Hi everyone. Welcome to our second webinar training for Give 828. We're going to get started in a minute. So if you're here, we'd love to know your name, the organization you're representing today. So just click the chat button and let us know who you are and who you're with and we'll get started in a minute. Thanks. I don't see a place. I'm not sure if the chat is disabled. I'm not seeing a place to change that. But if you do have questions, it looks like our Q&A is working. So if you have questions during our webinar, you can just send us through the Q&A button and we're going to jump right in. So thank you to everyone for joining us. Again, my name is Sarah. I'll be leading you through today's presentation. Just a quick housekeeping item to note. I want to let you know that the webinar is going to be recorded and it will be added to the nonprofit toolkit on the Give 828 site. If you have questions, it looks like chat might be working now. Yeah, just send us through any questions and Nema is joining us today with Young Black and Giving Back Institute and she'll be helping kind of answer those questions as they come through. So I am Sarah. I'm with Mighty Cause. We're the platform provider for Give 828. We're super excited to be here with you all again this year. We also have Nema joining us today. I'll pass it over to you Nema so you can give a nice welcome. Good afternoon. My name is Nema and I'm a program manager at the Young Black and Giving Back Institute. I work as the Give 828 coordinator, so I oversee all the major activities related to sponsorships, registration and promotion of the event. I'm a team and unfortunately most of us couldn't be here today, but I believe Denise or one of our interns is live-treating right now. So yeah, we're excited to be here. We've been seeing your registration forms coming in and it's looking like we're going to have an exciting campaign. So I'm excited to get into strategizing. So we'll get right into it. Here's a look at our agenda today. We are going to be going over some of the basics, kind of recapping what we talked about in the first agenda just a little bit, and then let you know what you should start thinking about as far as tasks to prepare for the event. We'll talk through just a bunch of different strategies for you to help you make your campaign a success. And then of course at the end we'll get to any remaining questions that we might have. One thing I want to mention, we just have a ton of strategy for you all today and I have to remind myself to take a breath and slow down while I'm talking because I get so excited about all this stuff.  So take notes, find things, make goals for your organization this year. If there's things that you haven't had time to work on in previous events, maybe this is the year that you want to try to tackle something new, whether it's peer to peer fundraising or finding a sponsor for your event this year, your organization this year. So kind of pick and choose different things you can work on and don't get overwhelmed by everything. But we're going to get started. I'm going to pass it back to you so you can cover the basics. Awesome. So I think most, most of you might be familiar with give a to eight by now if you have registered. If you have not, you can visit our website at www dot give a to a dot org. And you'll see some basic information about the event and what we've done in the past.  So it's designed to be a space for amplifying the work of black nonprofits, being nonprofits that primarily service or benefit black, black populations and that are led by black leaders. So this is supposed to be a space for us to find the donors and supporters that want to support our work, and it's exclusively black space. So we started in 2018 and this year marks our fifth year. We're excited because this year we'll have five days of giving will officially launch on August 28, but early giving starts on August 27. So from August 27 to August 31, we will be fundraising, and we'll get into the prizes later on. But yes, there's five days for the for five years of give a to eight in order to participate you do have to be registered. And you can go to the website and fill out the registration form is a $25 registration fee that you need to pay.  You will be, you'll be able to register. Awesome. Thank you. Alrighty, so next steps, once you are registered and approved to participate, you're going to wonder what to do next. Pretty much, you're going to want to start to really customize your organization profile. So if you haven't watched our first webinar getting started. That webinar really focused on all the nuts and bolts of really how to navigate the mighty cause platform. And this has a ton of getting started information on how to customize your profile and give it kind of a little refresher if it's if you're brand new, or if you participated last year, but you haven't checked out your page in a while. We're not going to repeat too much of that content here. So do check out that webinar. You can view it on demand. Whenever you have the time you can find it on the give 828 site underneath underneath the resources tab inside the nonprofit toolkit. So once you've done that step and your pages customized, you've kind of gone through and filled out, you're going to want to start to think about your communication strategies for the giving day. The different outlets that are available to you to reach your donors. You'll also want to really start to think about the goals you have your organization during the giving day, large goals, small goals, monetary, non monetary that type of thing. You'll also want to start thinking about securing matching grants to entice donors. And also start thinking about how to engage your community and your kind of family of supporters and ambassadors so that your organization can really reach as far as you can during the day of giving the five days of giving and kind of amp up like peer to peer fundraising and just all the different tools available to you.  And put some enthusiasm into your campaign because that's going to trickle into the feeling that you give donors as well, which is going to help them want to donate to your cause. So first this first like we mentioned you're definitely going to need to register your organization so I'll just plug this in right here. There's a quick form new participants you're going to want to fill out the eligibility questionnaire first. The give 828 team will notify you once you've been, once your eligibility is approved and then you can go ahead and register for the actual event through the registration form. If you previously participated and you still meet the terms of participation, you could go ahead and register directly on the form. Once you've registered, you can also access your organization profile. You'll be approved as an administrator so our ready come support team will go in and verify you as an admin for your organization. Once you're approved, you can start filling out your page and get started with all of the cool stuff available to you. I'll also show the toolkit resources that are available to you. There is a ton of resources. We have tips tricks FAQs walkthroughs support articles social media templates email templates. The give 828 team has done an awesome job creating these toolkits that you can download. You can also work laying the groundwork for drafts of emails so that you can kind of have a place to start so it's not going to be starting at the at zero so to speak. So definitely check out the toolkit and refer back to it as you plan your campaign. We also have a donor toolkit available to your fundraiser supporters donors under the resources tab. If you're a community of supporters and you want to direct them somewhere, send them to the give 828 site and they can access the donor toolkit. They can find out how to set up peer to peer campaigns and all that good stuff. We'll dive into rules and prices on a passive back team. So this year we have 14,500 in cash prizes. These prizes are 5,000 of them of $5,000 available for different nonprofits that register on the day and not specific. Doesn't matter where specifically you're based. And that will be available that is from the YB GB team. So that $5,000 will be available $1,000 per day over the five days of giving. And that's really important. If you are a registered organization that will be participating, but you might not meet the criteria that the different companies that I'm going to go through right now. But if you are participating, you're still eligible to get at least 5,000 in prizes over the five days. Now, if you are based in any of them, if you're based in the DMV area if you're based in Maryland if you're based in Virginia, or you're based in Washington DC. There's $5,000 available for organizations based in that area from our sponsors. If you are a nonprofit that's working in black reproductive maternal health, we have $3,500 available in prizes. And if you are a nonprofit that is based in one of the four counties in Florida, Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and DeSoto, we have $275 that will be an offline donation from one of our partners for each organization that registered. So these prizes, you know, they're available for organizations based on your how you, if you qualify for them, but just to note that there is $5,000 available, even if you don't meet the area based criteria or the issue based criteria that I just mentioned. So there's in total $14,500 available in cash prizes. Awesome. Thank you. Alrighty, so we're going to get into campaign strategy to really just talk about the trick to making the most out of your campaign. It's to have goals and to try to stick to sustaining your, your fundraising momentum through use of mini goals. Overall goals are really going to help your organization know what you want to get out of the giving day. These can be both monetary and non monetary goals. So you don't have to be totally focused on dollars raised, you could have something like a goal for any donor account or more peer to peer fundraising goals for securing sponsors or getting some matching grants going. So your overall goals, your larger, maybe dollar goal and your mini goals are going to help really generate the buzz and build the excitement that you need during the event. So many goals are pretty much a timeline, they're going to help you reach your overall goals. So, like an example of this might be an overall goal could be like 15 new donors during the day. You can set mini goals. So you might set a halfway goal of 25 donors by noon on another mini goal for 6pm, etc. So you can kind of see how these mini goals can be kind of expanded over the five day for main event days in the early giving day so that you can reach your overall goals by the end of the event on 31st. So you can set mini goals for certain hours if you want to have a lot of mini goals say on the first day or if there's more prizes that are more on tasting to you on the third day. You know you really want to consider the goals you have the prizes that are at play and try to plan out kind of a timeline so to speak to help you achieve these goals. So pretty much they are just milestones for you to help you get to where you want to be at the end of the event. So something to keep in mind is when your donors are most active, so you can adjust your hourly or your section goals accordingly. So if you know there's like certain times of the day that might be super slow for you. Something to consider is figuring out a way to drive a little bit more during those slower periods so a lot of nonprofits might consider boosting that time period by utilizing a matching grant. It's going to be something we talk about later but they're really going to be something that can kind of shake up your campaign, give you something to talk about on social media, or you know, emails that are going out to try to get some momentum during periods that might be a little slow for you. We're going to get into seed donations. So another tip is to get your campaign rolling by asking for seed donations. So seed donations are pretty much donations for people in your organizations in our circle. These are donations that are essentially going to break the ice with donors, they're going to help get the ball rolling. So seed donations because they pretty much make the number of your donations grow. So you plant the seed, you might get, you know, these don't have to be a lot of money and it can be just $10, just something small that can kind of be in your bank account. So to speak, to kind of inspire donors to give a little bit more. So this is the first time, sometimes it's difficult for people when they're the first to do something. So it's nice to see like, hey, we're getting started. We already have, you know, 10, 15 donors, something small to start growing your donations. But people to ask for seed donations would be your board members, your staff, anybody who is a director or a high level leader at your organization, volunteers are good group to ask anyone at your organization who's just highly engaged in your work would be someone you want to reach out to, to get seed donations. Well, dive into matching grants. So a really great strategy like I was saying for driving donations on a giving day is securing a matching grant. So if you're new matching grant is essentially a large donation that your organization is going to use to bring on other smaller donations by offering up this donation as a match. So the money comes matches tool, we kind of go into it a bit more in the first webinar. We also have a ton of resources available for matches on our platform and they're all linked in the toolkit for you to check out as well. But the money comes matches tool has a bunch of functionality, you can set a cap for donation matching. You can set a cap pretty much so that's like, so say $200 so someone doesn't come along and make a big donation and eat up the entire match. So if you have a say $1000 match, you're matching one to one and someone comes along and donates $1000 they've now gobbled up the match. And you can no longer use that as a tool to try and get more donations, which isn't a terrible thing but you're going to want to probably use your match to extend to multiple people so that they can all feel like they're doubling their impact. So it's a really good tool so you might want to set a cap. But it's a cool little tool, it's going to let you do a lot with your matching grants, especially, like I'm saying on a giving day matches are just a really powerful way to drive donations. So people to consider as prospects for your matching grant are the board members first and foremost, sometimes individual board members are super happy to provide a matching grant. But another idea is to consider asking your board as a whole to provide the match. So if your board say still has dues to pay, or just wants to have everyone chip in $100, you could easily get a large chunk of change for a matching grant sponsored by your board. You can also consider major gift donors. So if you are a nonprofit that has major gift donors donors who give large amounts. These would be really great prospects, you could reach out to them, see if they would be interested in instead, instead of donating $1,000 to you again this year, perhaps they want to offer their $1,000 donation as a matching grant. It's a cool way so that these donors can give in a different way. It's exciting to know that their donation is going to be inspiring other donations. So instead of just writing a check they're helping you as an organization grow and drive other donations. You can also give the donor extra recognition when you're promoting the match so if you have major gift donors who like shout outs. The donor is best. Some of them love to be praised. So that's a cool little way to include their name. You can also set it as a private match. If someone is more private wants to be anonymous. Corporate sponsors are really great prospects for matches. If you have a local business who's interested in donating, say $500 that would be a really cool way to help you out. It's very proactive. It's very public. It also allows them to draw a little bit of attention to their company and their philanthropy. But at this stage of the game before giving 28 you're going to want to start to make phone calls, set up some emails reach out to your large donors and just kind of start planting seed and seeing how warm they are to these ideas of being a matching grant and a sponsor. And then if anyone is interested you can start to show up the details and figure out the specifics, what time they would want to do their match, how they would want to set it would it be one to one to one type of thing. So a lot of fun with setting up matches and just the tools available to you. Once you have your match. The end of the day, the matching grant is really a wonderful powerful marketing tool. So in order to make the most of your matching grant you're going to want to consider how you're going to promote your match. So the first step is going to the matching grant tool on your giveaway 28 profile and adding the matching grant there. Marketing tools built into the platform for your matching grant. So we mighty cause puts a sticker on your donate button on your organization profile automatically if you have a live matching grant. You'll also donors coming to the giveaway 28 site will be able to search by matching grants and be able to see which organizations have matching grants. So if donors are coming with the intention of donating to organizations that have matching grants because they want to double their donation. And there's some good exposure there for you as well. And then also note that once a match is closed, you won't be able to edit it. So check the toolkit for FAQ zone matches. There's a link to frequently asked questions about matches. It can be sometimes daunting because matching grants is a very versatile kind of powerful tool. If you haven't done it before and you want to kind of read a bit about it, you can always also reach out to our support team and they can give you some advice on how to set up matching grants to fit what you're looking for. So as you are promoting your match also want to add information to your story, possibly update your organization profile page for the time being that you have a matching grant live, especially if it's a big match, you're going to be able to promote it on your social media channels, send out an email to your database to let all of your followers know about the live match. So countdowns are really important because overall they're going to have urgency. So if you're counting down if you have two hours left of say you have $200 left of your match, you'll want to kind of share the progress, help them get excited, remind them that the match is still available and hopefully urge them to stop what they're doing and make a donation so that they can double their impact. Donation management and reports. So the reports section on your organization profile is divided up into five different areas. So we have donations, offline donations, recurring donations, retention and your disbursements. With the mighty cause donation report, you're able to view the information associated with each of your donations made to your organization through the platform. So at the top of your report, you'll be able to filter, you can search for particular donations, you can search for donations only during the event. You can customize the display dates. So it's going to default to the last 30 days but if you want to see just a week, you can always customize those dates. And you can always download the full CSV file to include all the information like the addresses, custom questions if you added that to your checkout flow and more. So then we have recurring donations which we'll talk more on another slide, as well as retention which we'll talk more about disbursements of course is your disbursements report. So all the admins can see the disbursements to date sent to their organization, you can see the status of your disbursements and the methods of disbursement. So this is all of kind of the reporting that's available to you. So offline donations, so one of the most important aspects of offline fundraising is being able to track and manage your offline donation successes. So it gives me to get cash or check during the giving period. You can add those into your organization's profile. These are offline donations that get added to your totals. So offline donation, you can select just easily it's very intuitive at offline donation, the upper right corner of the page. And it'll ask you for key information, which I kind of snap screenshot it for you here, but it'll ask like your source the first name last name and email, and then the date of the offline donation. Activating your ambassadors. Another thing I wanted to talk about. So your retention report is going to be super key for you this year as well. So, on your retention report you'll be able to filter by status so those donors who are retained and those donors who are not retained. And so, you know, as you are kind of creating your email strategy or your communication strategy for this year's event, we're going to want to include a strategy to reach out to those who gave to your campaign last year. So you can download that report during the event you can also continue to look at that report to see who still maybe hasn't given yet and continue to reach out to them. So just try to get them to give you know something like you gave to our campaign during giving 28 last year we'd love for you to give again here and donate button type of thing. It doesn't have to be hugely wordy, it can just be like a reminder, a lot of people just need reminders that events are happening. So definitely work that into your communication plan.  So typically this includes your board members or volunteers, especially those who are just, of course, always super highly engaged superstars of your work, your organization staff members just so on. Your ambassadors is really great as a campaign strategy because this is going to help you break out of that list that you have been using of existing supporters so you might be continuing to reach out to the same people. This is a great way to get new people on your list, people that you might otherwise not have access to. You can see our just adorable little graphic right here. Here's you, here's your supporters, your ambassadors. If you use your ambassadors they're going to reach out to even larger circles so you're just really trying to expand and grow your network and by using those closest to you, you can reach more people. An ambassador can really help in even ways of just sharing a link to your page. You don't have to always have ambassadors working on peer to peer campaigns. Sometimes that's a daunting task for donors for your supporters. You can always just send out an email to those closest to you, your organization, and just ask them to share a link to your page during the dates of give 828. Ask them to share a donate button on their Facebook. Really just help boost your campaign on any way that they feel comfortable. If you have a board member for instance who is very well connected, this can be a really huge boost for your organization. So really put out the feelers and let people closest to you know that the campaign is going on and see if they'd be interested in sharing links to kind of extend your reach. So peer to peer fundraising is a really great fundraising strategy. It's a great technique where basically you are deputizing your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. So the mighty cause platform is set up for super easy peer to peer fundraising. It's a good way to shake up your campaign, acquire new donors, like I said, using your ambassadors is going to extend your reach. If you wanted to try peer to peer fundraising this year, you would basically ask ambassadors to help set up a fundraising page for your organization. It's not like a big ask, but it's usually really fun if people want to create peer to peer fundraising pages. They're excited about it. They're only going to do it if they want to. So it's a cool way for them to talk about their story. Talk about how they came to work with you or how they came to volunteer with you and why they're so passionate and excited to share your work to those closest to that. And these peer to peer fundraising pages are not going to distract or draw attention away from your campaign. They are all operating alongside your campaign. So all of these pages where people are donating to those are going to get funds that are directly added to your organization page. And in most cases, these ambassadors are reaching out to friends and colleagues and people who are not typically already being solicited for donations by you. So it's really picking up new donors, which is really great. And it's really just a more meaningful way for ambassadors to kind of make an impact during your give it 28 campaign. Instead of just making a donation, you can see if they'd be interested. It's a cool way for them to get really personal with that. So I'm thinking about peer to peer fundraising. So it's super easy to set up. I have another slide to kind of talk about a little bit about. I'll stay here for now. So like we also have peer to peer templates, which is pretty awesome. So within your organization page, there are in fundraising tools is a peer to peer template so you can easily quickly fill out that entire slide. And you'll see. If you go to the first webinar, you'll see that it has kind of a walkthrough tutorial of how to build that fundraising template so super easy. Team fundraising is also a peer to peer fundraising strategy so you can have teams create page and then they can write a bunch of different peer to peer fundraisers to the page. So really like if you were to consider an umbrella team fundraising has a bunch of peer to peer fundraisers within it. So really cool, really easy to set up. It's a cool fun way for a group effort if you have board members who are interested in having a team you could do a board team if you have volunteers who want to have a team create help create that for them. You can get emails directly through these team pages. So you can communicate directly with the peer to peers. It's just a cool fun way to get more people involved and a kind of competitive way so you can have you can see there's leaderboards on this page so really nice. If that's something new if you've already tried peer to peer fundraising, you're comfortable with it and you want to try fundraising team fundraising that's a nice way to do that. So email is one of the most important tools during the event. It is literally the direct line to your supporters pockets pretty much. So unless someone's unsubscribed or messages are going to end up right in their inbox probably on their phone and their hand. So the key to emails is really to keep them short simple and skimmable. Most people are going to read their email on their phones so you just need it to be quick. So how you like to read emails, your donors and supporters are going to want to read them similarly they're not going to probably want to see a paragraph they're going to want to know what you want why you're talking to them and a call to action where do you want them to go what button do you want them to click. So emails are also super important, you're going to want to segment them out. So an email that's going out to a volunteer is going to be different than an ask for a donation from a large recurring donor. So you're going to want to kind of segment out your groups tailor your messages to your audience, your email to a volunteer might start with we really value and are thankful for all that you do the ways that you give back through your volunteer service. Here's our event. Here's when you can also donate share links you know giving them different ways that they can share partake in kind of your event without necessarily always giving money, because they do also give time. So that message is going to be different than the one to a large donor who maybe gives $1,000 regularly, you're not going to want the $1,000 regular donor to get an email saying, please consider donating, you know, $10. You don't want to really think about the emails that you're sending to different groups of people. So identify your key segments, identify how you're going to tailor your message to them. And when it's tailored to the specific group they're more likely to take action on it. And then pay close attention to the timing of your emails. So I would recommend taking the time to schedule as much as you can beforehand. One of all these strategy tips really come down to preparation, creating a timeline creating a plan pre scheduling things so creating these emails on the day of the event that are going to go out maybe in the morning. And then event emails that might go out during the event in the afternoon. Depending on what you use you can like using mail to all these different services have pre scheduling so not going to want to sit at your computer during the event and start crafting these messages. If you have to, that's totally fine everyone has no different capacities for this type of stuff, but whatever you can pre schedule is going to really take a lot off their shoulders during the event. And as much as before most people read their emails on their phones so make sure that you choose mobile friendly templates, test it out beforehand, send yourself a test email. Click the buttons make sure you test your donate button. It works. You don't want to send one out and then have the link to be done so just make sure you test everything and pre schedule. And then I also want to talk a bit about social media strategy. Social media. I think we all know how kind of crazy social media can be. And going where your followers are so if you have, you know, 1000 followers on Facebook only a handful on Instagram you're going to want to put your time and effort into promoting your campaign where your followers are so on Facebook in this case rather than Instagram. So really put your efforts into the platform where you're most likely to reach the most people and have the greatest impact because we all have limited time, especially as nonprofits.  Again, a lot of the social media strategy is going to come back to pre scheduling. We definitely recommend scheduling any posts you can ahead of time pre schedule your posts for all five days of the event. There is a couple like Facebook's publishing tools or creator studio or you can pre schedule some tweets. So that really all you have to focus on are the live posting for things like if there's prizes that you're trying to win and stuff like that you can give kind of up to the minute results and updates on progress. So you'll be spending more time on the time sensitive announcements rather than trying to figure out what to post on the day two of the event. So we also find it really helpful to assign someone on your team to social media. So a trusted volunteer if you have a board member who's interested in helping out these people can help monitor your social media. They can quickly respond to comments in real time and interact with your followers which is algorithm friendly. So if possible, and if you have the ability on the budget we recommend budgeting just a little bit of money to boost certain social posts or some of your tweets, 1020 bucks for an ad can go a long way can breach pretty far. And hopefully it will be worth it because you'll be extending the reach with that advertisement. You can easily target just those who already follow your page so that you know on that day with that paid advertisement you're going to be able to reach those who you need to reach. And of course, always in terms of content that does well I think if you're on social media a lot you know that videos are doing really well. Stories are doing really well on Instagram and stuff like that. People of course always do really well as well. So if you have volunteers who can take photos of your staff or however you want to kind of direct your campaign social media campaign messaging people are going to do really well in those posts. And then of course we always encourage people to try to think out of the box if you want to try to do like a quick live stream video just during part of the event. And also do something cool like a watch party. So if you wanted to live stream. You could, you know, promote that your live streaming at a certain time on a certain day to try to just boost this one algorithm friendly content but also boosting this kind of personal touch for your donors so they can really feel involved. They can tune into your little live stream and watch how you do it and just really support you in different ways here as well. Well, I think we're almost done. I wanted to mention your giving day follow ups as you're planning your campaign, your follow up is going to be super important to keep in mind. As you plan your actual event content and your strategy, you also want to plan the thank yous to your donors because they are the ones that have helped you get through this event and get closer to your goals.  Because on your organization page, you can edit your thank you message, which they will see as soon as they donate, but there's going to be something that you want to send them when the entire event has ended. Just a quick hello. Thank you. We saw and we appreciate what you did for us. Also closing the loop as far as if you are fundraising for something specific, if your goal for this campaign was to try to get into pieces of equipment or improvements to the building. Just kind of updating periodically on your progress. So once these donors give to you, you don't want to just thank them and kind of close the door till next year. So those are people who were inspired and are probably curious about what you are about. So you want to have a plan to continue updating them to continue reaching out to them. And just keeping that relationship kind of fostering that relationship between donor and your nonprofit. Yeah, so looking ahead, even though the event might be over the relationship, like I said with your donors is ongoing. So as far as that goes, you're going to also want to consider at this time onboarding plan for the new donors that you probably will get during the give a 28 event. You can either mail in a welcome packet, perhaps a celebratory postcard or something small, just a little token to make them feel seen and special and get them on boarded into your, like your community, your nonprofit circle. You can also add them to an automated email journey where they can get more information. Maybe you do monthly newsletters might want to get them added in that if they give you permission for that as well. So as we wrap up, I have some support resources for you all. If you have questions if you need help setting up EMP if you need help figuring out strategy or you can't find a support article you can always reach out to our team. They're available Monday to Friday at 9am to 5pm Eastern. You can call leave a message they can get back to you or just email them they're super quick and excited to help. So, feel free to reach out. And I think that's the thing. I did a pretty good job. We're under an hour. So, and I'm if you have anything you want to add you can do so. And then of course if anyone has any questions you can send them through the Q&A. I will get that one. I don't see any questions coming through. I hope like I'm another minute, but I'm going to since the webinar was recorded will be posted into the nonprofit toolkit for you all to review check back on share with other nonprofits who might be curious about participating and give 828. And then if you need anything these slides will be uploaded as well. You can rewatch the segments that you need or just download the full deck. And remember you can always reach out to our support team. Thank you to everyone for joining us today and let us know if you need anything. I hope you have a good rest of your day. Bye.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020 happening digitally. We're connecting with Red Hat executives, thought leaders, practitioners, wherever they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this online event. Happy to welcome back to the program, Joe Fernandez who's the vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms with Red Hat. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, glad to be here. All right, so Joe, you know, cloud of course has been a conversation we've been having for a lot of years. When I went to Red Hat Summit last year, when I went to IBM Think last year, there was discussion of moving from kind of chapter one, if you will, to chapter two. Some of the labels that we put on things back in the early days like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, they're coming into a little bit clearer picture. So let's just give a high level, what you're seeing from your customers, when they talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments, what does that mean to your customers and therefore how is Red Hat meeting them where they are? Yeah, sure, so Red Hat obviously serves an enterprise customer base and what we've seen in that customer base really since the start, and it's really informed our strategy, is the fact that all their applications aren't going to run in one place, right? So they're really employing a hybrid cloud strategy, a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy that spans from their data centers out to a public cloud, typically then out to multiple public clouds as their cloud investments grow as they move more applications and now even out to the edge for many of those customers. So that's the newest footprint that we're getting asked about. So really we think of that as the open hybrid cloud and our goal is really to provide a consistent platform for applications regardless of where they run across all those environments. Yeah, let's look down a second on that because we've heard consistency for quite a while. If you look at the largest cloud provider out there, they said, hybrid environment will give you the exact same hardware that we're running in the public cloud and we'll put that in your environment. Of course, Red Hat's a software company. You've lived across lots of platforms for Red Hat's entire existence. So where is that consistency needed? How do you think about how Red Hat does things maybe the same and a little different than some of the other players that have been positioning and even repositioning their hybrid story over the last year or so? Yeah, so we're really excited to see a lot of folks in the industry including all the major public cloud providers are now talking about hybrid and talking about these types of initiatives that we've been talking about for quite some time. But it's a little bit different. When we talk about hybrid cloud and we talk about multi-cloud, we're talking about being able to run not just in one public cloud and then in an on-premise appliance mirrors that cloud. We're really talking about being able to run across multiple clouds. So having that consistency across running in, say, Amazon to Azure to Google and then carrying that into your on-premise environments whether that's on bare metal, on VMware, on OpenStack. And then like I said, out to the edge, right? And so that consistency is important for people who are concerned about how their applications are gonna operate in these different environments because otherwise they'll have to manage that those differences themselves. Speaking as part of Red Hat, right? This is what the company was built on, right? In the 20 years ago, it was all about Linux bringing consistency for enterprise applications running across X86 hardware, right? So regardless of who your OEM vendor was, as long as you were building to the X86 standard and leveraging Linux as a base, Red Hat Enterprise Linux became that same consistent operating environment for applications, which is important for software vendors but also more importantly for customers themselves as they put those apps into production. Yeah, I guess last question I have for kind of just the landscape out there, we've been talking for a number of years, when you talk to practitioners, they don't get caught up in the labels that we use in the industry. Do they have a cloud strategy? Yes, most companies have a cloud strategy and if you ask them if there's a cloud strategy to say today, same today as it was a quarter ago or a year ago, they say, of course not, everything's changed. We know in today's day and age, what I was doing a month ago is probably very different from what I am doing today. So I know you've got a survey that was done of enterprise users. I saw it when it came out a month ago and some good data in there. So where are we and what data do you have to share with us on kind of the customer adoption and where things are going? Yeah, so I think we put out a survey not too long ago and what we showed is I think over 60% of customers were adopting a hybrid cloud strategy exactly as I described, thinking about their applications in terms of an environment that spans multiple cloud infrastructures as well as on-premise footprints. And then going beyond that, we think that number will grow based on what we saw in that survey. That just mirrors the conversations that I've had with customers that many of us here at Red Hat have been having with those same customers over the years because everybody's in a different spot in terms of their transformation efforts, in terms of their adoption of cloud technologies and what it means for their business. So we need to meet customers where they're at, understand that everybody's at a different spot and then make sure that we can help them make that transition. And it's really an evolution as opposed to, I think what some people in the past might have thought of as a revolution where all the data centers are going to shut down and everything's going to move all at once. And so helping customers evolve and make that transition is really what Red Hat's all about. And so often, Joe, when I talk to some of the vendors out there and you talk about hybrid, you talk about multicloud, it's talking about something you mentioned. It's a box, it's a place, it's the infrastructure discussion. But when I've been having conversations with a lot of your peers, these interviews for Red Hat Summit, we know that it's the organization and it's the applications that are hugely important as these changes go and happen. So talk a little bit about that. What's happening to the organization? How are you helping the infrastructure team keep up and the app dev team move forward? Yeah, so first, start with that. On the technology side, one of the things that has enabled this type of consistency and portability has been sort of the advent of Linux containers as a standard packaging format that can span across all these footprints. So we know that Linux runs in all these different footprints and Linux containers as a portable packaging format enables that and then Kubernetes enables customers to orchestrate containers at scale. And so that's really what OpenShift is focused on is delivering an enterprise Kubernetes platform, again, spanning all these environments that leverages container-based packaging provides enterprise Kubernetes orchestration and management to manage in all those environments. What that then also does on the people front is bring infrastructure and operations teams together because Kubernetes containers represents agility for both sides, right? For application developers, it represents the ability to package their application and all their dependencies and know that when they run it in one environment, it'll be consistent with how it runs in other environments. So eliminating that problem of works on my machine but doesn't work in prod or what have you. So it brings consistency for developers, for infrastructure teams, it gives them the ability to basically make decisions around where the best place is to run these applications without having to think about that from a technology perspective but really from things that should matter more like cost and convenience to customers and performance and so forth. So I think we see those teams coming together. That being said, it is an evolution in people and process and culture. So we've done a lot of work, we launched a global transformation office, we had previously launched Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and have done a lot of work with our consulting services to help and our partners as well to help with some of the people in process evolutions that need to occur to adopt these types of technologies as well as to move towards a more cloud-native approach. All right, so Joe, what one of the announcements made at the show is talking about how OpenShift is working with virtualization. So I think back to the earliest container days, there was discussion of, oh, dockering containers, it kills VM or cloud, of course, some cloud services run on VMs, other run on containers, they're serverless. So there's a lot of confusion out there as to what happened? We know in IT, no technology ever dies, everything's always additive. It's figuring out the right solutions and the right fit. So help us understand what Red Hat's doing when it comes to virtualization and OpenShift and Kubernetes and how's your approach different than some of what we've already seen in the marketplace? Yeah, so definitely we've seen just explosive adoption of containers technology, right? Which has driven the OpenShift business and Red Hat's business overall. So we expect that to continue, right? More applications moving towards a container-based packaging and deployment model and leveraging Kubernetes and OpenShift to manage those environments. That being said, as you mentioned, virtualization has been around for a really long time, right? And predominantly, most applications today are running virtualized. And so some of them have made the transition to containers or were built container-native from the start, but many more are still running in VM-based environments and may never make that switch. So what we were looking at is how do we manage this sort of hybrid environment from the application perspective where you have some applications running in containers, other applications running in VMs. We have platforms like Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization that leverage the KVM hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to serve apps running in a VM-based environment. What we did with Kubernetes is, you said, how could we innovate to have convergence on the orchestration and management front? And we leveraged the fact that KVM, our chosen hypervisor, is actually a Linux process that can itself be containerized. And so by running the hypervisor in a container, we can then spawn VMs that could be managed on that same platform as the containers run. So what you have in OpenShift Virtualization is the ability to use Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, as well as standard VM-based workloads. And these are full VMs. These aren't micro VMs or things like Firecracker or Coddic container. These are standard VMs that could be full Windows guests or Linux guests running inside those VMs. And so it helps you basically manage that type of environment where you may be moving to containers and more cloud-native approach, but those containers need to interact or work with applications that are still in a VM-based deployment environment. And we think it's really exciting. We've demoed it at the last Red Hat Summit. We're going to talk about it even more here in terms of how we're going to bring those products to market and enable customers. Okay, yeah, Joe, let me make sure I understand this because as you said, it is a different approach. So number one, if I'm moving towards a container management solution, this is going to fit natively into what I'm doing. It's not taking some of my traditional management tools and saying, oh, I also get some visibility in containers. It's more, here's my Kubernetes solution and just some of those containers happen to be virtualized. Did they get that piece right? Yeah, I think it's more like, so we know that Kubernetes is going to be in the environment because we know that people are moving application workloads to standard Linux containers. But we also know that virtual machines are going to still exist in that environment. So you can think about it as, how would we enable Kubernetes to manage a virtual machine in the same way that it manages a Linux container? And what we do there is we actually put the VM inside the container, right? So because the VM specifically with KVM is just a Linux process and that's what a Linux container is. It's a Linux process, right? So you can run the hypervisor, spawn the virtual machines inside of containers, but those virtual machines are just like any other VM that would run in OpenStack or Red Hat Virtualization or what have you and you could vSphere for example. So those are traditional virtual machines that are now being managed in a Kubernetes environment. And what we're seeing is sort of this evolution of Kubernetes to take on these new types of workloads. VMs is just one example of something that you can now manage with Kubernetes. Okay, and help me understand what this means to really the app dev in my application portfolio because the original promise of virtualization was I can just stick my application in a VM and I never need to think about it ever again. And while that was super helpful when Windows NT was going into life in 2020, we do find that most companies do want to update their applications and they are talking about, do I refactor them? Do I make them microservices architecture? I don't want to have that iceberg of an application that I'm just dragging along slowly into the new world. So what is this virtualization integration with Kubernetes to mean for the app dev and the applications? Yeah, sure, so what we see customers doing, what we see their application development teams doing is modernizing a lot of their existing applications, right? So they're taking traditional monolithic applications or N tier type applications that may run in a VM-based environment and they're moving them towards more of a distributed architecture, leveraging microservices-based approach. But that doesn't happen all at once either, right? So oftentimes what you see is your microservices are still connected to VM-based applications or maybe you're breaking down a monolithic application. The core is still running in a VM but some of those business functions have now been carved out and containerized. So you're gonna end up in a hybrid environment from the application perspective in terms of how these applications are packaged and deployed. The question is, what does that mean for your deployment architecture? Does it mean you always have to run a virtualization platform and a container platform together? That's how it's done today, right? OpenShift and Kubernetes run on top of vSphere. They run on top of Amazon and Azure and Google VMs on top of OpenStack. But what if you could actually just run Kubernetes directly on bare metal and manage both types of workloads? That's really sort of the idea that our OpenShift virtualization solution was based on is let's just manage VMs natively with Kubernetes in the same way that we manage containers. And then it can facilitate for the application developer this evolution of apps that are running in one environment towards an apps that are running essentially in a hybrid environment from how they're packaged and deployed. Yeah, absolutely something I've been hearing for the last year or so, that hybrid deployment pulling apart applications. Sometimes it's even, that core piece as you said is on-premises and then I might have some of the more transactional pieces happening in the public cloud. So, really interesting. So, how long has Red Hat been working on this? My understanding of Kubevert is something I'm familiar with in the CNCF, believe it's been around for a couple of years. So, talk to us about just kind of how long it took to get here and fully support stateful applications now. What's the overall roadmap look like? Yeah, so Kubevert as an open source project was launched more than two years ago now. And as you know, Red Hat really drives all of our development upstream in the open source community. So, we launched the Kubevert project we've been collaborating with other vendors and even customers on that. But then, over time we then decide how do we bring these technologies to market which technologies make sense to bring the market. So, Kubevert is the open source project, OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization which is what this feature is referred to commercially is the product that then we would ship and support for running these in production environments. The capabilities, right? So, I think those have been evolving as well. So, virtual machines have specific requirements in terms of not only how they're deployed and managed but how they connect to storage, how they connect networking, how do you do things like fencing and all sorts of live migration and that type of thing. We've been building out those types of capabilities. There's certainly still more to do there but it's something that we're really excited about not just from the perspective of running VMs but just even more broadly from the perspective of how Kubernetes is expanding to take on new workloads because Kubernetes has moved far beyond just running how native applications today. You can run stateful services in containers. You can run things like AI, machine learning and analytics and IoT type services. But it hasn't come for free, right? This has come through a lot of hard work in the Kubernetes community in the various associated communities, the container communities, communities like Kuvert. But it's all kind of trying to leverage that same automation, that same platform to just do more things. And the cool thing is not just, it'll not just be Red Hat talking about it but you'll see that from a lot of customers that are doing sessions at our summit this year and beyond talking about what it means to them. Yeah, that's great. I always love hearing the practitioner viewpoint. All right, Joe, I want to give you the final word when it comes to this whole space. Things kind of move pretty fast but also we remember it when we first saw it. So tell us what's with the customers who kind of walking away from Red Hat Summit 2020 should be looking at and understanding that they might not have thought about if they were looking at Kubernetes a year or two ago? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is Kubernetes and this whole container ecosystem is continuing to evolve, continuing to add capabilities and continuing to expand the types of workloads that it can run. Red Hat is right in the center of it. It's all happening in open source. Red Hat as a leading contributor to Kubernetes and open source in general is driving a lot of this innovation. We're working with some great customers and partners, other vendors who are working side-by-side with us as well. And I think the most important thing is we understand that it's an evolution for customers. So this evolution towards moving applications to the public cloud, adopting a hybrid cloud approach, this evolution in terms of expanding the types of workloads and how you run and manage them. And that approach is something that, we've always helped customers do and we're doing that today as they move out towards embracing cloud needed. All right, well, Joe Fernandez, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch of OpenShift virtualization. Definitely look forward to talking to some of the customers and finding out that's helping them along their hybrid cloud journey. All right, lots more coverage from theCUBE at Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.


The topic for my paper presentation is diagnostic approach to basal ganglia hyperintensities in infants. The basal ganglia receive projections from almost every region of the cerebral cortex which enables them to integrate extra pyramidal motor activity. This process demands high ATP energy, internal mandates, rich blood supply and high concentration of trace metals. Unfortunately, these same features make basal ganglia vulnerable to systemic conditions both in long term and short term. There is true susceptibility to damage during childhood when the metabolic need for basal ganglia is much higher. MRI imaging is a useful tool in assessing the acute and chronic changes of basal ganglia in systemic diseases and neurological diseases. The aim of my strategy is to characterize the imaging findings in infants with basal ganglia abnormalities using different sequences on MRI and to correlate these findings with the clinical history, clinical examination and biochemical markers. Material and methods in retrospective study was done on 15 children under the age of 2 years who presented with the various signs and symptoms and are referred for MRI. Imaging was performed on a 1.5 Tesla Siemens MRI. All conventional sequences were performed on all children. Post contrast and advanced imaging techniques were performed in selected cases based on findings on conventional imaging and clinical suspicion. The first case is it is comes under vascular etiology. Here we can see flare hyper intensities which shows diffusion restriction in right lentiform, quartet nuclei in corona radiator and right frontal parietal cortex. Also, we can see foci of blumine which is noted in the M2 and M3 segments of the right MCA. This is a case of acute infarct and right MCA territory which is secondary to right MCA thrombus. The second case in vascular etiology, here we can see flare heterogeneously hyper intense area which shows peripheral diffusion restriction on DWI with few areas showing blooming on span segments. And mild peripheral enhancement and post-contract imaging is also noted in the right thalamus and mild perillational edema is also noted in the mid-bred and right lentiform nucleus. Filling defects which are noted in the right internal cerebral vein, vein of galleon and inferior cervical sinus and straight sinus which suggests the thrombus. This is a case of venous infarct with hemorrhagic transformation in the right thalamus secondary to the venous thrombosis. In case of metabolic etiology, here is a case of five months old child with hypoglycemia. Here we can see bilateral symmetrical T2 hyper intensities, bilateral quartet nuclei and putamen which shows diffusion restriction. This is a case of hypoglycemic encephalopathy. This is another case of newborn which presents it by both asphyxia. Here we can see bilateral symmetrical flare hyper intensities showing diffusion restriction in the bilateral putamen. This is a case of hypoxic encephalopathy. This is another case of infine which shows bilaterally symmetric spelling T2 prolongation and restricted diffusion in basal ganglia, insular cortex and singulate gyrus. On MR spectroscopy, we can see a combination of a toxic metabolic peak of glutamate and glutamine at short TA times. This is a case of hypatic encephalopathy. In case of congenital etiology, there is a case of canavans disease which shows subquarticle deep and periventricular white matter of the bilateral cerebral hemisphere showing T2 hyper intensity and T1 hypointense which suggests dismarination. There is symmetrical involvement of bilateral globus pallidus, subthalamic nuclei which demonstrates the restricted diffusion with characteristic sparing of the posterior limb of the internal capsule. This is also mild T2 hyper intensity in the bilateral quartet nuclei and putamen. On MR spectroscopy, we can see an elevated NEAA peak and the NEA to creatine ratio is also not elevated. This is a case of canavans disease. The second case in congenital etiology, here we can see bilateral symmetrical T2 or flare hyper intensities which shows diffusion restriction and decrease ADC values in corded and lentiform nuclei. Few focal flare hyper intensities are also noted in the periapidactyl gray matter, substantia nigra and braced stem. On MR spectroscopy, we can see lactate peak and decreased NEAA by toline ratio. This is a case of bleak syndrome. Observations and discussion. In 15 children, acute cases causes of basal ganglia hyper intensities like hypoxia, hypoglycemia and encephalitis was seen in 6 children. Other cases includes infarction in 2 children, infarct with hemorrhagic transformation secondary to venous sinus thrombosis in 2 children, leach disease, canavans disease and hepatic encephalopathy in 1 children, hypoxic encephalopathy in 2 children. Bilaterally symmetric diffuse abnormalities involving the lentiform nucleus, corded nucleus in the entirely typically suggest systemic or metabolic causes as per sense a central cause whereas the lesion is asymmetric, focal or discrete involving only a part of basal ganglia it indicates the involvement by infection or by a neoplastic etiology. However, there is often an overlap and atypical features of systemic diseases such as the unilateral involvement may sometimes cause confusion. Conclusion systemic and metabolic abnormalities often involve the basal ganglia on both sides and careful assessment of brain abnormalities occurring simultaneously outside these structures is important, especially MR spectroscopy imaging should be included in the protocol. Imaging with T1 diffusion material imaging MR angiography MR spectroscopy are often helpful in narrowing down to differential diagnosis. Oftentimes however the diagnosis is not straightforward and the correlation of typical imaging features with especially the clinical history the laboratory data can have make the diagnosis clear and correct. These are my references. Thank you.