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Welcome to TechSoup Talks.
Today's webinar is Online Collaboration Tools. My name is Kami Griffiths.
And I would like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series.
Today's presenters are Jon Warnow, Jay Boren, and Ronald Ho.
But before I introduce the speakers, I'd like to tell you a little bit about TechSoup.
TechSoup global is working towards a day when every nonprofit and social benefit organization
on the planet has the technology, resources, and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential.
We are mainly known for our product donation program which redistributes hardware
and software donations from corporate partners. We have hundreds of articles
in our Learning Center, along with information about free downloads.
Our Community Forum is where place where you can post your technology related questions
and have them answered by dedicated forum hosts and volunteers.
And our TechSoup for Libraries program provides information specifically for libraries
and public computer centers. So if you would like to stay on top of everything we are doing
here at TechSoup check out right here, subscribe to TechSoup.
And there is a couple of newsletters there that you can subscribe to.
We have a brand-new Digital Catalog which is a good introduction for new users of TechSoup.
It is interactive, easy to share, and accessible, and highlights our 41 donor partners,
and is organized around technology solutions. So if you get a chance to check that out,
there is a link to our Digital Catalog on our homepage right here.
Our donor partners make our donation program possible so that we can jointly serve
the needs of the nonprofit community. Some partners are able to donate their products
while others lower their fees significantly. We'd like to thank all of our donor partners
for their generous contributions.
Lastly, I'd like to highlight the work of TechSoup Global. We currently operate donation programs
in 33 countries. And in total we have provided approximately 4.9 million
donated technology products since our program started around the world.
Now, I would like to introduce today's speakers. And so Jon, I'd like to get you started.
Jon, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization?
Jon: Sure thing. My name is Jon Warnow, in my organization is 350.org.
350 is an international organization dedicated to building a global movement
to solve the climate crisis. And our Mission is to inspire the world
to rise to this massive civilization scale challenge which is a bit of a tall order.
And our main way of working is by empowering a global network of people all over the world,
young and old, rich and poor, to put pressure on our political leaders.
Kami: Great, thanks Jon. And we are going to hear a bunch more about 350.
So I wanted to have Jay introduce himself quick.
So Jay, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Google?
Jay: Absolutely. My name is Jay Boren, and I work with Google.org
which is the the philanthropic arm of Google Inc. My role is primarily focused
around charitable giving and nonprofit outreach. One thing of note may be that for those of you
who are interested, I write a monthly newsletter for the nonprofit community
highlighting new feature updates Google products and other things of note.
You can sign up at Google.com/nonprofits.
Kami: Great, and I will include information about that in our postevent message that I send out.
And Ronald, could you please introduce yourself and tell us about what you do a Google?
Ronald: Sure, thank you. My name is Ronald Ho and I am a product manager at Google.
I work in Google Docs and Sites team specifically focused on Google spreadsheets
and mobile documents, so all of our mobile tools for accessing your docs.
I'm pretty excited to be here and great see how Docs and Sites
really transform the nonprofit world.
Kami: Thank you, Ronald. And again, I am Kami Griffiths. I'm the training and outreach manager
here at TechSoup. And I would like to thank Becky Wiegand my coworker for answering questions
on the chat as well as Leslie Hall from Salsa Labs who will be answering questions
related to that product when we talk about that in a few minutes.
Without further ado, the agenda for the next 50 minutes or so we'll first start talking about 350.org
and the tools that they are using. We will spend some time looking at Google Apps,
digging in deeper looking at Google Docs and Calendars, and getting a live demo,
and then wrapping it up with more about 350.org and how they are using Google Apps,
and end with about 15 minutes of Q&A.
So with that, Jon, can you please tell us more about 350.org?
Jon: Absolutely. As I said, we are an international organization.
And to sort of get the obvious question out of the way first, what is '350'?
350 is named after the goal of reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere from the current level of 390 PPM back down to below 350
which is what leading climate scientists say is the safe upper limit. It is a bit of a odd name
for an organization. It's a fairly arcane scientific target, but 350 has the virtue of being a number
which means it transcends language barriers, and it is sort of just mysterious enough
to draw people and learn more about what we do.
So we started the 350.org about 3 years ago. And when I say we, I mean me and 6 friends
from college along with Bill McKibben, this guy on the left. He is an author who wrote the first book
about global warming for a general audience. And me and this team of people on the right
had been working together for a couple years, but saw a very urgent need
for large-scale global collaboration on this issue. So we went ahead and launched 350.org.
The important thing though is that our strength as an organization
doesn't really come from these people on this slide,
some of whom are living in the United States. But it really comes from people all over the world.
Everything we do at 350.org is global. And hundreds of thousands of supporters,
and volunteers in every corner of the planet power our organization.
Last year we organized what we called "An International Day of Climate Action"
which had over 5200 off-line events, rallies, teach-in, concerts, lobbying sessions
on a single day. And it happened in 181 different countries
which is pretty much all the countries that there are.
This year we are actually doing a similar date of events with a focus on
actually implementing climate solutions, rolling up our sleeves and getting to work on solar panels,
community gardens, and wind turbines. At the same time
we will be strategically asserting pressure on political leaders.
So to pull off all of these big large-scale global events,
we have a somewhat unconventional structure. We have a core team of 7 here in the middle.
And we have some regional coordinators who work with that core team.
And then this big orange circle on the outside is the most important part.
Those are our volunteer organizers who actually do the hard work
of outreach and education in their communities.
And to operate like this in such a distributed way, I am here in Oakland.
I have colleagues in Mexico, in Spain, in Washington DC, in Northern Africa.
To operate in this distributed way, we rely on set of tools that we harness
to catalyze this wide variety of off-line events. And when we look at tools
we look at tools that can enable us to collaborate closely, to work remotely,
and to stay productive even while we are traveling all over the world.
Basically, we have to have our entire organizational infrastructure sort of in the cloud.
So in order to do that we rely on these tools listed here on the screen.
We have Skype, Salsa, Flickr, Dropbox, and Drupal
which is the system that powers our own website.
In addition to these 4, we of course rely heavily on the Google Apps Suite for nonprofits
which Jay and Ronald will speak to more thoroughly. For registered nonprofits
with 501(c)(3) status, Google Apps provides amazing ways to manage
your organization's communication, planning, and collaboration.
I basically spend my entire day living with in a sort of virtual Google house.
But I will leave Jay and Ronald to talk about that.
I will just dive into Skype. Skype is sort of the always on lifeline for our core team.
It keeps us together and connected even when we are thousands of miles apart.
Skype's main claim defame is a low-cost virtual total phone system also known as VOIP,
voice over IP. But it does a lot more than that too.
These low-cost calls are great. I work with people in remote Pacific Islands,
and with Skype I can have video calls with them for just pennies a minute.
But you can also do a lot more. Over here we have me chatting with someone.
We can also transfer files, and just the ability to sort of have this face-to-face connection
even when we are far apart really does enable us to work closely
and get things done, even in a distributed system.
The other thing about Skype is that by having it sort of always on,
it greatly reduces our team's clutter, the random e-mails, unnecessary meetings that you go to,
conference calls that take 20 e-mails just to set them up.
So Skype really helps us stay productive and stay efficient.
The next two I will touch upon briefly is Democracy in Action.
They are a company based in DC, and they provide what is called the Salsa platform.
And for cash strapped nonprofits looking for sort of an all-in-one constituent relationship manager,
Salsa is just a godsend.
In one package Salsa provides you with the ability to e-mail your supporters, to process donations,
to launch advocacy campaigns like petitions and letters to the editor,
and to organize distributed events, or just single one=-off local events.
There are lots of other competing tool sets out there Blue State Digital, Convio, lots more,
but in my opinion, I think Salsa remains the cheapest
and easiest way to have a lot of what you do organized under one roof.
I'll very briefly talk about Flickr. For us we rely on images in almost everything we do
to help us tell these evocative stories from all over the world.
And because of Flickr's API which is sort of a language that allows our website to talk to Flickr,
we were able to harness Flickr to basically organize over 25,000 photos
from all around the world, and get those out to media so that we could
land on various front pages of the New York Times, and BBC, and CNN and on and on.
So Flickr is very, very useful for us.
And lastly, I'll just mention Dropbox which is a fantastic tool that enables you to share files
and have redundant backup systems. This basically means that the files
that I store in my Dropbox folder — it's just another folder on my computer —
automatically get backed up. So for my team who often need to have multiple versions of files,
and backups, and share very large files, Dropbox is incredibly useful. And I will cut myself off there.
Kami: Great. We are going to keep it on that slide. I have a quick question before we move onto Jay.
So earlier you mentioned "in the cloud," and I'm sure lots of people
have heard of cloud computing. And this is the concept of all of your data
living online somewhere. So the catch would be, what if your staff doesn't have access
to the Internet? So can you tell us little bit about how you deal with that?
Jon: Sure. I guess I have a couple points on that front. Many of the tools that we do use
provide backup or off-line options. Dropbox, the one I just mentioned,
has all of your files stored locally as well as stored up in the cloud.
Gmail which our entire team runs on provides off-line e-mail which allows you
to process mail off-line, and then when you go back online you can send and receive e-mail.
Google Docs which we are about to dive into, also I think had off-line functionality until recently,
and is about to resurrect it shortly. So there are a lot of systems
that enable you to work off-line and online.
The other point that I will make is that while not having Internet access
does make things a bit more difficult for my team, we are now able to do so much
with mobile computing. So even if I don't have full Internet access on my laptop,
I can do things on my phone that you couldn't have done even just a couple of years ago.
I sent out an e-mail to a quarter million people last week by pressing a button on my iPhone.
So there really are a lot of possibilities even if you don't have a solid Internet connection.
That is not to discount some of the difficulties that you do inevitably encounter
when you do so much of your work using online tools.
Kami: Great, thank you so much. Now we are going to jump over to Jay,
and he is going to tell us about Google Apps.
Jay: Hi there. Great, so I am going to give a very high level overview of the Google Apps Suite,
so apologies to those of you who are already very familiar with this.
But basically what Google Apps refers to is this suite of tools listed on the right-hand side here.
So you may be familiar with these as independent Google products,
but in fact they all work together in conjunction.
When we refer to them as a group we call them Google Apps.
Now at the core of Google Apps is this idea of easy and real-time collaboration.
We hope that by using these tools you will free up more of your time to be able to do the things
you need to do to run your organization, and not have to face the frustration
of sending revisions back and forth and missing each other,
turning in for the night sort of situations. And we will get into that a little bit later.
Now what Google Apps will also do is sort of run the back end of your organization in the cloud.
So it provides a white label solution for you to have your e-mail address,
and your shared documents, and your shared sites, and calendars, and groups,
and Google Chat, and video chat, and all these things running in the cloud
so you don't have to have servers taking up space in your office hosting all this information.
And it is available to you anywhere you have an Internet connection.
And of course, the best part is it's all free for nonprofit organizations
with less than 3000 members. And for those larger organizations
with more than 3000 members, or employees I should say, we provide a deep discount.
So here is sort of a slide outlining maybe why Google came around to the idea of Google Apps
in the first place, and that was a frustration with business as usual,
knowing that to get a simple document shared and revised with people
you face a situation like this. I'm sure this looks very familiar.
You share it with 4 editors. 3 of them are very prompt and get back to you.
You assume the 4th one has dropped off, or is busy, or has no feedback to give.
You continue along with your revisions and then boom, right when you think you are done
somebody who is working on an antiquated version of that document gets back to you
with input that may be valuable, but is now a bit too late.
So what's the solution? The solution is a set of tools that allows real-time collaboration,
so that nobody is ever left behind because they missed a revision, or were dropped off an e-mail,
or anything like that. And in addition to e-mail, real-time collaboration applies
to all of our products whether that is calendars that are updated in real-time
and shared across your domain, or Google Sites which allow you to organize information
either internally or externally, and in addition to Gmail, and Docs, and Spreadsheets
which we will be diving into a little bit deeper.
Gmail I'm going to gloss over, but I just want to clear up a common misconception
which is that if you want to run or host your organization's e-mail using the Gmail back end,
you would have to have an "@Gmail.com" address, or it would somehow
be less professional than other enterprise solutions.
In fact, if you sign up for Google Apps for nonprofits
and your organization starts to use this suite of tools,
you will maintain your "@YourOrganization.org" e-mail address, and the back end
will be handled by Google's infrastructure in the cloud.
So moving on to Google Docs, Ronald is going to dive into this deeper as well,
but I just want to give a high level overview of some of my favorite features.
A big one is the ability to upload and save to and from your desktop,
so although Google Apps is a cloud based service, we recognize that everybody
is making the transition from a desktop based system. So if you have 1000 documents saved
on your desktop PC you can easily bulk upload those into Google Docs,
and then share them with the people you wish to have them shared with.
So we are doing everything we can to make it easy for people to make that transition.
And it also provides a great backup solution. If you are still operating with your documents
on your desktop and you want to maintain that, you can also bulk upload them
into your Google Docs folders so you can share and find them anywhere
you have an Internet connection, but you can also just use them there
as a backup or storage solution for the time being.
So this is a theme we are going to keep coming back to, "at any time from anywhere."
So Google Docs allows you, and the Google Apps Suite in general allows you
to move away from this concept of the PC, the personal computer
where you are physically tethered to your machine because all of your files
and all of your information lives there. And if your hard drive crashes or your computer gets stolen,
you are in a tough spot. With Google Apps your information lives on the cloud.
And you can set controls so that you control exactly who has the ability to see
or edit this information in conjunction with you, but it also gives you the ability
to edit anywhere you have an Internet connection, to access your files anywhere.
Whether you are in Oakland or Moriches it doesn't matter
as long as there is an Internet connection.
And as Jon mentioned, we also provide off-line features. So to take the Moriches example,
if you are there and there is a really good hot spot near your hotel,
you can get all the information you need, cache it in your off-line settings,
and then access it from the field.
Picking who can access your documents is a big feature as well.
So the privacy and sharing settings are totally customizable for every document, every site,
every spreadsheet, so that you choose exactly who can see these,
exactly who can edit them, and exactly who can't.
This is something we alluded to already. I'm going to keep going, but sharing changes in real-time
is important. And when we say real-time, we really mean it. When you are in a document,
or a spreadsheet, or editing a site, when somebody makes changes
it appears on your screen no matter where you are or how many people
are editing this document at the same time. So you really don't have to worry
about missing changes or different revisions.
Files are stored securely online. I already mentioned this, and it is an important point for us.
We take online security very seriously. And also, like all of these products it is free
which we know is very important for nonprofits and for profits alike
that by freeing up both your time and your budget to do other things,
it will allow your organization to grow in great ways. That is our hope at least.
Moving on to Google Spreadsheets, again, real-time features here, so it's not just documents
that allow you to do this. Even in spreadsheets you can be updating both text, formulas, layouts,
visualizations, anything that you are doing can be seen by your coeditors.
Visualize your data and analyze it with built-in features, so for those of you
who are used to Excel, Google Spreadsheets is quickly building out new features.
And the great thing about the Google Apps Suite is that it is a living set of services.
So you don't get version 1.0 Google Apps. You don't get version 2.00 of Google Apps.
By becoming a Google Apps customer, you sign on to receive all of the updates
that become available when they become available.
And that is a great part about having this cloud based solution
rather than having software sitting on your desktop that you have to update.
So Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, all of these tools are getting better all the time.
Another easy plug for me here to sign up for the Google for Nonprofits newsletter,
because we do our best to keep track of these updates as they become available.
And those we feel are most relevant for the nonprofit community,
we will tell you about at the beginning of each month.
Collecting and utilize responses from forms, this for me is a huge feature.
So you are able not only to create spreadsheets that you are maintaining,
or your coeditors are maintaining, but you can create a form that lives
either internally or externally, and solicit responses from your target demographic.
And all of those responses are going to be captured in Google Spreadsheets in one place
with a timestamp, and the person's name if you choose to ask it, and any sort of information
you want to collect from them will all be there and be shared with the people
you want it shared with. And from my conversations with nonprofit organizations,
I've found that this is one of the most useful features of Google Spreadsheets.
Shared calendars, for me at least, I don't know how I could operate without these.
By having calendars shared within your organization in real-time,
not only people but shared resources can be assigned a calendar.
So if you are looking to set up a meeting with 4 of your coworkers,
and say all 4 of them are in different locations and you need to book a room for each one of them,
being able to do that in calendars knowing all that information is up to date is a huge time savings.
And it frees up not only time, but frustration for people trying to find one another,
but narrowly missing, or finding out the calendars aren't up to date, or having to send 100 e-mails
back and forth to figure out what people's schedules are.
And like all the features of the Google Apps Suite, you can set privacy controls
to determine who sees your calendar information, and who sees either exactly what you're doing,
or that you're busy, or just no access at all. So that is fully customizable as well.
Moving on to Google Sites, I'm going to give a brief overview of these.
Ronald is going to dive into this a bit deeper. I don't know if it is fair to say
the most underutilized, but maybe the most under appreciated part of the Google Apps Suite,
and I find it to be by far one of the most useful.
So what Google Sites allows you to do is create sites either using templates or free-form
if you know HTML, or just enjoy working in that, and embed gadgets easily. So it's not just text.
It's videos. It's Google Spreadsheets. It's Google Docs. It's forms. It's all these things.
It's not only Picassa, but Flickr. It's all these different things that you can embed
in your website to create a pretty rich immersive experience.
And this can be true either for external websites if organizations are just getting set u
with their web presence, or want to save money without hiring a web developer,
but more often than that it is used internally for organizations
to collect all of their information in one place.
So I use Google Sites most frequently for project management to keep track of
all the different information and projects I'm working on. Whether it is running notes,
or team members, or current information, or docs and spreadsheets, you can keep it all organized
in one site, and all linked and easily accessible for all your different team members.
And again, choose who has access. So if it's a confidential project
and you only want your team members to see that information,
it only takes a click or 2 to do that.
So again, share information on a secure company intranet, also collaborating on projects,
and planning meetings and activities. So if you have a big volunteer event,
or a big fundraiser coming up, being able to point everybody to one website
where all the information lives, rather than trying to maintain a bunch of different e-mail threads,
and keeping track of 100 different links to all the documents and relevant information,
being able to put that all in place at one site. And as you might be able to see in this photo,
doing things simple things like embedding a calendar on your site, or keeping a ticker,
a count down of how long you have to accomplish your goals
can be really, really useful. At least I find it to be so.
And most importantly, and something Ronald can definitely talk more about
is the ability to get this all on the go. We are very focused on making all of this information
accessible and useful on your mobile device, whether it is Android, or Apple, or Symbian
or anything else. If you are using a mobile device and Google Apps,
you don't need to worry that things won't be compatible,
or just because you are away from your desktop computer
you won't have access to that information.
So sorry for going so quickly. I hope that was helpful for some people.
And I'm going to turn it over to Ronald.
Ronald: Okay, I think I've shared my desktop. Can everyone see this?
I don't want to speed through this, so I am going to just pick and choose.
I usually speak on this topic for about an hour, and I have about 10 minutes now,
so let's get started.
So this is a document. This is Google Docs. We rolled out a new editor a few months ago.
And what I really want to show off is the sharing and real-time collaboration of documents.
Because let's face it, documents as you see it right now is not interesting.
You've seen this in like Open Office. You've seen this in Notepad.
You've seen this in Word. I am entering text. That is not that big of a deal.
But what is the most exciting part is the "Share" button right here.
When sharing it you can say this document is currently private,
and let's say I want to share with my personal account. And once I hit share
I can put in a message that says "hi." Hit Share, and now I can also change the visibility
of this document. If I want everyone on the web to see this document,
or if I say only certain people with a link, or it's only private to the people I send it to.
So we have a very, very strict controls on sharing that you can go through.
So let's see if I got this document here. In this document you will see
that the next time somebody opens — This is my personal account.
I'm opening up the document. So these are 2 separate accounts on the top and on the bottom.
And you can see as I am typing right now, — I'm trying to squeeze this into my screen here.
So the way real-time collaboration works here is as I'm typing, you can easily see the presence.
As you see right up here, and I am typing down here in my other account,
"hi there how are you doing?" And this happens nearly instantly all across the world,
because we have the infrastructure for distributing real-time collaboration across.
So hopefully this shows you the power of this.
So it's really amazing to watch a document literally come together
and grow right in front of your face when you are watching everybody build a document together.
So that is real-time collaboration. That is sharing.
On the spreadsheet side of things I want to show off a couple of key things.
Again, I have to pick and choose my favorite things here. I only have a few minutes left.
This button here, "Form." Go to Form, I'm going to say "create a form."
Now, give me about 15 seconds to create a form to collect T-shirt sizes.
So I'm going to say "T-shirt. Hey how are you doing," and sample Question,
I want your name for example. Send it to me in text. I want your T-shirt size.
And let's say it's a multiple-choice question, small, medium, large. So hit "Done."
And that's pretty much it right there. You've created a form in less than about 15 seconds.
I am going to now e-mail this form to — let's e-mail it back to this account here.
So you can see the integration that we have. I have just e-mailed this to myself.
Before I e-mail this, let's go back to the spreadsheet.
Remember, I started with a blank spreadsheet. Let'*** Spreadsheet.
Notice here in this spreadsheet Google has already populated the fields.
We know you are looking for a name. We know you are looking for a T-shirt.
It is already set for you. So let's see what this looks like in e-mail.
In e-mail, if you click on e-mail if you use Gmail, you get the form embedded directly in here.
Now I am going to try something here. I'm going to fill out this form.
"Ronald," and let's say I wear a large, and I'm going to hit "Submit." Now, before I hit "OK,"
I want to bring — whoops. Let'*** "Cancel" for now.
Before I want to do this, I want to show you this spreadsheet here.
I'm going to hit "Submit" here. I'm going to hit "OK."
As you noticed, my responses came in instantly. It is amazing when you send out a form,
and watch who will fill it in, and literally watch responses pour in.
And that is one of the really key things here.
Now the last thing I want to touch upon is Google Sites.
Jay was absolutely correct when he said, "Google Sites is one of our most underutilized things."
And folks don't really know about Google Sites whenever we ask them. So let's create a site.
So in my experience creating a site, there are 2 difficult parts in creating a site.
The first one is coming up with a name. And the second one is going through figuring out
this silly captcha here. So let's come up with a "sample site 1," and g-r-i — excuse me here.
I'm getting old. Here we go. Is that incorrect? Oh, name is already chosen.
Oh, gosh. I'm not very creative here. Let's try 45. I'm pretty sure there's not that one there.
Oh, alright, here we go.
So instantly I have a site up and running. If anyone that's online right now,
if you want to go and hit this link, you can access this site.
You can think of Google Sites as 2 different things. One, it is an instant website.
Two, it is a project management wiki type thing that Jay was talking about earlier,
absolutely right on point there.
Watch as I edit this. Think about putting up a website about 2 or 3 years ago.
If you wanted to put up a website, how would you do it? You'd have to hire a webmaster.
You'd have to learn HTML. You'd have to learn some javascript to make it look pretty.
But with this, all you have to do is know how to write an e-mail. If you can write an e-mail,
you can update this site. Watch as I hit "Edit page" right here.
I am going to type and say, "Hi how's everyone doing?" here. And I hit "Save."
Instantly my website is updated. Whoever hits this "sites.google.com/site/samplesite45"
whoever would hit that, you will get this site instantly updated with the latest content.
No more waiting for a webmaster. No more needing to find a webmaster.
You can put up your site yourself. We've got themes
so you can make your site look pretty with a click of a button.
And let's talk about internal websites. Of course, if you are an organization,
you sign up for Google Apps, you have the ability to make sites only accessible
within an organization, so only accessible within 350.org for example,
within Google.com, whatever your company is.
We also have the same extensive sharing that you are used to in documents.
You can share with certain people. You can make sure anyone in the world can view this site.
Or I can take off this check mark and nobody can view this site except for the people I say.
Now the last thing I want to touch upon is the power of sites when it comes to editing a page.
You saw me create that document earlier right? Sure, I can take that link to the document,
and I can drop in that link here, and anyone can click on it. So I'm going to take this link.
I'm going to pop it into here. And the next person who clicks on that link will get to the document.
But at Google, we thought you can get better than that, and you can get prettier.
So here in this "Insert" button, let's insert a document.
That same exact document you watched me open up right here —
I think I called it "sample document" — I can now embed this document
directly here. Let me hit "Save."
Once you hit Save, that same document you watched me create seconds ago, minutes ago,
is right here embedded into your website. Think about it. You can put proposals in here.
You can put anything you want. So if that's not interesting,
or you don't find that useful, think about this one.
Two more quick examples to show here. Hit "Edit." And watch as I really edit this.
It's really very, very seamless. So hit "Insert." And let's say you created a presentation
with our presentation editor. I didn't go through our presentation editor,
but it is the same real-time collaboration that you are used to with Google Docs.
Sorry, my Internet seems to have gone down here. It's back.
So a presentation that you created — there we go — I created this presentation for nonprofits
that I usually give. And once you say nonprofits etc., you can start with size.
Let's say make it medium-size. Watch as this presentation is directly — I just hit "Save" —
is directly embedded into my website.
Whenever you give a pitch, whenever you give a presentation,
you can directly embed it with only about 3 clicks of a button, directly into your Google site.
And folks can now go and click here and go across, and go through a presentation.
And you can kind of get a sneak peek at some other presentations I've given at this point.
Now, one more demo that hopefully will help you out.
Creating forms is great, right? Creating forms is great. Creating sites is even better.
But why can't we put those 2 together? Well, at Google Sites we said, hey, why not?
So if you go to Insert, you go to Spreadsheets, Forms. You go down to Forms.
You watched me create that T-shirts form minutes ago, right?
Watch me hit "Select" here. Hit Save. The spreadsheet form is here.
And I am going to hit Save again. Next time anyone hits the website
they can see the form directly embedded on the website.
Google sites can be your internal site, and can be your external facing site.
You can use it to collect sign-ups. You can use it to embed calendars, embed maps.
I didn't even talk about embedding calendars or maps. You can embed presentations,
embed documents, embed spreadsheets, and even embed forms.
It's a great way to kind of collect sign-ups in a one-stop shop.
I don't have time to talk about [indistinct] or anything,
but that is essentially the beauty of Google Sites here.
And just for those skeptics out there, let's show off a couple of real sites that are being used
out there. And these are all Google Sites that are slightly customized to look a lot better.
I clearly do not have UI skills to make the site look better.
But with a couple of clicks InRelief.org pulls in their — this is a Google Site you are looking at.
We have built-in search on this site. They can put up widgets like 29 days, 128 days etc.,
do count down widgets. They have blog widgets that pull in from their blogs.
They have feeds, that's feed readers that they've put in.
So InRelief is able to do this almost for free.
This is another site that is a highly customized Google Site, but all of this is within our options
for you to do. This is called Puddle Play. This is just a children's camp website.
This is it right here. And this is again, built on Google Sites as well.
And everything is there. You can easily add pages to Google Sites.
I didn't have a chance to do that. You can create a page, add pages to the sidebar,
all within clicks of a button.
So hopefully I've covered a bunch of things there. I apologize again for going through so quickly.
I've talked to Kami about doing a whole separate session about this, to talk more about this.
I would love to do that at some future time. Hopefully I can answer some questions later
if you have any specific questions. Thanks very much.
Kami: Wonderful. Thank you Ronald. That is a fantastic overview.
Yes, it went fast, but remember this is being recorded so you can go back and watch it,
and hit pause and think about it. But I am going to take Ronald up on that offer
of doing another session just to focus on one or a few of these tools.
But what I would like to do now is stop showing. Okay, there we go.
And move it back to Jon, and have him talk a little bit more about,
talk deeper about how he is using Google Apps specifically with 350.
And then we will hopefully have some good attendance for Q&A. So Jon?
Jon: So yeah, at 350.org we do rely on Google products pretty much day in and day out,
everything from Google Sites which we use for our internal wiki.
We use Google Docs to collaborate. We work on big e-mail blasts that we send out.
I really could go on for hours, and hours here, but I will just run through a few
of the more unique examples of what we do with Google products.
This first example is a demonstration of one of the interesting ways that we use Gmail.
Whenever you e-mail info at 350.org, or you respond to one of our general e-mail blasts,
it goes into a shared gigantic group inbox. And everyone on the 350.org team
has access to this inbox so we can all respond to the messages that are most appropriate
for a given team member. And this saves us a ton of time in terms of having to forward e-mails
to different people, or having multiple conversations that are redundant going on
in different silos. Since it's all in one big transparent inbox,
we can all work that much more efficiently and collaboratively.
Here in the screen shot you can see, that's me selecting my name from this big drop down menu
of everyone else on my team, because I was the one who was most appropriate
to answer this particular inquiry.
The next example demonstrates how we use the Google Maps API.
One of the great things about Google is that it not only enables you to use Google products
on the Google website, but it enables you to use them on your own website.
Ron demonstrated a number of the embedable widgets that are available to you.
And you can even take those things a step further and customize them a little bit.
So here on this page you see a map of over 1000 events that we are organizing
for this up coming day of action. And there is literally no way that we could organize
such large-scale events and operations without harnessing tools like this.
So Google is obviously most famous for its search functionality.
And one perk of having Google for nonprofits is that you can use Google's custom search
to search your own website free of charge, and free of advertising.
This means that people can easily use Google search on your site
to find exactly what they are looking for in just a few seconds,
or I guess .31 seconds to be precise.
And this last example is maybe a bit more advanced, but it shows how with a bit of work
you can use free tools like Google Spreadsheets for all sorts of things.
A little while ago we found that we needed a way for people to easily find the phone number
of their political leaders to make advocacy calls. And this should be easy, but it wasn't.
There was no sort of centralized database where people could easily find this stuff.
So one of our partner organizations developed what is known as their Google Gadget
which is a little box that you can embed in your website, and this Google Gadget
enables people to easily find the information, the phone numbers,
by selecting their country from drop down menu. And what is especially cool about this
is that the whole thing is powered by a Google Spreadsheet.
So if we need to update the information, say if the Prime Minister of Albania changes
his phone number, we can easily jump into that Google Spreadsheet, make an update,
and then when our Albanian supporters select Albania from the drop down menu
they get the updated phone number very easily.
So it's a pretty specific example, but I think it speaks to fact that the possibilities are endless
when it comes to harnessing these free or cheap tools for really efficient collaboration
in the 21st Century. So yeah, that's it for my end.
Kami: Wonderful. So much information so quickly.
I wanted to let you all know that we have some resources in the Power Point
that you received this morning. You will receive it this afternoon.
But these all link out to different training modules, videos,
other information specifically on Google Apps and Google Docs.
So what I'm going to do now is move to the question and answer part of this presentation.
And we've got several questions that have been submitted already.
So please, if you haven't yet submitted any questions that you have, do so via the chat box.
This first question will be for Jon and it has to do with training. A question from Mike,
I hope Jon will address how one goes about integrating all these various components
to make a coherent infrastructure. What kind of tech skills are needed?
So Jon, can you address that question?
John: Absolutely, and it's an excellent question.
Kami: Okay, so Jon has dropped from the line. He can answer that call,
or answer that question when he gets back in. So we will move to the next question
which will be related to Google. And some questions have to do with — Jessica's question,
what are the limitations with using Google for nonprofits for free versus cost?
Is it based on income or member use? So I guess I'll throw this to Jay.
Can you address that question? Let us know what the costs are involved,
and what some of the benefits are.
Jay: Yeah, absolutely. So currently the free version of Google Apps for nonprofits
is only available to US 501(c)(3) nonprofits with less than 3000 employees.
So we don't monitor the number of employees technically,
we monitor the number of people who will be using Google Apps.
So if you plan to switch more than 3000 people over to Google Apps,
then we give a discount of 40% to implement your instance of Google Apps,
but if you have less than 3000 people it is free.
For those organizations based outside of the US, there is a version of Google Apps
called the Standard Edition. And you can see all of these at the Apps Editions drop down
at Google.com/a, just the letter "A" to learn more about this and compare them.
But the Standard Edition is free for anyone with less than 50 users.
So if you have a small organization based outside of the US, you can still get Google Apps for free,
but you will just need to do it using the Standard Edition.
Kami:Now there is a question and I don't know who is better to speak to international nonprofits.
Any news on support for international nonprofits
in terms of getting an educational Google Apps account?
Jay: So I can take this one. This is Jay. We are actively pursuing the ways
to expand our nonprofit in-kind donations, among those Google Apps for Nonprofits,
Checkout for Nonprofits, Google Grants etc. And our Geo offerings, the Premier Edition
of Google Earth and the Maps API are available in a lot of different countries.
And those can be found by using your favorite search engine
and looking for Google Earth Outreach, or by visiting Google.com/nonprofits.
And Google Grants which is our name for Adwords Donations for Nonprofits
is also available in several different countries. Unfortunately Apps is only available to nonprofits
for free in the US at this time, but we are working on solutions to scale these offerings international.
Kami:This will be for Ronald, and it's an interesting question.
So what is the value of Skype over Google Apps? And we talked a little bit about Skype earlier .
It's got video conferencing. It's got file sharing and you can chat.
And I know there's a bunch more that Google Apps has to offer.
Ronald: It sounds great. That's a very interesting question. It's a very good question.
It's funny, Jay and I were just talking about this over chat ourselves actually.
I think the value of Google Video Chat and Google Docs and everything
is that it is one integrated system. You can share a file using the same sharing menu
through Google. When you upload at Google Docs, you can upload any file into Google Docs
actually, not just a document. I can upload a PDF for example, or even a Power Point file.
Anything I wanted to upload, a file that we don't have, you can upload it and share
and it is all the same sharing controls. So you can share it with a group of people.
You can share it with 1 or 2 persons, or make it accessible to everyone in the world,
make it a public document. So that's one thing.
So the other thing is that everyone in your organization if you want to video chat with them
would need to go get a Gmail account or a Google Apps account etc.
Skype I guess is made perhaps to be more prevalent around the world as just a chat tool.
So you may possibly be more likely to find somebody who would have a Skype account
more so than a Gmail account. So that is also another thought. At the end of the day,
it is all about which ever channel you are most familiar with.
With Google it is all about having it as one cohesive package.
I hope that answers the question. If it doesn't, I will be glad you take follow up questions.
There were a couple questions on chat that I didn't see get addressed.
I can answer those in like one-liners if you want Kami.
Kami: I'm going to move onto the question because Jon is back on the line,
and then I will call you up in a second. So Jon, if you could address that question
about integrating the various components?
Jon: Absolutely. and I don't know where I got cut off, so I apologize
if I am repeating myself to some of you.
Kami: We didn't hear anything.
Jon: Okay, great. It's a very good question, because especially after seeing this
whole presentation its an overwhelming amount of information on a number of tools.
What we do is have a short orientation with new team members
that basically just breaks down which tools we use for what purposes.
And we have a schematic, a diagram that demonstrates how the different tools integrate.
And people generally seem to get it pretty easily. Sometimes there is some initial confusion
about which tool to use for file transfer, sharing and things like that,
but people get up to speed fairly quickly.
We do also have the advantage that many of the people we work with around the world
are quite young, so they have maybe a natural fluency with this stuff.
But because these products, especially Google products are so user-friendly
we find that people are able to get up to speed quite quickly.
Kami: Great. Now, this question for Jay, we are having trouble switching
from paid to Nonprofit Edition. Different departments seem siloed.
What's the best way to go about this particularly if we have specific questions for customer service?
Jay: Sure. So if you are already using a paid version of Google Apps,
you can visit Google.com/A, go to Apps Edition, nonprofit, and there get started.
So if you click on Get Started it will take you to a place where you are supposed to register
your domain name. What you can do is click on the link below that which is either Group Members
start here, or Returning Users sign in here, and it says enter your domain name.
And there you should be able to easily switch over from the paid version
to get the Google Apps for EDU upgrade.
And there is a slight lag because they need to confirm 501(c)(3) status.
And once our team is able to do that they will be able to enable your account,
to get that apps free to you upgrade. Also if you are already a paying customer
you will have access to Google Apps support team, and you should be able to
contact your representative and ask them any questions about making the switch.
Kami: Thank you. And this one is for Ronald. And then also Ronald,
if you wanted to address one of the questions that you saw on the chat that you thought is relevant.
A question from someone in Second Life, they are interested in learning more
about the training modules and what they include.
Ronald: I was just about to chime in on that, fantastic.
We actually just launched the training modules for education for teachers.
And I think the education space and nonprofit space are the same where folks
are really starting to integrate technology into the core of their work
whether it is teaching or whether it's the nonprofit work that they do.
If you go online and go to EDUtraining.GoogleApps.com
and I guess I will pass this on to Kami later, that's EDUtraining.GoogleApps.com.
We actually put in over 600 pages of training modules where you can go through step-by-ste
of how to create a form for example, how to create a document,
how to collaborate with users, how to share properly, how to use Gmail.
It goes on and on. It's a very, very comprehensive training center.
And the teachers that have used this so far have had a lot of very positive things to say.
The only thing, the other thing is that we constantly are releasing features
and those features you can subscribe to our Google Docs blog or our Google Apps blog,
and you can search for those online, and we will be posting up new features there all the time.
A couple quick things, I saw a person named Richard mention
whether or not they could use their own custom domains for mapping to Google Sites; absolutely.
In Google Sites, if you go to share manage sites, you can change the see name properly
to point from your — like if I said Ronaldsorg.com or something, or .org, or .edu
could actually re-map to a site without the user even knowing they were going to a Google Site.
And the other one was about Google Spreadsheets and how you can share
only parts of it. We have a concept of publishing the spreadsheet
where under the share menu you have publish. You can publish out certain sheets
that you want shown and certain sheets that you don't want shown.
So if you've got some columns that you want to show on one sheet and some that you don't,
you can simply hide them and publish that sheet, or you can have them link to another sheet
and then publish only one sheet at a time. So there is a lot of flexibility there.
Kami: Thanks Ronald. I know there've been some questions about how do we get the newsletter,
and how do we get help setting up. So some of the things that Ronald just said
will help you getting set up, and we will include that link.
We will also include a link where you can get the newsletter that Jay mentioned earlier
in the postevent message that I'll send to you later this afternoon.
There are quite a few questions, confusion I think for people who might be brand-new to this idea,
like do I need to have a Gmail account to use these files, to use the Google Docs?
And when can I get some of the things that are offered on Google Apps
that I can't get as a Gmail user? So Jay, could you address that?
So if you want to get started, what you do?
Jay: Sure. I think it is going to be a bit different for everyone.
If by getting started you mean just learn more about what's out there and if Google Apps
is right for your organization, I would suggest visiting Google.com/nonprofits
and following the links for apps. Or also, if you want to dive a little bit deeper into the trainings
to see what's possible with the Google Apps Suite, to visit that link that Ronald mentioned
which we will send out in the post webinar briefing.
So in terms of support, part of the Education Edition of Google Apps which nonprofits receive,
the naming there is a bit confusing, so not 501(c)(3) nonprofits that apply for the nonprofit upgrade
are actually receiving what we call the Education Edition.
And that comes with full 24/7 support, so any issues that may arise with implementation
or ongoing issues or any bugs that you find, you will have access to our support team
who can help you address those issues.
Kami: So just to be clear if I wanted to use Google Docs
and I don't have a Gmail account, would I be able to use it?
Jay:I'm not sure about editing. I'd like to ask Ronald to chime in on that.
But anybody that can view Google Docs…
Ronald: You can definitely can edit anonymously. So we have the concept of anonymous view
and edit. So if I share a document out there, you have to set up the document
under the share settings to say, anyone in the world can view and edit
which is what I showed you earlier where it said public. You can say public for viewing,
or public for editing.
You have to be careful with these documents, because when you say public for editing,
it really means public for editing, so anyone can get in and edit.
So the best way to go of course for everyone is to sign up for a Google Apps account,
so you have a trusted set of folks that you have. I can't emphasize how important it is to sign u
for a Google Apps account, because then you can give out custom e-mail addresses
to everyone in your organization, and you own their account as the domain owner.
For example, if Jay and I worked in a company and we both had Gmail addresses
and Jay left the company, then I don't have all the documents that Jay use to own
and he has it in his own personal Gmail account. I have no control over those.
I can not say Jay, give me your password. But with a Google Apps account
Jay has an e-mail address that is within an organization. And when Jay leaves,
we still own that account. The organization still owns that account,
and they can go in and retrieve any documents, or kind of set up any filters
that they need to set up, whatever it is. So it's very, very important.
And also, if you assign user names for all of these folks in Google Apps,
in a Google Apps domain you can now verify who they are. And with Google forums
there is actually an option for domains that says automatically collect their user name.
So like everyone in your organization like all 3000 of them or more could be submitting to a forum,
and you can see exactly who has submitted to that forum without actually needing
to put in their name. So it's little perks like that that you have once you own those accounts.
Jay: And I'll chime in here to say that if you are pondering using Google Apps
for your organization, or maybe you need to get some buy in from other people
in order to make that switch for your whole organization, I would suggest
signing up for a free instance of the Standard Edition of Google Apps
in which you can have up to 50 users, and play around in there to see what it can do
and how it can work for you. And feel free to really push the limits there,
because you are not going to break Google's infrastructure.
And if you just sign up for the Standard Edition and your whole company isn't running on it,
but it allows you sort of a sandbox to figure out what is possible.
Kami: Wonderful. And with that we are going to wrap up the webinar.
I would like to thank the 3 presenters for all this great information.
And I hope the folks out there listening are walking away with more information,
and feeling not frightened but inspired to go check out the different products that Google has
as well as the different applications that Jon mentioned earlier.
I do apologize for the many, many of you who didn't get your questions answered,
but please post those to our community forums. And my coworker Becky
will send that short URL out to you via the chat.
We have a couple more webinars coming up in the next few weeks,
Social Media Decision Making on September 21, and Donor Management Solutions
on September 30. So watch out for those and when we have the registration ready
you can sign up for those.
So we would like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk
which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology
throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits in the US and Canada
reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration
through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services.
So thanks again everyone for participating. I hope you learned a lot.
And thanks again to the presenters. This is really, really great information.
And I apologize for making you cram an hour-long presentation into 10 min. Ronald,
but we will definitely be checking in with you again. So Jay, Jon, Ronald, thank you again,
and for the folks helping on the chat.
Have a wonderful day, and we will see you again on TechSoup Talks.
Bye-bye.