William McRaven graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism in 1977. He then went on to serve 37 years in the U.S. Navy, where he became a Navy SEAL, and ultimately advanced to the rank of four-star Admiral. In his last post, Admiral McRaven was the commander of U.S. Operations Command, leading a force of 69,000 men and women. He advised presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, and other top U.S. officials in the areas of U.S. foreign policy and defense. In addition to many other operations under his leadership, Admiral McRaven headed up the special ops raid in 2001 that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, briefing President Obama in real time as the operation was being executed. The same year, he was named runner-up for Time Magazine's Distinguished Person of the Year. Admiral McRaven retired from the Navy in 2014 and became the chancellor of the University of Texas system earlier this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Chancellor William McRaven. Well, thank you very much, Mark, and let me thank you in the LBJ Library for hosting this magnificent event. And let me also thank again, Director Jim Clapper and Director John Brennan, two very close friends who have worked with me side by side for many years now. We are really blessed to have these two gentlemen in the positions they are in. I can't think of any two guys that have done more to protect this nation over the years than Jim Clapper and John Brennan. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today. And I also want to recognize again, former director, Porter Goss, so great to have you here and you've added a lot to the last two days. And I would be remiss if I didn't call out my very good friend and mentor, Admiral Bobby Inman, who has been so gracious as he has walked me through the minefields that sometimes can be politics at the University of Texas and has graciously worked with me as I have established my tenure here at the University of Texas. So, Admiral Inman, thank you again very much. Well, I'm going to approach this a little bit differently here. You've been looking at the first customer and now we're going to take intelligence and really kind of move it down to a tactical level. And then frankly, I hope to be able to walk you from the tactical, maybe back up to the first customer. So I've been asked to talk about why is intelligence necessary? And I want to start off with a little bit of a thought experiment. So in the world of special operations, one of the things we have to tackle off in are hostage rescues. So put yourself in a situation where you have a hostage situation and you have perfect intelligence on what is going on in the single room. So you have a single room, there is a hostage. He is on the right side of the room. He is in a chair, he is bound. You know exactly where he is. There is the hostage taker. The hostage taker is on the other side of the room. You know exactly what weapon systems he has. You know exactly the dimensions of the room. You know the thickness of the walls. You have some understanding of the intent of the hostage taker and you have some understanding of how the hostage himself or herself might react. You know how the door swings open. You have for all intent and purposes, perfect intelligence. And the purpose of that intelligence, of course, is to mitigate the risk to a manageable level. On the outside of that door, of course, you have special operations, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that are prepared to go in to rescue this hostage. And not only do you have perfect intelligence at a point in time, but you have it throughout those points in time. So it is real time intelligence and it is constant intelligence. And of course, what that does for you is it really does reduce that risk to a manageable level. Now, always in the process of going through the door, you blow the door open, the first man through the door could stumble and that creates problems and the next man through now has to adjust as you have a moving hostage taker. All those sorts of things are in play. But having said that, with perfect intelligence, the chances of success on that particular operation are very high. So when we look at intelligence from a military standpoint, and I'll talk in a little bit later about how I think policy makers use this intelligence. From the military standpoint, we love to quote Carl von Klauswitz, who talked about the fact that the defense is stronger than the offense. That the defense just has to preserve and protect. Well, the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy. The defense only has to preserve and protect and the offense has to impose its will on the enemy. Well, if you're going to impose your will on the enemy, the better the intelligence, the more likely you are to be successful against the stronger form, i.e. the defense.  And I'm gonna walk you through some of the significant uses of intelligence we have. So we'll start with imagery, image intelligence or image as we refer to it. Many years ago in 2005, we were tracking a very, very high value al-Qaeda target in Iraq. But in 2005, the special forces there, we had only one predator. The predators were relatively new on the battlefield, certainly in terms of the military. And we had a very qualified special operations force, but we had one aircraft. And we had been tracking this individual through human intelligence, and we knew that he was going to have a rendezvous where we suspected he was going to have a rendezvous at a certain place out in Al-Ramadi, in the western part of Iraq. So we had our human intelligence surrounding where we thought the link-up was going to be of this bad guy, and we had, again, a single predator overhead. So as the link-up was occurring, we were not able to verify that the individual in question was there. But as the link-up occurred, we thought we had identified the appropriate vehicle that the bad guy was in, and the vehicle started to move. And that was fine because we had a single predator overhead and we were watching as this vehicle moved, and then a second vehicle joined the convoy. And now we had two vehicles, which was fine, because they were moving in unisons together. And at some point in time, they came to a crossroad. And the Lieutenant Colonel who was working for me turned and looked at me and said, you got to call it. Are we going left or are we going right? So we took the vehicle on the right, and we allowed the vehicle on the left to move out in another direction. And so we followed the vehicle on the right for quite some time. And again, the predator flies at a fairly high altitude. And again, this was 2005. The quality of the sensors weren't all that great. But all of a sudden, the vehicle stopped near a palm grove. And we had a good beat on the vehicle. It was the only vehicle around the palm grove. And right at that moment in time, as we were watching this vehicle, the optical ball that is underneath the predator recycled. And what happens is it goes from a picture that appears to be a couple hundred meters away to a picture that is now several thousand feet away. And it recycled up, and it shocked us all. Now we could still see the vehicle, but instead of the vehicle being this large on our screen, it was now about this big. But we watched it very closely. And about 15 seconds later, the ball reactivated, came back down, and we thought, okay, good, everything's fine. We continued to follow the vehicle. And then finally, my patients ran out and I asked the assault force to interdict the vehicle to capture who was ever inside. And so we interdicted the vehicle, no shots were fired, we stopped the vehicle, and there was just a driver inside, not the guy we were looking for. But as it turned out, there was a AK-47, an assault weapon in the back, and a laptop. And so we quickly scarfed that up and we got it back to our headquarters. And as we began to do the forensics, we went back and looked, and we thought something is amiss here. And of course, as we did the forensics, we found right at that point in time when that optical ball recycled and went from a close-in view to a distance view, the individual in the back of the vehicle had gotten up and run into the palm grove and we missed him. And it took us another year to capture, to kill this individual. And in that year's time, dozens of Americans and hundreds or thousands of Iraqis were killed. And it really showed us both the power of imagery intelligence and also the limitations. The other technical intelligence we use is signals intelligence and I won't go into a great deal of detail, but suffice to say we have the ability to understand what is happening between two individuals on various communications. But at one point in time, in a country far, far away, not Iraq or Afghanistan, we were pursuing a target and we had interpreted listening to the two individuals on their devices that we thought, again, that they were going to link up with a very high-value target in this particular country. And so we stood ready to conduct a strike and as the operation evolved and we were continuing to pull in technical intelligence, we took the opportunity and took the strike and while it was a bad guy, it was not the bad guy we were looking for. And later on, I was asked a question about the quality of the intelligence and how I viewed the risk and how that risk was in fact presented to the decision makers up the chain of command. And it is something as a user of intelligence and a conveyor of the quality of the intelligence and the need for action that I never forgot. Suffice to say and I'll talk a little bit more about it is you have to be certain that the quality of the intelligence you get is in fact reducing the risk. We have other types of intelligence where we have large sensor devices and we use this quite a bit in Iraq and Afghanistan to hopefully locate buried explosives, homemade explosives. And what you would find is we would position these sensors on large aircraft and they could at times determine whether or not a particular route, a road had been dug up and a homemade explosive had been put in that road. Again, the technology was good, but it was hardly perfect and many times we would send assault folks in or explosive ordnance disposal folks in based on the intelligence we had to see if we could defuse the weapon. And of course it turned out that it had been just some young boy digging in a road that had no bearing on the threat that we perceived it to be. And then of course there was always human intelligence and that is probably the hardest of the intelligence but frankly the most important and the most vital in terms of understanding the context.  And nothing I think is harder to determine than the intent of a particular individual no matter whether you know them well or do not you just never know what their next move will be. So what we had tried to do really since 9-11 as I have watched it closely is how do we go about improving the quality of intelligence. So in the eminent realm, in the area where we use imagery the quality of the image of course has increased dramatically. In the early days as I said in some cases the ISR that we had, the optical ball was what we would consider kind of standard definition. And so the quality of the image you got was sometimes a little grainy. Not that you couldn't see people very clearly but it didn't also operate well at night. And so there were a lot of problems with it. As time has gone on and technology has gotten better and better the quality of that image has gotten to the point where it is as clear as I'm looking at you in some cases. And that's very, very important because again as I said from the beginning the purpose of the intelligence is to buy down the risk. And if you don't understand the factors that are involved in creating that risk if you're looking at a picture that isn't as clear as you think it is then that risk is greater and you're not going to be able to provide the options that you want to the decision makers. You also need more angles. So I talked about the fact that we had one predator. So if one predator is good more predators are better. And the fact of the matter is again a single angle on a target in particularly as we were looking at Afghanistan many times we would be looking at a compound in Afghanistan and the angle of the view was obstructed by the compound itself. And so consequently you went in without perfect intelligence sometimes without even good intelligence but at least it was better because you had some angle. But of course pulling one predator and multiple predators together and working them with fire support that you get from the AC 130 is one of our gunships with the aircraft in the sky all that requires a very delicate and sophisticated dance and that's very difficult to do but it's important to make sure that under the imagery aspect of this you have multiple angles. The longer dwell again fortunately over time what we found with some of our imagery platforms is they were limited in timeframe. Before we had the predators we actually had a helicopter with a small optical ball on it. Well the helicopter was limited by the fuel and therefore every once in a while in the middle of an operation you would have to land the helicopter. It was the only helicopter with the only optical ball we had and we realized you just couldn't do business that way. So we invested a lot not only we special operations but we the United States government invested a lot in making sure we had multiple platforms in order to do the job. And then we talked about the timeframe. When you look at the PDBs and what they provide the president in terms of strategic intelligence and operational intelligence on the battlefield and Frank Denious asked the question yesterday to director Brennan and the panel and I about the quality of intelligence and what can you get down to the soldier today and what you can get to the soldier today is unprecedented. The soldier in the foxhole if you will can have a terrific view of the battlefield a visual view of the battlefield. But if that view is time late and I associate it with I have a box at the stadium to watch the football games. And the interesting thing is we have a number of TVs up in the box but the TVs are about five seconds late. Well you know what that means when you're watching football and you hear everybody cheer and you're looking up going to wonder what they're cheering about and then five seconds later you begin to find out what they were cheering about. Well in the world of intelligence when that intelligence has to be so timely because it is being relayed to the operator the soldier on the ground five seconds can be a lifetime and five seconds can mean the difference between life or death. So as you look at the imagery you have to work on ensuring that the quality of the image is good that the multiple angles are out there that you can increase the dwell time and that the timing between the actual capture of the image and the return is as small as you can make it. On the signals on the technical intelligence this is really about ensuring that we are able to collect on a variety of different platforms and I won't go into a lot of detail there. But the other aspect of this is making sure that the analysts you have and the interpreters that you have are good. In a lot of cases as we are chasing bad guys around the world some of the dialects that we are trying to translate are not common. And therefore there may be one or two people in the Department of Defense that speak this particular dialect and they may not speak it as well as you would hope they would speak it. So in the middle of a very complex operation as you are trying to interpret the nature and the intent of the bad guys through technical intelligence the nature of that translator is absolutely critical. I learned this the hard way as well when I was giving a speech to the graduating West Point Academy folks in Afghanistan. And I got up and gave what I thought was a rousing fabulous speech to the graduating class and I got a very kind of polite applause at the end. I thought boy I must have missed the mark. The Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army came up to me afterwards and he said your translator is terrible. He misrepresented everything you said. And so if you take that to an intelligence standpoint and you realize if you do not have the right translator and if that translation is somehow skewed then again your understanding of the intent therefore your understanding of the risk is entirely different. And the analysts and of course we have a lot of analysts that look at these sort of things and it is the same problem set. You not only have to have translations but you have to have analysts that understand in context what is going on. On the human side we really do look at the training and we have and the CIA are without a doubt the world's finest when it comes to intelligence analysis and we have great folks across the intelligence community at the Defense Intelligence Agency the NASA Geospatial Agency all of the parts of the IC some fabulous Intel analysts. But clearly what separates us us the US intelligence community I think from any other organization in the world is the quality of the training that these analysts go through in order to be analysts. And what you find again it's like any other aspect of life you have the rookie analysts and you have the experienced analysts. So the reason you have the quality of PDB briefer you have is because that individual has spent a lot of time being an analyst is able to convey the analytical information in context and that's very important to anybody that's receiving intelligence. And then again understanding the behavior of the individual. So a lot of times we're chasing people that we know very little about. Somebody in one of the organizations with the intelligence community knows something about them and that person becomes a subject matter expert on a particular individual. And sometimes there's only one person or maybe one or two people and you really do rely a lot on them to provide you the analysis of that particular individual in that target set. So as you look at the various types of intelligence what we learned very quickly in the war in Iraq is really where we started this is that you have to be able to fuse the intelligence.  What you have to be able to do is fuse them all together. It is the fused intelligence that now reduces your risk again. So I go back to my scenario of the room. If all you have in that room is a camera that is observing the hostage and the hostage taker then you don't understand the dialogue that's going on between the two. If you have the dialogue but you don't have a photo or you don't have a constant video stream then again you have an incomplete picture. So what is critical is to be able to take these various types of intelligence and fuse them together. And this is again a very important aspect of what we did in Iraq. Not only did we fuse them but then we recognize that from the military standpoint we also were not the sole source of intelligence when it came to the various types of intelligence. So we would bring in CIA, DIA, National Geospatial Agency, FBI, Iraqi intelligence and we would, we created these fusion cells. Also the conventional forces were part of these fusion cells and we realized that if you wanted to be able to pass information and use information you needed to understand what was going on the ground. Sometimes the soldiers who were closest to the problem set could give you a better insight into what was going on in the ground than the analyst that was back in Baghdad or potentially Langley or Fort Bragg. So you pulled all the subject matter experts together in a single place and you would look at a target set and you would fuse the intelligence and you would use this inter-agency process to have the best intelligence you could and therefore again reduce the risk on a particular mission. We used a lot of what we call Metcalfe's law and Bob Metcalfe created this law some time ago that talks about telecommunications networks and in it when you look at telecommunications network what he said was if you add a new node to a telecommunications network so if you have A and B and then you add C what you get is an exponential increase in the power of that communications. Now C and B have got to be able to talk equally as strong as A and B but this concept of Metcalfe's law frankly applies to kind of human networks as well. So every time you add a node you exponentially increase the power of your knowledge and I think the power of the intelligence that is out there. So as we created these joint inter-agency task force these gyatus we called them and we had analysts from all the Intel communities we had analysts and operators from the military and from all the other constituents that were out there fighting the battle the state department, et cetera you had a much better look at the picture on the ground and this was vitally important and again with each node you added you had a better understanding of the picture. So we took this concept of fusion and we started off small with fusion cells we created these locally grown joint inter-agency task force in Iraq and then Afghanistan. We began to partner the Iraq and Afghanistan node when we found out the enemy network did not see any boundaries between Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and other places and then we created this global gyatum where we could look at the problem set globally and each iteration along the way we became better and better. So now let's talk about the intelligence and its role to the policy makers and I will use a little bit again another football analogy if I can. You know when you look at two opposing teams on the football field and if you said again I'm gonna have perfect intelligence on my opponent and I'm gonna be able to steal their signals I'm gonna know exactly what I need to know about each player which one's hurt which one stayed up the night before how fast are they you know everything about their scheme maneuver their defense their offense you know how they're gonna play on the football field and you say I got it I have perfect intelligence on that football team.  So this is the point for policy makers. It's not just about the intelligence it's about using the intelligence to understand what your options are and how to apply those options against the problem set. I had a chance to talk to the Texas football team a couple of weeks ago and I was talking to him about the Notre Dame game the Notre Dame game of 2007 and in the Notre Dame game now this is Notre Dame in the Naval Academy so the Naval Academy had not beaten the University of Notre Dame in 43 years. It was a given that Notre Dame was gonna beat the Naval Academy and they had I think half a dozen four and five star recruits on the Notre Dame team and I asked the players on the Longhorns I said I want y'all to raise your hand somebody out here raise your hand on those of you that wanted to go to the Naval Academy to play football of course nobody raised their hand and I said exactly right. So you had the case of the Dallas Cowboys against the high school team. Well the game goes into its first overtime conclusion of the regular time frame goes into its first overtime goes into its second overtime goes into its third overtime and the Navy beats Notre Dame 47 to 43 and my point to them and it is a point that should not be lost here is Navy studied Notre Dame Navy understood what Notre Dame strengths were and Navy understood where their weaknesses were and they developed a plan they reduced the risk to a manageable level to defeat Notre Dame and that's really when you look at it that's the value of intelligence to policy makers. So we'll talk about the Bin Laden raid. The CIA did a magnificent job along with the NSA and NGA and others in providing us the operators the intelligence for the Bin Laden raid and it was as good as we could have gotten it but the fact of the matter is we didn't know what the inside of the compound looked like because we're just not able quite to do that. We weren't exactly sure whether in fact it was Bin Laden and we thought it was about a 50-50 chance at best there was a lot of things we didn't know about the compound where Bin Laden was but when we presented it to the president it was well Mr. President we're the Dallas Cowboys and they're the high school football team we will be successful on this we have the intelligence we need but our team is better than their team and that is the nature of what policy makers have got to grapple with what are their options? What are their options? What the president did for me in the Bin Laden raid was he said I don't only want you to be the Dallas Cowboy I want you to be the Dallas Cowboys that won the Super Bowl I want you to make sure that there are no that you have reduced that risk to absolutely the smallest possible level you've got great intelligence but now come up with every plan B, C, D and E so that we are buying down all the contingencies we did that through good intelligence we took the intelligence we had and we continued to mitigate the risk so now let's take that scenario of mano a mano a single football team against a single football team the Cowboys against a high school team my seals against what we thought the threat was the Bin Laden compound and now let's look at Dash or ISIS as people call it think of the complexity of a situation like we have in Syria and Iraq this is not the single room in the thought experiment this is a room with another room and another room and another room and another room and another room and another room these are problems on top of problems on top of problems so when you have multiple factors involved you have ISIS you have the Syrian army under a side you have the moderate Syrians you have our allies and the Turks and the Jordanians and the Saudis and the Emirates and the Iraqis you have the Iranians and the Russians so you can see the dilemma that occurs when now all of a sudden what was a nice clean picture gets multiplied a hundred fold so therein lies the problem for decision makers but I would offer that you begin to slice the problem into definable areas and you tackle the best options you can so what are we gonna do against ISIS what are my options how do I build the better team against ISIS how do I build the better team to help build the Syrian military up how do I deal with the Iranians how do I deal with the Iraqis how do I encourage the Iraqis to be more forceful in each one of these cases you build an intelligence portfolio that provides the president the national security advisor options for dealing with these problems the great thing about the options in an area like that unlike the bin Laden raid for me where it was the military against the military target you have the advantage of having the diplomatic option so diplomacy can work economic sanctions can work the military obviously is an option law enforcement is an option so the president has to have the intelligence he has to look at all his options and then in every case he's gotta work to buy down that option so he has the best course to go forward and so I will end just with again a couple of final thoughts here as you look at intelligence and as I said what intelligence brings not only to the battlefield but I think to the policymakers is the intelligence is there to reduce the risk to reduce the risk to a manageable level so then you can apply your options against the risk that you know and sometimes the risk you don't know the intelligence is there also because it's not always just about offense and my business it's almost always about offense it is the nature of special operations to be on the offensive to go against a defended position but that's not always the case the president and the national security team also is looking for opportunities to be able to play defense against the threat that might come from overseas we have to work continuously to improve the nature of our intelligence and when you look at the director of national intelligence and director of the CIA and the other directors and leaders of the Intel community that's what they do every day because the game changes every day the enemy is a thinking enemy the enemy is a reactive enemy and every step of the way you're trying to get ahead of their reaction because every time you come up with a solution I guarantee you it won't be long before the enemy comes up with something that counters that and now you're off on another tangent in order to tackle that aspect of the intelligence so you are constantly battling this loop if you will of the enemy being able to adapt and then again as I said the whole purpose I see it from my standpoint as a military commander and I think from the standpoint of policy makers is that that intelligence helps them with the options that they've got to be able to put on the table to do what is best for the United States of America I thank you very much and Mark wherever you are would you like me to take any questions and I can't tell you who killed Kennedy I don't know that I need a few questions Mark said I can take one or two questions so yes sir Fantastic do you prefer Chancellor McRaven or Abram McRaven or both It's Bill to my friends and I'm happy to be called Bill or Chancellor my time as an admiral is behind me and I'm thrilled to be the Chancellor of the University of Texas system Okay Chancellor McRaven I have a question for you about a media report that came out four years ago regarding a Freedom of Information Act request for the Osama bin Laden death photos Right Did you yes or no did you destroy the bin Laden photos in request to a FOI request by judicial watch so they could not get them Yeah thanks we've answered that question and that's for the record already so you can go back and check the record on that thanks Yes ma'am Sasha Parsons here third year student at UT I had a question for you you spoke a lot about or we've heard a lot today about how policy makers are consumers of intelligence and you spoke in about the very strong relationships between the military and the intelligence community I was wondering if you can go a little bit deeper about what kind of training military officials get about how to be good consumers for intelligence and what kind of questions to ask so they get the information they need Yeah you know that's a great question and I will tell you we have learned so much as tragic as 9-11 was and it was incredibly tragic you know we have learned a lot I think as a nation on how to deal with pulling the interagency together how military officers can be better consumers of intelligence one of the things that really helps if you go back to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986-87 timeframe it told the military that you really need to become joint officers so as a naval officer I was required to spend time with the army and the air force in order to be jointized and when 9-11 happened we realized in the military and the rest of the interagency did as well that if you want to learn and understand how intelligence is built how other people think about problem sets then you have to have this interagency flavor to you so what has become kind of standard at least within the military certainly within special operations is that we cross-pollinate all the time with our interagency partners so a young army captain who in years prior to 9-11 would have gone through the standard schools at Fort Wachuka or someplace else and they would learn how to do army intelligence now what they get an opportunity to do as a young captain, army captain is they will spend time at the CIA or they will spend time at the National Geospatial Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency and they get a whole different look at one how the intelligence is developed how it is produced and the questions to ask because they're around these great folks who do this for a living so by the time that captain becomes a Lieutenant Colonel and a battalion commander in a combat zone they are very well schooled and very well educated in the process and understand the questions to ask because they've been had an opportunity to live with the people that do this for a living. Thank you. Thank you. All right, one more question? Okay, seeing none, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.


Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar, Cloud Identity for Nonprofits, How City Year Streamlines Use Their Access to Advance Their Mission. I just want to go over a few housekeeping items before we get started. So all callers will be muted. If you have questions, you should see a chat box with a left-hand side of your screen. That's where you can ask any questions that you have as the webinar goes along, and we'll try and get to them one by one, and then we'll also have a Q&A at the end. If you lose your Internet connection, try refreshing your browser and reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. If you want to listen to the webinar again once it's over, you can go to techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. To listen to the webinar again, or if you have to drop off early, we'll be hosting the webinar there. You'll also receive an email with the presentation, recording, and any relevant links once the webinar is over. And you can also send us a tweet at techsoup and use hashtag TS webinars throughout the webinar. But if you really want to get the question answered immediately, you can use the Q&A box to the left-hand side. So just a little bit about TechSoup. So we are located in 236 countries and territories. We partner with several technology companies like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec. And today we have Okta joining us along with City Year. So just to give you guys a chance to practice using the chat box, I would love to hear where you guys are calling in from. And I can read a few of them out. So we have Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Milbrook, Southeast Texas, Central Ohio, right down the hall. Somebody at TechSoup is joining us, which is nice. Cool. So we have people calling in from all over the country which is great. So just a little bit about our partnership with Okta. So Okta and TechSoup recently joined forces to help people with cloud identity and single sign-on technology services. And we are offering 25 free licenses. So once the webinar is over and you have a better understanding of how the technology works, please visit techsoup.org slash how-okta-help-non-profits to get more information and learn more about the technology from there. So just a little bit about our speakers today. So we have Christine Sullivan who is the Vice President of IT Services at City Year. She leads the execution of City Year's U.S. Technology Strategy. And she came to City Year at the launch stage of the program, which now serves 28 locations and 4,000 staff and AmeriCorps members. She has a background in project management and customer service. And you'll learn more about her work throughout today's presentation. And we also have Erin Baujo-Felcher who is the Executive Director of Okta for Good which is Okta's Corporate Social Impact Initiative. And she has worked at the intersection of business and social impact for over a decade and has held various corporate social impact roles at Zynga, Yahoo, and Warner Brothers. So now I am going to go ahead and pass it off to Christine. Thank you very much, Seema. Hello everyone. This is Christine. I am very pleased to be participating today and wanted to start out today by just telling you a little bit about City Year and our mission. As Seema mentioned, we are about 4,000 members strong.  So we are highly dependent upon the AmeriCorps model. So one of you and the audience, if you've done a year of service, thank you very much. And hope that you enjoyed learning a little bit about City Year. Basically, we have a model where our AmeriCorps members who joined us for 10 months partner with public schools in our high-need communities to help students graduate from high school on track, on time, ready for college or a career opportunity. The way the model works is we have all of our school team members serving in schools full-time. They are with our students that we serve from the first morning bell through the after-school programs that City Year supports in the communities where we serve. Nearly 80% of our core members are recent college graduates. We recruit and hire AmeriCorps members throughout the year through a very selective recruiting process and basically have our members join us. They serve our students as tutors and mentors in a near-peer model. So working with kids identified as high-risk in an area where they may not be able to graduate from high school without some extra support. So just a little bit about why City Year was founded. And why are we here? What are we looking to solve? And basically the challenge that we are working to address as an organization is the gap between what our students need and what many schools are designed and resource to provide. The students that we work with in high-need communities often face obstacles outside of the schoolhouse that interfere with their ability to arrive at school every day ready to learn. And that's where AmeriCorps members come in. The AmeriCorps members come into our school partners and work with students who often need some extra support. So as you can see on the slide I have up that there is a gap. We have a lot of schools that were built back in the 1950s and 60s that are still operating in sort of a legacy model that don't necessarily provide extra supports that our kids coming to school may need today. And that's where City Year comes in with that extra support and provides intervention time with students that need support either from an academic standpoint, a behavior standpoint, or even getting to school on time. There are a lot of obstacles in the way in the communities that we serve and that's where our members come in to make that difference. And just to give you a little bit more of sort of the problem at hand, because of this gap and the identified need, low graduation rates are pretty... There are reality in the schools where we serve. And just to give you a fact on that, just over half of the schools where we serve, only 63% of our students are making it to 10th grade and in a position to graduate on time with their class. Okay, just one more thing. So what we're looking to do and our mission as an organization is to really have a long-term impact strategy. And with the model that we have in place and this near-peer model, by year 2023, we are looking to dramatically increase the number of students who arrive on track and on time to that 10th grade to graduate successfully with the rest of their peers at grade level. So just a little bit more on our model just to give you some background on us and our mission and why we decided to look into technology and investing in supporting our long-term impact strategy. This slide is really just some demographics on who we are. So as Seema mentioned, we're about 4,000 members strong. We have 3,000 AmeriCorps members that join us for 10 months of service. When we get to our technology strategy you can imagine that that's a little bit of a challenge for particularly a non-profit organization with resource constraints, getting those members onboarded on time to go out and serve in the communities where we serve. We currently have 28 sites across the US where we're serving and we have now close to 400 school districts and school partners where we're serving on a daily basis. The impact and the range of that is we're serving close to 250,000 students on a daily basis. With the long-term impact strategy that I mentioned earlier we hope to be serving over a million students by the time we finish or we reach our long-term impact strategy which is in phase 2 of that work right now. And just a little bit more on this. So I mentioned previously that the 3,000 AmeriCorps members are arriving in school partner sites on a daily basis Monday through Friday. They're there before the first morning bell to meet our students that we're serving. And that's the whole school. We're outside greeting students, cheering them on, getting them into school, making sure that they're getting into classes. And then throughout the school day we are working with children one-on-one who have an area where they need some extra support whether that's academically, they may have a behavior issue, or they're just not coming to school on time. We do a lot of outreach to the community, to parents and guardians to make sure we're understanding reasons that are preventing students from even stepping through the schoolhouse doors in the morning again to get them back on track and graduating with their peers. This is probably my favorite topic to talk about is the technology strategy because I've had the pleasure of working at City Year for six years now and actually watched and helped support the transformation of our technology strategy. But at the root of our mission we're here to serve our students on a daily basis. And we're here to make our AmeriCorps members successful and make sure that every minute they have is pointed towards a student and not spent looking for information to support curricular activities and all of the events that we're serving at the school. So really the question at hand is why did City Year decide to make investments in its tech strategy? Where does identity management fit in? And where did we start our journey to really revitalize what we had back when I started, which was a very disparate environment. Instead of introducing you into sort of our technology roadmap, what I thought I would start with is just how we started thinking about what a technology refresh and investment meant to City Year in terms of its mission and how we support our students and support our AmeriCorps members. When we started this work six years ago we were largely working in a hub and spoke network environment with about 50 systems that we knew were unsustainable. They weren't scalable to help us achieve our mission. So we started conducting due diligence, keeping in mind that we had a strategy to support. But above all, what we built needed to stick. It needed to be sustainable. It needed to be accessible. And technology is really not on the top of mind for our support professionals out in the field helping our students. So I'm going to run through our guiding principles which was really sort of foundational for us when we started out thinking about a tech strategy. And as I mentioned earlier, I've been here for six years and I've watched these guiding principles lead us into an implementation and production environment that is sustainable and scalable which also has octet at the core from an identity management standpoint which I'll get into in a little bit. So connectivity and mobility is core to our model. About 80% of our workforce is arriving at a school partner across the U.S. on a daily basis. They are not working in an office. So being able to get to our tools and our enterprise systems is crucial which is why identity management is at the core of what we have built out. Business intelligence was another area at the forefront of our implementation was something we knew we needed to build to, meaning as systems were introduced into City Year they needed to be integrated and they needed to serve a higher purpose of providing some predictive analytics as we got our main systems installed. This is probably my favorite returning time to school partners as you can imagine if we're out and about in school yards and school houses on a daily basis our AmeriCorps members have much more important things to do with our students than poking around trying to find curriculum or trying to log into a system back at City Year to get work done. So every minute spent trying to poke around and log into a system is one minute away from our students. So overall we've done a lot of analysis and feel that we've had a very good return on investment as far as our technology roadmap and accessibility into the system to return that time to school partners annually. And then finally the secure environment. We handle and are good stewards of a lot of school district data on a daily basis. It's needed for our work. It's needed for our mission. We needed a tool wrapped around our enterprise programs that can help us safely deliver private and sensitive data out to our workforce and be confident that that data is getting into the right hands at the right time for us to make decisions on the ground in the schoolhouse. So ahead of all of the work that we did to implement and move into a new refreshed technology environment, we're all of these guiding principles that have stood the test of time since we began that transformation and are now continuing the work we do with the new systems that we have in place. And Erin, I think I'll send it over to you. Great. Thank you so much, Christine. Hello everybody. This is Erin from October Good. So what I want to do now is zoom out for a second from Christine's story and what she shared about their mission, their guiding principles and how they think about technology to really talk about what we are seeing in terms of what's happening with IT on a much broader level. City years needs are complex. They're challenging. They're incredibly important to their mission, but they're not necessarily unique. So what we're seeing at Okta and how we kind of think about the world is across every sector we're seeing these paradigm shifts that we kind of look at in three categories. And they're outlined here on the slide with some thought bubbles to bring it back home for some of you to maybe experiencing some of these pain points. The first point is that what we say is integration is everything, right? So even the smallest organizations today are using maybe dozens of applications and tools and for larger or more established organizations, you also add in a lot of legacy technologies that are still being used. And so your ability as an organization to make all of those tools work seamlessly together and to keep things simple for your end users depends on how well you integrate. So that's point one. Point two is that people are now the perimeter. This is sort of security issue, right? And so it used to be that your network or your firewall were the security control points for your organization. But today when you think about your users, whether they're employees, donors, volunteers, they could be coming in from any network, any device. As Christine said, they could be coming in from a school site, any location. And so trying to access all of these applications from all these places, the people themselves become the new security control point. That's really important to understand that shift. And then the third shift is that really every organization across every sector is having to become a technology organization. So now, not only do you have to manage technology access for your employees, but you may be expected to understand how to connect with your clients, your beneficiaries, your volunteers, or other stakeholders via the right technology. And this is probably, you know, from what we're seeing, this is probably the most important change that organizations across all industries are trying to embrace. And the reason it's so important is that the big opportunity certainly for nonprofits is that when you figure out how to leverage the right technology to engage all of your stakeholders, you can accelerate your mission even further and even faster, right? So because of these new realities, identity is more important than ever. So what do we mean by identity? It's a simple idea. If you definitively know who someone is, what their role is, and what their relationship is to your organization, where they're located, what network they're on, what device they're using, what applications they're trying to access, what time of day it is. All these details come together to inform who this person's identity is. You know all of this information. You should be able to provide that person with the most productive, most secure, and most personalized experience possible via technology. The reality is both the people in the technologies that your organizations are engaging with are constantly changing, right? You have employees that need to access technologies, but increasingly, like I said, you have volunteers, you might have board members, beneficiaries, who all need to access some piece of your organization's technology. And these people are not sitting behind a desk. They're using mobile devices. They're out in the field, and their relationship to your mission is changing as well. And in addition to that, you know, on the right side of the slide, it's the technologies that they're using are changing. The apps your users need are changing faster than ever before. And because of that, the one constant in this equation is identity. And that's why that sits in the middle here of this picture. This idea of identity management is what Okta was founded on nearly 10 years ago. So our vision and mission is to enable any organization to use any technology today and in the future. We do this by securely connecting an organization's people to the set of tools they want to use. And we as an organization are really energized by this pursuit, in part because it hits on challenges that literally every organization on the planet is grappling with. So if you're grappling with this stuff on the call, you are not alone, and it's hard. But it's something that, you know, we are excited about because we see it as so fundamental to how organizations can really achieve their missions and transform themselves. That, of course, includes nonprofits. And so this is why 18 months ago or so, Okta as a company took the 1% pledge and founded Okta for Good. This is a way really for us to focus our company's resources on helping nonprofit organizations better manage their technology challenges and really redirect resources to fulfilling their missions. It was actually, I want to thank Christine and Sidier. They were customers of Okta long before Okta for Good was a program. And they really, they and a few other really key strategic partners in our early days really helped our leadership to understand, better understand the needs of nonprofit organizations and started to point out the ways that we could really help the sector. So thank you, Christine. Since launching Okta for Good, we've directed over a million dollars of technology to organizations reaching more than 800, I would say a million dollars of donated technology to organizations reaching more than 830,000 users. And those numbers are great. We're proud of them. But I want to let you guys know it's really just the beginning. Very, very early days for Okta for Good. And it's an exciting time for us, you know, in terms of Okta for Good because our nonprofit customers are not only benefiting from this program that we have and from the technology that we have, we really feel like we are able to help. But I think more importantly, they're helping us learn how to better serve the sector. So as we grow and develop, we are really trying to evolve our nonprofit technology offering as well as our philanthropy overall as a company. Really trying to evolve it with the insights and feedback in mind from all of our wonderful partners. And so it's a really fun time to, I think, be engaging with us if you're also passionate about sort of helping companies like ours really shape and think about how we can be more effective corporate philanthropists. And I can talk more about that later if you guys are interested. So, all right. So before I turn it back to Christine, I want to show you guys one more thing. I sort of talked a bit high level on some of these IT paradigm shifts and the topic of identity management, you know, at the highest level. I want to show you this because when we talk about Okta, we talk about integrating all your organization's technologies and giving every user a seamless and secure experience. This is really what we need. So this is the Okta dashboard. So for any user of your organization, if they use Okta or something like it, they log in once with a single username and password and they can access all the applications they uniquely need to do their work. The dashboard kind of illustrates the simplicity of single sign-on and what that means from the end user's perspective. You know, if you're an employee of an organization, you log in once to Okta and then you can navigate seamlessly between Gmail, Box, Salesforce, etc. without having to log in again. This obviously enables your users to focus on your organization's mission instead of remembering passwords and logging into stuff and resetting passwords and all that. So it's really important from the end user perspective for that simplicity and just returning time to them to get their work done. But it's also great for your IT team because it's reducing the number of help desk tickets, password reset requests, and time spent providing and revoking access one by one to these applications. You kind of centrally manage that all in Okta. And again, the idea is returning time, which Christine already mentioned and she'll talk about more in a minute. That's really what this is all about. Time back on the work and on the projects that you and your organization value most. So that's it for me for now. I'm going to turn it back over to Christine to continue her story. Go ahead, Christine. Great. Thank you, Erin, and thank you for the kind words. I think the next slide will help tell the story a little bit more about what Erin was talking about in terms of returning time and why identity management is an important consideration as you're looking at your overall technology roadmap. And if you have sort of some of the same use cases that we have as we were building around security and being mindful of returning time and just that ease of access, I can't stress enough. Every minute counts for our members in front of our students. And by design, we selected and have partnered with Okta to make that seamless for our environment. So just to sort of emphasize that the slide you're looking at is really sort of a high-level architecture graphic of what City Year's Technology Strategy looks like today. And I won't spend a lot of time on it because it even overwhelms me sometimes to look at it. But the net net is we are 100% cloud-based shop. We moved from, as I mentioned earlier, a data center rich environment with over 50 systems to this environment today. So everything that you're looking at on the slide is a web-based or SaaS-based platform. In the box called Core Business Systems, we use a variety of Salesforce instances as well as Workday and Office 365. And those are the main systems that people log into at City Year on a daily basis to do their work. And wrapped around that is our Identity Management Layer, which is Okta. So without further ado, I'm going to move to the next slide. I'll give you a real-time example of what Identity Management can look like and what Okta has offered up to City Year as far as returning time to our school partners and removing mobility issues out of the way for our workforce. So this is an actual snapshot of my portal. And rather than asking our members who are only spending 10 months with us on an annual basis to get acquainted with navigating to systems, we are using Okta and the single sign-on experience to deliver this portal which provides seamless, secure access to all of the applications that they need while doing their year of service. And this goes for our staff members as well. But just think about this versus attempting to navigate across multi-systems and trying to remember which ones to use for what. We do a lot of heavy internal branding here which is why some of the tiles may look a little bit different from some of the applications I just talked about. But this is one-stop shopping for our network. And we've gotten a lot of great feedback from our members who are with us. We do a lot of surveying up front and at the end of their year when they graduate for what their year of service looked like up to and including the technology experience. This has really helped us just to eliminate a lot of confusion. And as you can imagine on the IT side, it's returning time to my team also because we're not spending hours on the phone with sites and individual members trying to reset passwords or navigate to systems when it's necessary to find material for school curriculum or enter time tracking or you name it. It's all here. And if you can get to the portal, you can get to your tools. And you don't need a lot of assistance from IT even just to reset your password because it's all in this experience right here. So I can't say enough about if you're sort of reevaluating where you are from a tech standpoint within your own organization to really take a look at identity management as a service and give off a look too. You can do your own research and see where they wind up in the Gartner and all the reviews online, but they're a great partner to work with. So just before I leave here, the net net is from a member experience. If you're out in a school partner site and you're serving 12 to 14 hours a day and you're working with high-need students that need your time and attention, the last thing you need is to need to navigate back to your organization's technology stack to try to figure out where to locate material to help yourself or where to record time that you've spent with a student. This is really the most seamless thing we have in our environment and easily accessible by everyone just to keep our mission moving forward in order to achieve that long-term impact strategy that I described earlier. All right. And then in closing, I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about returning time. I probably over-emphasized that at this point, but this is really what we look like on a daily basis, even sitting at city or headquarters. This is who we are. We're supporting technology and we're supporting our members out in the field, but our work is really about our students. Our work is about supporting our AmeriCorps members who are key to solving the gap in schools and the overall dropout crisis in the areas where we're currently serving. So our time matters to the students that we serve and the more we scale and the more we move into communities where we can help with some of the problems where early warning indicators indicate that we have a problem and we need to support more students, the better we're going to get at closing the education gap. And really the words in the middle of the screen we believe every child has potential and we know all children can succeed is what fuels everyone in our organization to come in every day and do the work that we do and to do the hard work to support both all of our students and our school partners, but most importantly our AmeriCorps members who are serving in the field and doing the hard work every day. We try to do what we can to make everything easy for them based on what they're faced with and the challenges that they're supporting on a daily basis. So this is the reality. The portal is where you go to find your systems and your tools, but the end result is really about supporting the students we serve out in the communities where we are helping our school partners. And then I guess just to tie it back before I send over to Erin from a result standpoint at a high level, our partnership with Okta has obviously solved a lot of use cases that we were concerned about and not only returned time to our workforce but improved our efficiencies as an IT team and returned time to us which is also important so we can turn our IT staff into other areas where we need to solve other critical business problems. Win-win on that and we are happy to partner with Okta on that. We have a great use case out on our website if you're interested in learning more about that. And then at the end of the day we're really all about efficient access management. We do not believe that anyone at this point with all these great tools available particularly through the Okta for Good program should be struggling with access management. It's a great product. The partnership with Okta made it easy to work through our due diligence and testing and really solved a very large use case we had particularly as we know we will scale and have more members join us year to year. And then improved user experience. You really can't argue with logging on to a portal and having all your tools accessible to you and not having to worry about access or passwords or what you should or shouldn't have access to because it's all mapped out for you and it's easy to use and again hopefully adding value to someone's day when we're also mission focused. And then finally just that secure access particularly with all of the data that we're safeguarding and that we need to get to the core of our values and surveying out at our school partners. It's critical that we have access to real time data to understand how our students are operating and where they need extra supports or have we graduated someone out of our program because they've made such progress. All of that data is easily and securely accessible to our members when they need the most. Erin, I'll pass it back over to you. Great, thank you Christine. So just again to recap on the off the side our mission really is to enable any organization to connect to any technology. And as you've heard from Christine that means something very important for city year it means something very important to any organization. The challenge that is really universal and again that's why we're so excited about partnering to solve it. And Octa for Good commitment really is to extend this idea of connection to our communities and support nonprofits in this journey. I like to use this slide in these pictures because the guy on the far right holding that giant box of stuff is our CEO. And I put this picture on here to demonstrate that this is a commitment that really is coming from the highest levels of our company. This means something very very important to us at Octa that we can have the privilege of helping nonprofits to solve their technology challenges and accelerate their missions. And it's something that truly does come from the top and all across our organization and we're very very excited about being at the beginning of this journey to better serve nonprofits. So in that spirit of support I wanted to leave you guys with just a couple of helpful takeaways. The first is that there's a free resource on Octa's website called the businesses at work report. This is a screenshot of it and the URL is down at the bottom. You can go check it out right now. So the cool thing is that when you are a company like Octa and you have thousands of customers from all different sectors connecting to all different kinds of technologies you can start to see interesting patterns in the data. And so we started the businesses at work report several years ago really to help organizations whether they're our customers or not. This is a free tool but really to help them understand what apps and tools are most popular, are fastest growing, are really gaining traction in the market and just to make sense of all of the options that you have out there. So what you can do with this report is actually a dashboard so it's dynamic and you can search by either types of tools if you want to dig specifically into something like collaboration software and see what the most popular collaboration tools are or you can search by industry. So if you want to say, do you really want to look at just nonprofits and what the most used tools are in that sector you can or if you want to look across all of our different industries you can search by that as well. But really what this is I think is a nice shortcut. If you're short on time and resources but you want to quickly benchmark what the top tools are among again the organizations in OCTIS ecosystem you can use this report and I think we're finding that a lot of folks out there are really starting to leverage as a tool in their toolkit to quickly understand best practice benchmarks and what's out there and what tools to be exploring. So please feel free to take a look at that and I'm happy to answer more questions about that if you have them. And finally, you know, I hope now through both what we shared and what Christine shared in particular that you have a better understanding of how important and really transformative identity management can be for your organization. There are many, many solutions out there. But if you're interested in ours here are the details on our nonprofit offering. So any qualified nonprofit, qualified through TechSoup can receive 25 free licenses of all of our core products. We also offer discounts for additional licenses above and beyond 25. So that's one piece of it, right? It's just getting our technology into the hands of nonprofits and that's what that's really about. But we know that enablement is a huge part of making that donation of technology mean something. And so we also offer 50% of all of our public training courses which are wonderful. We even have a certification program for Okta that is new and growing and very popular. You can take advantage of. And then we like to also bring our community together and we think in many cases the best ways to learn and to sort of accelerate your technology initiatives come from hearing from others. And so we have an annual customer conference called Octane and nonprofits can attend that conference for free. And so that's another piece of what we do. You can find out more information about our offer at the URL below here on the slide or in the link that Sima has been sending around on the chat. And with that I will turn it back to Sima for Q&A and happy to answer any questions. All right, thank you Erin. Thank you Christine. So we're going to go ahead and move over to the Q&A. So if you guys have questions there's the chat box on the left hand side and I'm going to go ahead and read out some of the questions that we have. So I think Erin this question is for you. How would you compare Okta to services such as Google's SSO single sign-on tools? Yeah, so like I said there's a lot of solutions out there. And I think what makes Okta unique, I would call out two things. The first is that we are very intentionally independent and neutral. So that means that we exist as a platform that enables you to integrate to any technology. We are not really trying to sell you anything else. So we don't have an opinion necessarily on what collaboration tool you use or what CRM you use or what donor platform you use. Our mission is about giving you the best platform to connect to whatever you decide is the best technology for your organization. And so we think of being independent and neutral and being very focused on that. That sets us apart and really enables us to focus our energies on our mission, right? Which is to enable any organization to use any technology. So I would say that's one. And then number two, this is a bit more practical. We have a network of 5,000 sort of pre-built integrations. So you turn on Okta and you immediately have access to 5,000 tools and applications that are already ready to go and ready to be turned on within our system. So we like to think that that just makes things easier and again gets you a lot faster time to value by using our tool. And I believe that link was floating around in the chat as well where you can actually see and search what those 5,000 pre-built integrations look like. And I would say maybe the third thing is just again our focus on the nonprofit ecosystem and our desire to help and support nonprofits. We believe that nonprofits deserve the access to the best technologies just like anybody else. And so having an intentional focus on that while it's a nascent program for us, we're very committed to it and committed to seeing that grow. And so particularly for you guys, I would say that's the third one. Great. So Christine, I think this one is a question for you. So are City Year's members accessing the cloud apps from laptops, tablets, or phones? And then in terms of restrictions of how people can use Okta and the security aspect, does it really matter what they're logging in from? Sure. So I think just to follow up on Erin's point because it's relevant to this question as well. What I didn't mention in portions of my presentation is City Year, part of our technology strategy was built to really support bring your own device. You can imagine we have 3,000 members walking around with different types of phones and tablets and whatever we issue out to perform work. So at the core of our technology strategy was we were going to be device agnostic and just really focus on the user experience. So again, can't emphasize how helpful Okta has been in us standing up an identity management platform. And if you're an organization that isn't interested in doing a lot of bake-off and wanting to stand something up, take a look at it. But to answer the question directly, we are device agnostic. So we have people that use laptops. We have people that use Macs. We have people that bring in their own devices. So really the ability to deploy a portal and feel good as an IT person that we are provisioning and providing access to the right enterprise apps for folks on the ground that need real-time data. It's honestly something that we don't do a lot of thinking about because it's deployed. And people have a self-service opportunity to manage themselves in the Okta portal. They can reset their own passwords. And if they choose to do so, they can add their own apps. Going back to Aaron's comments about all of the apps accessible through the Okta tool, it's really plug-and-play. It's returned so much time to the IT department that we're now focused on other things like helping the network with better and faster predictive analytics versus helping people navigate the systems or reset passwords. So hopefully that answered the question for you, Seema. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Okay, so I think we have – I think some people on this call are probably pretty IT and tech savvy. Some people are probably not. So we got a question. Someone said they're a little bit lost and they just want some more clarity.  And I think this question can go to Aaron or Christine. I think this is probably more of an Aaron question. Sure, I'm happy to answer it. Although Christine, I would love to hear your take on it as a technology professional but in a nonprofit if you have an answer to that I'm happy to give the answer as well. Sure, and I think my answer is it's absolutely beneficial especially if you have limited capacity as an IT professional to support your organization. This is really something you stand up and you have to set it up but then you're setting up your user base to really experience self-service and I think kind of nirvana for any kind of organization whether you're nonprofit or not. And the other thing I might offer is a great way to learn more I think is to really kind of also just look at the Octane conference. It's pretty cool and if you can sign up for free there's plenty of sessions and support there to just explore identity management in a way to help you learn more and understand customer use cases because it really is about community versus the product. So just to sort of act a thought about that as well. Great. I'll just add, if you're a small organization but you get to the point where you even are managing four or five or six different cloud applications for your employees that gets to be a bit unmanageable even if you're just looking at those sort of half a dozen or so applications and maybe 20, 25 or so employees with passwords to all of those things with a need to log in every day and navigate among all that stuff and on top of that you don't necessarily have an IT person on staff with somebody else is managing that and on top of that you might have people kind of coming and going more often than you want. I mean these are just realities for small organizations that we work with. OCTA can be a really, really great solution for that even in that very sort of simple circumstance because I think you're still having to manage a lot more than you want to in terms of that level of work. And so there's a lot of bells and whistles and fancy stuff that we do but at the heart of it it really is just about kind of getting in between your people and your technologies in having a one-stop shop to give people access to turn things on, to turn things off and return that time. And so I do think it's a, and we're happy to talk to those of you more offline who are interested in solutions for smaller organizations and help you kind of understand that better. But it is a very, it's still I think a compelling value add and sort of return time solution for those contexts. Great, thank you. So in terms of the 25 free licenses, does 25 licenses, is that 25 users or how does that work exactly? Yeah, so exactly. It's 25 users. So you can think about that as 25 employees, the size of your organization, our core IT products that we make available through Octa for Good primarily serve internal employee users. And so, or in the case of, you know, Christine, we think about AmeriCorps, right? So you can think about who your stakeholders are, but it's 25 licenses across all of those core products for each of your employees. Got it, okay. And then we have another question. It's a more technical question. So in terms of, you know, a lot of applications now have two-step verification and then password change requirements. How does, you know, Octa, you know, and City are also like, when that happens, how does that work within the tool? Great, so this is Erin, and I have a phone a friend person here sitting next to me and I'm going to answer this very technical question. I would like to introduce Takram McLean from our team here at Octa who can answer that expertly. So for many of the applications within the Octa Integration Network, we use SAML to connect Octa to the service provider. And SAML is a much more secure method for logging into an application. And it's basically, it establishes a token between Octa and whatever the application may be, whether that Salesforce or G Suite or O365. In the case of SAML, there is no username and password. It's all token-based, so there is no password reset that needs to happen. For many of the other applications where it actually Octa is storing the username and password, it's a bit more nuanced. There's a couple of different ways that it can be done. A username and password can actually be set by the Octa administrator or it can be set by the actual end user, in which case it's simply stored within Octa. Now the service provider requires a password reset and most of those are flexible within an administrator, so you can actually turn that off within the service provider and have Octa manage any password reset and you don't have to worry about the service provider doing that. But if it does require a reset, Octa can actually facilitate that and store that reset password just as it would store any other password. So that's kind of a long-winded and somewhat nuanced answer, but there's a number of different ways that can be managed. Awesome. All right, sounds like you phoned the right friend. Cool. Okay, so I think we have maybe time for one more question. Someone was just asking in terms of general password security, whether they have Octa or not. Do you guys have any general advice, whether it's links or frequency of changing passwords? Do you have any general security advice for the audience? Christine, do you want to take that one? Sure. So Citi here has, as part of the roadmap security work that we're working on with the network, as you can imagine, a sort of forced password reset is a big change management activity for us as an organization when you have so many people onboarding and offboarding on an annual basis. So having said that, we do have an annual password refresh and right now we are evaluating sort of what the password syntax needs to look like and we'll be assessing whether or not to apply that for next year's members who are joining us. Great. All right, so I think that brings us to the end of the Q&A. Erin, did you want to add anything to that? One quick note from Octa. We're going to throw a link into the chat with some tips and advice from our side as well. Perfect. Awesome. Cool. All right, so Erin, Christine, if you had anything, do you want to add anything else or are you guys good to go? No, just thank you so much for the time and for sticking with us here. Hope it was helpful and we're happy to chat more with anyone following the call. Excellent. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and move into our final slide. So you guys should have seen this link in the chat, but if you're curious about how to get started with the 25 free licenses, just visit this URL and all of the information is there. So again, thank you Erin and Christine for today's webinar. It was really helpful. I'd like to hear from you guys. It's always good for us to know what you learned in today's webinar. So if you could just take a second to use the chat box to share one thing that you learned in today's webinar. It's always good for us to have that feedback and we also have a post event survey that you should get once you close out and you'll also get it in the follow-up email. If you could take a few minutes just to answer those questions. Again, your feedback helps us to take future content and what's valuable to you guys and we can customize our webinars accordingly. We're also on social media so we love social media love. So if you're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, please give us a follow. We post a lot of tips and tricks and how to use and things like that. We also have a blog which is blog.techsoup.org. Again, we post there about two to three times a week. So we would love to share that information with you. And we have a webinar coming up next week called Digital Fundraising Tools and Trends for 2018. So please join us if you have the time. I believe it's next Tuesday at 11 a.m. And lastly, again, I'd like to thank Erin and Christine for helping us today and to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. Thank you all so much for joining and hope to see you on next week's webinar.