 Well, welcome everyone again. Thank you for joining us for this incredible webinar hosted by TechSoup. Today's webinar is about assessing your digital capabilities. Now, I know we talk about digital and we use words like technology, all those big fancy words, but really when it comes to your organization, we know that we have to use technology and learning your digital capability or digital readiness is very important. I'm Aretha Simons, I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I do wanna let you know this is being recorded and within about 48 hours, you'll receive the recording. So when you watch it, you'll be watching on YouTube. Make sure you hit that like button and subscribe if you have not already subscribed. Before I introduce our speaker, I want to highlight, this month is Cybersecurity Month and I know we have a month for this and a month for that, but really we know that security is very important and some things you cannot avoid or make foolproof, but you can make a difference. And so I wanted to highlight some of the courses that we have. You can sit down with your board of directors, your team, your volunteers and make sure that everyone takes proactive steps to safeguard your data from hackers. Again, this is for your board of directors, train your staff. I'll put those links in the chat room in a few moments. Everybody is on mute. Please use the chat area to type your questions or use the Q and A section at the end or maybe in the middle, McKenna might stop and answer some questions for you, but definitely at the end, we'll try to get to as many questions as possible. So without further ado, I want to introduce you to the beautiful McKenna vitamin. She's our program manager and over solutions and services and you're gonna be in for a treat. McKenna really knows her stuff. So McKenna, I'm turning it over to you. Thank you so much. Thanks, Aretha. So today, thank you again all for being here. We'll be talking a little bit about framing the digital transformation challenge that nonprofits face. We'll talk about TechSoup's digital transformation initiatives. We'll go into our framework and model as well as the digital assessment tool and then we'll open the floor up for questions at the end. As Aretha said, feel free to put the questions in chat. I'll try to get to them as we go through, but if I miss one, make sure to remind me at the end because I do want to make sure I get to all of them. So recent studies show that technology within the charity sector lags behind the private sector by at least five years and many nonprofit organizations are struggling to embed digital into their operating models. And there are many institutional and historical challenges that prevent digital adoption among nonprofit organizations. So there's a lack of IT expertise. Many small nonprofits just don't have the resources to be able to hire and fund IT staff as well as access to consultation can be difficult. Consultants can be expensive and there's not enough consultants available at the nonprofit price point to support all of the nonprofit organizations. The transition to software as a service has also been a challenge. Many nonprofits, because we're lagging behind the state of technology, rely on on-premise software. So things you download onto your computer and use. And as more and more software companies move to software as a service and cloud-based models, we're leaving a lot of the people who are using on-premise software behind. There's also the overhead myth where the success of nonprofit organizations is often based on how much funding is allocated to programs. This often leads to technology and other strategic investments being underfunded. Another big challenge is lead generation tools. So many of the digital capability assessments and tools that exist today are actually being used as lead gen tools to upsell a consultation or a service. So with all of these challenges, we need dramatic global transformation intervention to impact the digital capabilities of the nonprofit sector to enable it to deliver impact at the scale required to address critical issues. So the nonprofit sector has a ton of things we need to do, right? And we saw that exacerbated during the pandemic. We've also found that we're further away from meeting the 2030 UN sustainable development target than ever before. But there are fewer resources and funding for the nonprofit sector to do it. So 77% of nonprofits reported a lack of funding as their largest barrier to digital adoption. And 82% of nonprofits reported a negative impact on their ability to deliver programs in 2020 and we're just not prepared for it. So we're finding that 71% of nonprofits have a low digital maturity. 85% of nonprofits use manual data entry to report on their programs and 53% of nonprofit staff have a lack of digital skills and training. So let's talk about what we're doing over at TechSoup to start addressing some of these challenges. So before we get into any of the exciting things I want to talk about today, let's talk about what is digital transformation. So digital transformation is the process of determining and implementing policies, increasing staff capacity, and specific technology systems to allow organizations to deliver their services with a greater impact for the individuals they serve, as well as their own decision making processes to facilitate policy decisions in their communities. So basically what we're up to is working to increase nonprofit digital capabilities so we can do more of the mission with less staff, money, and time to increase impact. But as we talk about this, what is it exactly that we're transforming? It's not just technology. It's the intersection of technology, people, and process to be able to work together to create a higher impact. So technology adoption can't exist in its own. We need to transform how people interact with technology and the processes that exist within each organization to be able to use these tools most effectively. So how can we help transform nonprofits? Well, we have to start with your mission, right? The most important piece of everything we do. And then we help identify focus areas. So there's so many things going on with technology. It's hard to know where to start. So what should organizations prioritize? Where is a good first step? And then how do we assess urgent needs in these priority areas? And this last piece is recommending solutions based on these needs. So in a quick recap, nonprofit digital transformation enables nonprofits to do more with less while transforming people, process, and technology through a needs assessment in focus areas to provide recommendations and solutions to address identified needs. And so with all of this in mind, there are four core elements of the TechSoup digital transformation initiative. The first piece is the digital assessment framework. And we're going to take a deep dive into each of these four in a little bit. A digital assessment framework to assess current digital capability. The second piece is a digital capability model, which is a relevant global nonprofit digital capability model to ensure stages of capability. The third piece is the digital assessment tool, which is what I'm here to talk most with you about today. And the fourth piece is our marketplace of resources, which if you know TechSoup, you're probably familiar with a lot of these. So let's dive into the framework where we assess organizations current digital capabilities. So the digital transformation framework helps nonprofits align the development of their digital capabilities with their organization mission. So we start with mission and goals, connecting org mission to focus areas that an organization can prioritize. Then we jump into focus areas, which are six standard focus areas that is relevant to every nonprofit to assess and improve their digital capabilities. And the last piece is resources and tactics. So these are topics that help organizations understand how to plan for digital enablement and help us provide specific recommendations. And so if we drill down into that a little bit more, this framework really relies on six categories that represent TechSoup segmentation of organizational function as it relates to technology. So each category you see here has an intentional number of questions assigned to represent key topics of inquiry related to the utilization of technology and policy for impact. So if you take a look here, we'll see programs, fundraising, communications, operations, a category on security, which is timely for cybersecurity and infrastructure. And what you don't see in these six categories is all of the deeper pieces. So this provides not just a surface level overview, but really a comprehensive look at an organization's digital capabilities in each focus area. So we've identified 86 topics that have been reduced into 36 subcategories that come across our six functional areas. So if we're going to take a look at digital security, for example, it's not just, oh, it's antivirus software, but it's data privacy, device management, threat detection, threat protection, authentication and authorization. So it goes a little bit deeper than just what technology is being used. And now we'll jump into the digital capability model to measure stage of capability. So the digital capability model measures capability by assessing how people process are integrated into technology implementation into the organization. So for each of the six framework categories we just talked about, the capability model approach takes care in evaluating technology culture and skills training, which are our people components, our process components, which are organizational processes, our data systems, state of technology and technology approach, which all kind of go into our technology category. And this model helps nonprofits establish a baseline for current digital capabilities and serves as a way to measure improvements over time. So organizations will receive a rating for each assessment they complete. And an overall rating after all assessments have been completed. So if you take a look here, you'll see, well, things range from a stage from one to five, ad hoc to adaptive. And what's really great about this tool is that not everyone needs to be at F5 in every category. It's actually very common for organizations to come into this digital transformation initiative and be at ones or twos. It's really up to the organization. And because everything is curated to what you put into the tool, you'll be getting recommendations that are relevant to your organization. So from theory to practice, so the framework and the model are implemented in the digital assessment tool, which I'll show you in a moment, to assess organizations and all three aspects of people, process and technology, and provide relevant capability ratings and recommendations. So if you take a look at these screenshots I've added in here, we have each of our functional areas, operations, communications, fundraising and development. And you'll see that in this test account I used, we've scored a two in fundraising and development. So this translates into a functional level of digital capability. And if we drill down, we'll see that donor management is an important subcategory in fundraising and development. That's important for my test organization to develop and work on. So as you can see here, there are recommendations that are curated specifically from these entries. So there's articles, blog posts, hardware, software services. And now for the exciting part, the tool. So this is a tool that helps nonprofits identify digital capabilities through self-assessment and recommends resources tailored to enhanced organizations effectiveness in delivering their mission. And it's free. So as you can see here, we start with the assessment on those six categories, move into our stages of capability, which is our rating from ad hoc to adaptive 135. And then step three is our recommendations where we talk about our software, hardware courses, services, webinars, blogs, consultants, policies, things that can help your organization move from one stage of capability to the next. And we didn't just design this in tech soup alone. It's been a very large collaboration process with experts and partners from around the world to build a framework that's globally relevant. And the assessment questions and the tool that we created were iteratively tested by a cohort of 30 Bay Area organizations. They helped us with the maturity model, the framework, the user experience of the tool. So it's nonprofit tested and we're continuing to add improvements over time to make this more and more valuable to the nonprofits that we serve. So nonprofits can use the tool to assess needs, understand digital capability and get recommendations on how to improve. So that's just our base level. There's actually a ton of more ways in which we're thinking about how the tool we can use. So one component of this is understanding your digital capability to help target fundraising campaigns, to help talk and communicate with your stakeholders in a better way. There's a ton of different areas in which these insights can help your organization find different ways on how to improve. And we're going to talk about the digital assessment tool user journey and then I will flip over and show you the tool itself. So how this works is you start with an initial assessment, you gain an initial rating and you receive initial recommendations. Then there's a period of time where you're engaging with and adopting resources. And then you can take a reassessment to see where you're at now and the tool will give you new recommendations on how to continually improve and track your progress over time. So now I'm going to pop over and see. Aretha, can you see Welcome Sue? Yes, I can. All right, thank you. So this is a test organization that I've created to give you a demonstration. And how this will work is it starts with an introductory assessment. So I'll continue to the introductory assessment. This is the first step in an organization's path to digital transformation. This will give 20 questions about different areas of the organization. Progress is automatically saved so that you can take breaks, you can invite teammates to take over. Or if you want to work on it offline, you can also print a copy, work on it with your organization and input the questions at the end. So we'll come in here and I'll just show you a little bit about what this looks like. You're able to skip questions and come back to them later. So I'll come back to question five and see how does your organization manage its ongoing relationship with individual donors? So you'll see question options and they can sometimes be maybe difficult if you're not comfortable with technology to understand. So we've provided more details to really give you the context you need to make an informed decision to best represent where you're at. So I'm going to go in and just click a random one. We're going to pop over to the end. I'll give you a chance to review your answers before you submit. Submit Mrs. Sussman. And we can see our results. So from my test organization, it shows that we've scored a one, which is a ad hoc level, which means that we make reactive and isolated investments in people processing technology in order to meet critical needs. So I can come in here and I can see just a series of initial recommendations. Here's a software comparison, which we'll talk more about in a second. A webinar we can take a look at services that are relevant. And then what's really cool is we can come over to our dashboard. We can add goals so that everyone in our organization can see what our digital transformation goals are at this time. We can see an overall capability rating once all of the assessments are completed. As you can see here, these are our six categories from the framework. It gives you an estimate on how much time it usually takes to complete. So as we take a look, there's a recommendations dashboard where you can assign your recommendations to other colleagues, volunteers, staff. And you can see what's in progress, how many of the recommendations have been completed. You can also continue to add more people from your team. So you can see, hey, you know, maybe I'm a program person. But we do have a fundraising person on our team. So I can go in and invite someone from my organization to complete the assessment. So I've assigned this to Johnny. And I'll let Johnny take over the fundraising and development assessment. And I'll get notified when he completes. So this is just kind of a quick taste of what this tool looks like. I'm going to look in the chat and see if we have any questions. Yeah, so this is just the quick look. Once you complete all of the assessments, like I said, you'll get the overall rating. The more assessments you complete, the more fine tuned your recommendations will be. So if we come in. I know we just looked at this a moment ago. But if we click one for example, it'll say the length of an article. This is an article about donor management software, unless the major features of the products we offer. I'm assigned to this right now, but you know, maybe I think that Mona should take a look at this. So I'll assign that to Mona. So that'll be considered in progress until Mona completes. You can also, as an administrator, remind your teammates to complete something. That reminding feature works. For our dashboard, the assessments. We've really worked to make it as functional and as collaborative as possible. Yeah, so if we jump back to our presentation. So some of the notable tool features, which we talked about where the introductory assessment, which is going to give you a quick win. And give you an initial taste of all of our functional areas. The inviting colleagues feature helps promote or quite collaboration in this journey. The print capability helps provide for offline collaboration and consultation. You can also, if you're working remotely and you want to answer the questions together, hop on a video call and share your screen as you go through this. The organization dashboard helps keep everything in one place. So it helps tie your mission assessment score recommendations and keep track of assignments and who's working on what all together. There's also the software comparisons where organizations can compare features if more than one software has been recommended through the tool. So you can kind of see a screenshot of this here. This was added as based on feedback and requests from the first pilot organizations. Currently, this feature is dependent on information, which is available in the TechSoup catalog, which sometimes isn't enough. So we're working on refining these for the top software. The software comparisons can be more and more helpful over time. But basically the point of this is to help organizations more easily compare recommended software offers at Accordance. In our marketplaces of resources is really important for our recommendations. So we intend to bring the entire marketplace of resources that TechSoup provides nonprofits, as well as relevant resources that are not available in TechSoup as it exists today. We're already working on improving the resources that are available. This includes a library of nonprofit policies, improvements on software comparisons, a digital transformation learning track that's self-paced. So you can come in, work with the tool, and have added support as you go into each of these categories. We're also designing new services to help nonprofits plan their digital transformation. On top of these resources, we're also supporting cohorts of nonprofits through their digital transformation. Parts of this are in our digital resilience program. Other parts are with our TechSoup courses. Right now we're offering a 300 level course that's helping nonprofits learn more about each of these functional areas as they go through the tool in a cohort level to be able to share with other nonprofits who are working towards similar goals. So there's a lot of work to be done, and we're excited to be doing it. So let's get started. So Aretha will be sharing out the links to the tool in an email afterwards. I think she'll also be putting it in the chat box now. This tool launched just a little over a month ago after a few years of development and collaboration. So we're really excited for you all to be some of the initial people coming in and using the tool. That said, we know there's improvements to be made. So the best way for us to continue to improve the tool and make it more valuable to you is for you to try it out. Let us know what you think. You can contact us directly to assessment at techsoup.org. That's an alias that I'm managing with our other digital assessment tool team. So you can contact us directly. And we're excited to hear from you. There's also functionality built in the tool where you can provide feedback directly. So if you read a blog post and you're like, wow, this was a great blog post. This is something that I think other people might find useful. You can give it a thumbs up. You can add in a comment there to flag it for us. On the flip side, if there's something in here that you find is not useful or something that you just think might be wrong, we want to hear that too. And so you can also use the features in the tool to let us know that as well as contacting you directly. But yeah, so that is my, I know that was a lot of information, but that is a brief overview of what we've been working on with the digital transformation initiative. So we're excited to have you try it out. That was awesome, McKenna. A lot of information. I know there was a lot of great questions and I'm going to go to the questions that people put here to host the panelists before we go to the Q&A. From Joy, she said, how are the recommended resources added in the comparison list? Are they tailored towards nonprofits, tech suit preferred, et cetera? Yeah, so this is the initial iteration of our tool. This is version one. So right now the recommendations are manually inputted from our tech suit catalog. So right now we can only offer what we have in our catalog. As time goes on, we're looking to pull in external resources because we know there's so much out there that we just don't have at this point. So we're working on identifying additional resources to bring into the tool, making sure that we're really providing the best recommendations. And they will all be tailored towards nonprofits. We're not looking for things that are just generic. We're looking for really, how does this resource or recommendation support nonprofit digital transformation in this category? Great. And Karen asked, I'm in the process of putting together a budget to plan our digital transformation. Is there someone at TechSoup that can help with that? Yes. That is part of our services that we're designing to support the digital transformation initiative. Karen, if you want to email me at that same alias that we'll send out, I can get you connected with our service providers or our services team to help learn more about what you're looking for. Okay. Great. Thank you, Macken. Now to the Q&A. You were missing the framework earlier and Tom said, where can we find this resource to the framework? Yeah. So that is part of the tool. We are also turning it into additional resources and worksheets that people can use alongside the tool. So it'll soon be available. But Tom, if you want to email me, I can send you, send you a worksheet. Great. Kami said, we support two organizations, but have just one TechSoup account. Both organizations need their own TechSoup account to use this tool. That's a great question. Yeah, that is a great question, Kami. So right now the digital assessment tool is a separate login from your regular TechSoup accounts. So you can create separate accounts for this. Over time, we are considering finding a way to migrate it so that it's single sign-on. So there's less accounts that you have to remember. But at this time, we wanted to make it really open and available for consultants to come in and take a look at the tool for other people who are maybe not nonprofits, but work with nonprofits to come in and see how this framework and model can be used. To support the work that they're doing. So at this point, it shouldn't be a problem. And we can figure that out in the future when we get there. Great. Thanks, McKenna. Karen, does TechSoup offer help in developing a budget in order to fulfill our tech needs? Yeah. So that's something that I think one of our service providers can also help you with. That's kind of part of what TechSoup services is up to. As you know, digital transformation is in part an understanding of what your needs are, as well as determining how do we allocate resources or develop a budget to make these things happen to support these next steps. So we're at this point, we're actually working with the digital resiliency program as a pilot to figure out how we can use this tool in tandem with a budget development to support a digital transformation strategy. So if you want to follow up on email, Karen, we can talk more about this in depth. But it is something that we're working on developing. Okay, great. Thank you so much. So everyone that asks for the recording, the recording will be available within 48 hours. The PowerPoints will be on the recording. So you'll be able to review it on the recording. We'll send it via email. Let's see. Bert asks, what if you don't fundraise? Excuse me, Brent. Excuse me. What if you don't fundraise or is that relevant to your nonprofit? I guess during the assessment. Sorry. The fundraising part. Do you, I guess basically. If you, do you need to do the assessment? Is that relevant? If you don't do any fundraising. Yeah. So fundraising and development. Are kind of two separate things. So. I think it's up to you and your organization to take a look. There's also an option. I think it's up to you and your organization to take a look. There's also an option on every assessment to say. We don't do this. So some of the subcategories in that question portal might be relevant. And if they're not, you can say, we don't do this. And the algorithm and the tool will help adjust accordingly. Okay. This is a great question. Cammy, you have some great questions. Some nonprofits don't qualify for TechSoup, which we know. So they don't have TechSoup accounts. Can they still do the digital assessment? McKenna. Yes, they can. Okay. Great. Another note I want to add is. So this tool is launched. Initially in the United States. We're working right now to really globalize the tool. That doesn't mean that if you're not inside the U.S. You can't use it because you can't use it. But I just want to make the note that if you're outside of the U.S. at this time. We are using recommendations that are directly matched. U.S. TechSoup catalog. So you can still use it. You can still get the recommendations. But the recommendations might not have the same price points or might not be available through TechSoup in your country at this time. We're designing the plan to do this. Very quickly. We're already working on figuring out how to do that now. But I do want to note that. The capability in the framework. Those have all been developed in a global manner. And we're working on the recommendation piece now. Okay. Steve, this is so great. We could work on that. We were at the lowest level and now pretty sophisticated. Is the tool helpful for most technology? Excuse me. Technological sophisticated nonprofits. Yeah, that's a great question. Steve. Yes. And no. The tool was initially designed for nonprofits who. Have a small budget who might not be able to. Afford a major IT transformation all at once. That said. Technology is evolving rapidly over time. New things are coming out. And we're working on finding a way to continually update the tool. So that we're capturing the new trends in emerging technology. That's something that's going to be happening later on down the road. That said, Steve, if you want to take a look at this, it'd be real. I'd be really interested in hearing your feedback on the tool itself. Because this is something that we're considering as, as we develop further iterations. Yeah. So that was it for the Q&A. Very good. Some great questions. That's a great comments. Would you do me a favorite type in the chat room? One takeaway that you got from the webinar today. And I'm going to put our survey link in there. If you complete the survey, that would be great. Your one takeaway. I'll tell you mine. That when I saw the demonstration of this, this is not just a survey to find out about. Our nonprofit. This is a tool to use. To help us. Get better to see where we're weak to see where we're strong. Kind of like a SWAT analysis, if you will, but then we can use this as a part of our strategic plan. That's my takeaway. So type your takeaway in the chat room and, and you can send your thank yous to McKenna because this was fabulous. McKenna. A lot of thank yous from Karen. Everyone. Thank you so much. Tech suit rocks. Thank you, Lori. Thank you, Karen for saying that. Great. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. I love Karen. This is a comment on both. I found this helpful as a global reinforcement of what we are considering right now. Very good. Very good. We have to think about the future. We are, we're going for, right? Not going back and technology is not going anywhere. Just going to, just going to get new technology every year. Great. I enjoyed the top level. Look, yes. At the components needed for better digital. Yes. I love that. Love that. Yes. Awesome. Thank you very timely. Great. Thank you so much. Many of our staff need to be involved and make this a useful assessment and help us in the future. Very good Nancy. That's so true. Thank you so much. Well, thank you everybody. I'm going to, I think when you close it, the link will show up for the survey. Again, I'm going to drop the link for the survey in the chat room. Once again, the digital assessment tool was in there. We're going to email this to you within 48 hours. McKenna. You are the, I told you guys, I told you you were good. Thank you so much. Lots of great feedback. Have a great day. Everyone. Bye-bye.