a bit as we develop and build new pieces and modules to the new Illinois legal aid online and one of the cool things in Chrome is you can inspect an image or a site and you can change the CSS and then those changes are reflected in the browser so instead of actually having to go in and make those changes and push them into a dev environment you can see them temporarily so that you can make decisions more quickly when you are trying to figure out or if perhaps you're working with someone else and you want to show them a few options it's a quick tool to be able to build this next tool is another free-for-non-profits tool it's called New Relic and it's website performance it sort of a takes your site's blood pressure if you will it's kind of like a quick health check and what's cool about it is it shares with us what the user experience is like from from the standpoint of the from the actual website's perspective so not not as content or it's its flexibility but rather how quickly is a page loading are there any issues that can be addressed on the back end that will make the user's experience from their computer or from their mobile phone more will improve the experience so that they're not faced with sort of another barrier to the system Gwen our technical director gets this weekly email on Mondays and it's a chance for us to just see how things are doing and to identify any potential issues that we can go in and fix and again free-for-non-profits the next tool is canva so in addition to development I do a lot of our external communications and fundraising so a lot of these next tools are tools that I use when I am wearing my fundraising hat and communications hat so canva many of you might know is a great tool for folks who don't have any native design skills but need to attract need to create some attractive images on social media we all know that you know images get more hits and I wanted to create some images to go along with content that we were pushing out there so canva is a really simple tool to do that with and in fact I I created this quick little image here 50 tech tips and it took me about 90 seconds so if you are charged with creating some some images for a campaign and you don't necessarily have the in-house staff it's a great tool to build something that's attractive without spending a long time it's a great efficiency tool and the next tool is similar to one that Jen shared this is called genius scan and it's another one of those ways that you can use your phone as a scanner this I found really useful if I'm out in the field and I need to sign something and send over a version but I don't want it to look like it's a has a poor image so it improves the image quality and then allows you to send off to whomever you need to the necessary document and this is a iOS app I think Android too but I use it on an iPhone and it is a great really simple tool Hootsuite I'm sure many of you know about and use similar to tweet deck this is something that you can use to share share and schedule posts by multiple social media sites social social media channels so not only Twitter but LinkedIn and Facebook and others if you use them and the thing that I want to highlight here is how useful the tool can be in terms of creating less work for the following year so here you'll see this is our a sample of our past scheduled tweets from October 2015 and a great thing that I can do is go back to these tweets and reshare them oftentimes if you have an editorial calendar that highlights particular themes or holidays at different times of the year your content is pretty similar so it's a great sort of reminder that you can actually go back and retweet things and reschedule things so that you're making less work for yourself and then the last tool is another one that I use quite a bit which is ride sharing tools I think they are a complete lifesaver especially when you need to get quickly from place to place in my capacity as a fundraiser I plan a lot of events and oftentimes that requires transportation of a ton of materials whether it be you know some cases of wine or program books or or signage and sometimes it just doesn't make sense to bring a car into the city if you're working in a metropolitan area and these two tools are great for transporting people and materials without any real pain so those are my tech tips I will hang on for Jillian to pass the baton onto herself I guess so again my name is Jillian I'm the training and field support coordinator with pro bono net and I work with pro bono net sites on helping them to talk about how to maximize and get the most out of their sites and I also do some internal process improvement for our own organization and so my first tip is to ask people how they work not what they do I love asking this question when I'm out networking or socializing I find that instead of asking people what they do if you ask them or if you quickly ask them how they work after what they do it's a great way to get an understanding of how people think and what tools and processes they might use I actually got this tip from Lifehacker and I've gotten several tips as a result of that from speaking with people in marketing or business development it's as non-profits we often have to wear many hats and so I find that this is a really great tool my next tool is co-sketch and this is a multi-user online whiteboard that is designed to give you the ability to quickly visualize and share your images your ideas as images and I really like this tool give me just a moment I really like this tool because it allows you to really simply share so anything that you paint will show up for all other users in the room in real time and then it's just one click to save the sketch as an image for embedding on forums or blogs etc and it's also zero zero hassle it runs in all common browsers without plugins or installation and it's free and without registration so just to give you an example of how I use this I had a complicated concept I was working through working with one of my colleagues who's based in our New York office we were having a conversation about trying to map out a system for our new help desk and what that would look like and we were both having we're both visual learners and we're having trouble we were we were describing it but just wanted to make sure we were on the same page so I spun one of these up and we were just really easily able to map out our workflow really easily able to sketch something out so it's something that's a little bit easier than using like balsamic if you just need to get something on on the ground really quickly and my next one is makebeliefscomics.com this one is a little bit more fun but it allows you to create your own comic strip similar to creating memes I like to do this to do a shout out to a colleague send it around it's just a fun creative way to do that I also I'm not sure if anyone's use it on law help to describe concepts but I know that animations have been a popular thing and this this is a free tool to to jazz up your site and it's really easy I put this together in about 90 seconds and I hope you all enjoy the joke there and my next tool is g2crowd.com this is a great tool if you are asked to look into a tool that might be a good to compare different tools I often get a lot of questions from pro bono net from pro bono net admins on can you recommend a third-party survey tool or I had to do research recently on good help desk tools so I was comparing zen desk and other items so this has 86000 plus business software reviews and it provides pricing and product information along with side-by-side competitor information and user reviews I found that this is a pretty nice tool there is a paid version that you can that you can access as well and they do some of the comparison for you but if I'm just doing something that's first blush and I have gathered the users requirements what they need I'll go ahead and hop onto the site and do a quick comparison and I really like how they have the user reviews and the rating system and then the comparison I find it to be really helpful there's some other I should note there's some other software comparison tools but this one is just the it's very user friendly the next tool that I like to use is called my radar it is a mobile app that displays animated weather radar around your current location that allows you to quickly see what weather is coming your way all you have to do is start up the app and your location pops up with animated weather and then there's a standard pinch zoom capability which allows you to smoothly zoom and pan around the United States and see what the weather is like anywhere now it makes this tool different from other weather apps I'll just give you a little anecdote I'm a California raised girl was recently visiting some family in Michigan and had to drive from had to drive in the middle of a huge snowstorm and I realized I needed to drive back to the airport and wanted to get a sense of when the storm was coming in and this was the only tool that I could find that would give me up to date weather and so I was able to see along my route whether I had a storm coming my way or whether I was going to be clear I know a lot of you travel to for your your workout into areas so I find that this tool is really helpful and I will use this going forward whenever I'm doing business travel or driving or flying another business travel related tool I also love this for personal use as well it's airfarewatchdog.com it is a it's an email actually it's a site but you can also sign up for flight alerts that give you that send along right into your inbox airfare deals and money saving tips so this is I set up an alert from San Francisco to Lima this is not a business trip this would actually be a trip for fun but you can see here they send me an email that says this is the lowest rate within the next 30 days and I can also update my route and easily sign up for other alerts and I also just get really good tips from them just as a side note it's not in here but another one that I like is called Hopper it is an app that you can access and it will show you it will give you a sense of whether to wait to buy a flight or whether you should actually hop on and that's a pretty good deal and you should buy it right away and my next tip is the LS and TAP survey bank I'm all about not recreating the wheel and this is a great tool to help you do that there it gives you access to surveys that have been used specifically in the legal tech community before so recently at pro bono net we wanted to do spin up a user survey an end user survey and so we looked here at the survey bank sometimes creating questions is more of an art than a science and so I referred to this site for some good ideas and then I also and my other tip is writeclearly.org I should note that this has been developed by the legal tech community writeclearly.org is where you can find resources to create plain language legal documents online and it provides access to a library of plain language documents in their plain language library as well as a tool to analyze the reading level of web pages and suggest improvements for readability and it also has a tool to help define complex legal terms on your website which was it's called readclearly it was developed by open advocate so I strongly encourage you to check that out especially for those of you who are creating client-facing websites and then my next tip actually you can the next few tips build on one another but I will I will get to that shortly so the this tip is feed rents and I personally love rss feeds I knowing that we're in the access to justice tech world there's I feel like there's so many intersections and so many different pieces of news that I could be following along tech along what's going on in the access to justice world around working and productivity and because I strongly believe that information is power I love to be able to stay on top of information but sometimes that can be really complicated so I've personally been interested in how you can make it as easy as possible for yourself to stay on top of as much information as possible so this is the first tool that helps kind of achieve that goal and feed rents is an easy tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content or rss feeds that you aren't interested in and it's essentially like a spam filter for your rss subscriptions I I really like to use this it's a free tool and you can import feeds I don't think there's a limit on this and then you can set up your filters and enjoy enjoy your feeds the next one is rss mix so this one it actually allows you to aggregate all of your feeds so you can mix any number of feeds together to display a number of stories in one feed I also like feedly it's a great rss feed reader to do this it allows you to put as many feeds together it actually allows you to filter out feeds as well but where it's it's a little where I like to combine feed feedly excuse me feed mix or rss mix and feed rents is then porting it in to blogtrotter once you've got all of your feeds because that essentially is a nifty tool that delivers updates from all of your favorite rss feeds right into your inbox which gives you the ability and the flexibility to stay updated while on the go so when you're using these three tools together rss mix feed rents and blogtrotter you basically get all of the feeds that you would want without the information that you don't want right into your admin and right into your email and then the final piece of that is and actually the last the last the last tip that I have and it's actually our 51st 50 first tip we threw in a bonus tip for you all this year is legal tech rss feeds there is a lot of content online where you can grab legal tech rss feeds and either place them on your own website or into an rss either feedreader like feedly or through feed rents or feed mix pro bononets on the news and calendar tool on our site just as an example for on all of our news and calendar tools we offer an rss capability so you can just go and grab grab the content here and pull in all of these all of the information that's coming in through the news tool and then basically get that right into your inbox so it's a great way to stay on top of information it does take a little bit of time to configure all of this to the way that you want it but it's definitely worth it I've done this for myself personally to follow to follow and stay on top of news and then also done this for our communications team as well and then this is actually how we populate our news is we follow a lot of rss feeds to get that information up to date so that brings us to the end of the webinar I wanted to do a special shout out to our presenters thank you so much also to our attendees