our thank you guys for letting us know where you're zooming in from and one thing that you're grateful for. Today's webinar is sponsored by AWS Amazon Web Service and today we're going to be talking to the experts and we're going to talk about how to utilize analytics to better understand your donors. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I'm going to talk about how you can engage today. I know many of you are on our webinars and you know you're so we would love you to put your questions in the Q&A section. If you need the closed caption, go ahead and tap on the little CC at the bottom of your Zoom screen. This is being recorded. You're going to get the recording and the slides by tomorrow. Yes, by tomorrow. And I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Mike Young and Angela. Guys have a great webinar. Thank you for being here. Aretha, thank you so much. Hey everyone. Thanks for joining today's AWS and TechSoup Ask the Experts webinar. Today we're going to be discussing something that is near and dear to all of our hearts, especially this time of year, how to utilize analytics to better understand your donors. My name is Mike. I'm with the AWS programs team here at AWS and our goal is to bring programs to life that are going to benefit nonprofits like yourselves. So the goal of this Ask the Experts series is really to provide some practical guidance, our technical experts, so Angela, incorporate live like how-to demos to give you some real world examples of how you can really bring these technologies into your own organizations and sort of make them your own. So AWS was founded over 15 years ago and some of our earliest AWS customers were in fact nonprofits. Organizations like the Red Cross, Code.org, PBS, all of whom are still using AWS to power their innovation today. So in just a minute, Angela is going to hop on or go off mute, I guess. She's an AWS solutions architect. But first, I just want to get a sense as to who is actually in the room today. So before I hand things over, if I could just get a quick poll within the chat, if you could just put a one in the chat, if you either currently have now or have some time in the past received AWS credits through TechSoup. So one in the chat if you have now or some time in the past gotten AWS credits. Oh, not sure. Okay. Hopefully we can fix that again. Okay. Thanks. So well, now let's say whether you're a current user or not, can you put a two in the chat if you are completely new to AWS? Awesome. Oh, great. Okay. So that's awesome. So it looks like we actually have attendees from both camps, which is great to see. We love chatting with old friends as well as making new ones. And I know somebody had asked to talk a little bit more about the credits. So we'll do that in a second. So for those that are newer to credits, AWS works directly with TechSoup to provide nonprofit organizations with funding to support AWS cloud usage. So basically these credits can be used to offset your cloud technology costs, whether it's storage, compute, running a virtual contact center, or maybe it's like experimenting with machine learning. These credits that you can get through TechSoup, these are applied against your AWS billing directly within your console. And through our new tiered program, AWS nonprofit actually have access to credits worth $1,000, $2,000, or $5,000 annually based on your organization's annual operating budget. So if you haven't already, there are a couple of twos in the chat there, but we encourage you and your nonprofit to take advantage of this program simply by registering with TechSoup just to kick off that process. Again, if you haven't already. Also please keep in mind, as Aretha had said, that this is an opportunity to ask us questions as well. So feel free to type questions over the next 45 minutes to an hour. We'll be happy to support you the best that we can. So that is it for me. Let's get to the good stuff. I'll hand it over to Angela. Thanks. There's my mute button. Hello, everyone. My name is Angela Si and I am a solutions architect here at AWS. I work primarily with nonprofit customers, sometimes your Excel. So I saw that in the chat, we have quite a few newcomers to AWS to give you a little bit of an idea of what solutions architect do. My role is to be here to be your technical guidance as you navigate within the cloud. So I'm here to help you learn what AWS services will help advance your organization's missions and challenges. And I'm a free resource to you. So if you are thinking about going to the cloud, you're not sure where to start.  So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right into why you're here today, which is to learn about how you can utilize analytics to better understand your donors. So we know we want to understand our donors, but let's take a step back. Why is that important? What do we want to understand? And when I say understand and analyze donors, it might not be donors for you. It might be your volunteers and might be your members. So anything that anyone that you're trying to reach out to. So why is it important to analyze this data? Well, first and foremost, we want to get insights on donor behavior. We want to learn what do they care about? Who are our donors? We want to learn who is connected to our organization and how do we engage them? What motivates them to support our causes? And how can we help keep our costs top of mind? So basically, we're trying to understand which population is interacting with us. And with that information, we can either hit the iron wall, it's high and pursue other potential members or donors within the same profile. Or maybe there is a population that you want to reach, but you're not quite reaching and that you see that from your data and now it's time to pivot and reach out to the organization, the population that you're not quite yet connected with. So the next reason why we may want to analyze donor data is donor retention. So donor retention is one of the most common objectives that I hear from the nonprofit customers that I worked with. They want to be able to identify trends, right, to find out what factors are encouraging our donors to continue to give to remain a part of our organization and what factors may cause our donors to start becoming more inactive and to start fall off being very engaged with us. And so why was this important? How can this help us? Well, if we know the trend and we know what the donor activity looks like, then maybe we can get ahead of the curve, right? If we observe that a donor is starting to trail off, maybe it's time for us to reach out to them, reengage with them and bring them back before it's too late. So it helps us develop strategies for communications. And the next reason why we want to analyze donor data is to learn how our organization's brand and mission is being perceived by your community. So I'm sure you all have board of directors that you need to provide reports to. Maybe it's volunteers, maybe it's donors who want to see how you have been using their dollars to do the good work. And being able to provide these reports and showing them the data that backs up the good work that your organization is doing is really important because you are building report and credibility, which then helps them to want to continue engage with you more and have that good reputation within the community within the mission area that you are serving. So last but not least, why we want to understand analyze donor data is to make data-driven decisions. And I'm sure you all have heard the catchphrase of data-driven decisions because I know I certainly have heard that from many of our nonprofit customers. So we want to have these data so we can decide what fundraising events do we want to host next, which fundraising events were successful, which were not. Is there a correlation in the method of contact? Do donors that we reach out through phone tend to give more or maybe donors will reach out through text? Is there any sort of correlation anywhere that can help us better understand what we're doing and what can be improved and help us make the next decision? So on the topic of being data-driven. So Harvard Business Review actually did a study and they found that 99% of businesses want to be data-driven. And I'm sure that's not surprising to you, which is probably why you're here today because your organization probably also wants to be data-driven as well. But guess how many of those 99% of businesses were actually successful in becoming data-driven? If you want to take a guess, go ahead and put it in the chat. So of the 99% of businesses, including yourself, right, that want to be data-driven, what percentage did Harvard Business Review found were actually successful in that mission? Okay, I'm getting 50, I'm getting 10, 25, yeah. So I guess you guys are pretty accurate.  So it turns out 26%, 26.5% of the businesses have been, only 26.5% of businesses have been successful. And I was surprised when I saw that number because collecting data and analytics has been around for three, four, five years now. So I was assuming that it was going to be much higher than that. But it turned out only about a fourth of the organization thus far has been successful in becoming data-driven. So why is that? Why is the number so low? So we identify here actually some of the key challenges that our nonprofit organizations are facing. And so as I'm going through these, feel free to put in the chat if plus one, this is what my team is feeling, or plus two, or plus 1,000, yes, this is exactly what is going on with us to let us know this resonates with you. So first challenge is the explosion of data. These days, everything that you use, everything, the data is being collected. And that results in a lot of data, which means you need to sift through the noise to extract meaning from this data, which takes time and resources, both from a human resource perspective as well as a technology perspective. You need to have your business analysts who are going through all this data and to be able to clean them, transform them. And not only that, you need the technology, right? If you're currently on premises, you need to have the servers, the disk space to be able to hold all these data and to perform that analytics on this vast volume of data. Next, we have an explosion of personas. And what I mean by that is that there's many stakeholders at play. So from an external perspective, like I mentioned, you probably have board of directors that you need to provide reports to.  So you have all these different external parties that you need to report to you. And also internally, you have different teams who have different objectives, right? So if you have a marketing team, they might be interested in data that's related to their marketing efforts, whereas your, let's say, programs team might be interested in how they're outreaching efforts, their event fundraising events, how are those doing? So what does that mean for your IT, for your developers, and for your business analysts? They have to go and create all these different reports to satisfy everyone's objectives. And we simply don't have time for that, right? It's very tedious as well. And another challenge that we hear a lot is the demand for data driven. So we just talked about everyone wants to be data driven, but it's not just about being data driven, but it's about being data driven in time. And so what I mean by that is to give you an example, one of the first customers I worked with when I first joined AWS is a financial institution who had their data analytics solutions on-premises. And this forced them to only be able to run their reports once a month, because that's all they were able to do from a business analyst perspective. They have one business analyst, and you know, that's as much as she could do is once a month. And that was not enough for them, right? Can you imagine a financial institution only producing financial report once a month? We need insights faster than that, right? So let's say you have a, in your nonprofit organization, you have your marketing department who are producing newsletters. And let's say that these newsletters, you know, we're trying to garner donations, but it turns out they're not doing that well, whether it's because the content is not fitting what our constituents want, or maybe they're too repetitive, and so people start clicking on them and reading them. Now, would you rather find that out after maybe the second month of donation, dropping, or not as much engagement from the marketing? Or would you rather find that out every quarter? Probably the first one, right? And so having faster decision making, again, takes time and effort that a lot of nonprofit organizations do not have from a human perspective as well as an on-premises technology perspective. And then on top of that, data is stored in silos. So a lot of the nonprofit organizations I work with, they utilize a software as a service solutions, which means, for example, out of the box software, right? So Salesforce, that's where the donor data is stored, or Google Analytics, where your web traffic is stored, or something else, right? And these software solutions are great because they're out of the box and we can use them right away. But the challenge with that is now my web analytics data is in the Google box, whereas my donor data is in the Salesforce box. And then maybe you have even separate software that you're using to actually collect payment for the donation, and that's it's in itself box. And so to be able to bring all of these data together, again, it's time that you have your developer have to take away to do that ingestion. And it just becomes very tedious. And you have to spare that resource that a lot of times nonprofit organizations do not have. And on top of that, a lot of nonprofit organizations I work with have solutions that are on-premises, that was built by the guy before that no one knows how to change it because the guy is not with us anymore. And so we don't want to touch it because we don't want to break it and it's working. So there's this application with this data that's sitting on-premises. So we need to also try to somehow incorporate that too, right? So data is in silo and that's a bit challenged. And the next is unlocking value of the data. And so what that means is now that you have all this data, what do I do with it? What do I even do with it? What questions should I ask? People, when they have all this data, they have decision paralysis. So think about, if you were going to restaurant and you're handed a book of menu with 10 pages, it's probably, I don't know about you, but it's probably going to take me 15 minutes before I decide what I want to order from that menu, right?  So as humans, we tend to get decision paralysis. And so with this explosion of data, this also saw all of a sudden we have all these data at our hands, but what do I even do? How do I unlock the value of it? What questions do I even ask? Where do I even start? And, you know, that's a challenge. And last but not least, like I mentioned throughout this whole thing, resources, right? We don't have the resources technical wise and human resource wise, and it can get expensive. If this was just something we're trying out, we're not sure if it's going to return on the investment. We're just trying it out, which can turn into an expensive experiment if you're trying it on premises, right? So at AWS, we recognize that these are challenges within nonprofit organizations. So what we've done is we developed a suite of low-code, no-code data analytics tool. And so these suite of tools that allow you to do your data and analyze your donor data without having to write any code, which means you can start experimenting faster.  And also these suite of tools, they're all serverless. And what that means is that you don't have to manage the server, you don't have to manage the compute resources, the storage disk space behind it. All you have to do is worry about how you want to use the service to analyze your data. And so today specifically, I'm going to share three tools with you that are all low-code, no-code, and are all serverless to help your organization get started on getting insights into your donor data. But before I do that, I want to tell you a little bit about Girls Who Code. So Girls Who Code is one of the many nonprofit customers that we have. And they are in an organization that is dedicated to bridging gender gap that is within the tech field. And so they offer programs to students who are traditionally underrepresented in the tech field and provide them with the education and provide them with programs so that they stay interested and get the correct support that they need and to continue on this path when they go to college and get a job and beyond. And since launching in 2012, they have helped 450,000 girls through its program and currently they have around 90,000 college-age alumni. So it's a very successful program. So the challenge that Girls Who Code ran into is that their data analysts were having to spend up to 40 hours just on data preparation before any data analytics were to even happen. And so just the data preparation piece was taking a really long time and it was a bottleneck for them. So the solution they found was to build a 360-degree view of a data hub on AWS where they were able to bring in data from third-party solutions that they were using, such as Salesforce. And they bring all the data into AWS and build this 360-view data hub on AWS so now they can gain insights on how their programs are doing, how their alumni are being engaged, and be able to make real-time decisions on how programs are doing and make decisions on how to better engage their alumni and their donors. And the CFO of Girls Who Code said that because of AWS, they can now have real-time and dynamic data that's coming in, which help them optimize their fundraising campaigns and help optimize their effort in this area. And so my goal is in the next 40, 45 minutes or so that we have left here today is something that I share with you, some of the tools that I share with you that we can offer. I will resonate with you and can help you optimize your organization's fundraising campaigns and optimize your efforts and just like how we were able to help Girls Who Code. So before I jump in to tell you about the tools we have, let's set the scene a little bit. In the report that we published back in 2019, we basically broke down data analytics lifecycle into five and half stages. So stage zero, the half stage, it starts with the data source, where your data is coming from. So this can be on premises, right? If you have excel sheets that you hold on premises, this can be application data. So we have our data source. Stage one of the lifecycle is data injection. How do we bring that data in? And after you ingest the data, it needs to go somewhere and that's where stage two comes in. That's the staging area. And we call that the staging area because typically this is a raw data holding space, right? This data is, like we said earlier, has a lot of noise that we don't necessarily want, which is where stage three comes in, where you're doing data cleaning. You are only extracting the columns that you want. You are maybe joining two data sets together. Maybe you have a data set on donor information and another data set on how much they actually donated and we need to somehow map these together to create one view. So that's where stage three, that's what happens on stage three. Then you move on to stage four, where you're actually doing the analytics and the visualizations and then finally to stage five, where we're archiving that data, maybe because once we do that analysis, we have a dashboard, we've got our insights, we don't necessarily need to hold that raw data anymore and we can push them down to an archival stored to take advantage of cost savings. So starting with stage one and two with data injection and data staging. So the first one I want to talk to you about is Amazon AppFlow, which is a data ingestion tool that provides native connectors to bring in your third party data. So what do I mean by native connector? So with native connector, you don't have to write any code. It is going to be a couple of clicks, a couple, oh, a couple of sorry, I didn't know why it advanced on its own. Yeah, so a couple of clicks and you will get that connector set up and with the minutes, the data will start flowing from your data source into AWS. And so what this tool can do is bring in data from silos. So if you have Salesforce data, if you have Google analytics data, if you have SurveyMonkey data, that's what it can help you do is to bring in data from silos and bridging that gap. And the fact that it is no code means that your business analysts can do with themselves as well. There's no API calls that needs to be written, no code that needs to be written, so your business analysts can easily get in the console and do this themselves. And as far as cost goes, there's no licensing fee. So with AppFlow, you are charged only for the amount of data that you are generating. And so once you ingest that data, if you're not using it anymore, it is not going to charge you. And this offers you speed and agility. So like I mentioned, within a few clicks, it will be ready and data will start to be ingested, which means there's no need for decision paralysis, right? Because you can, also I apologize for the slide going back and forth. It looks like there's some sort of timer that is on that I was not aware of. So I apologize for the auto jumping. But yeah, speed and agility, there's no need for decision paralysis because you can easily try it out, right? Set up the connector, just couple of clicks, start ingesting the data, try to see if you want it. And if you don't want it, no worries, just stop using it, take it down. You're not going to get charged for it anymore. Experiment, right? And it's not going to be an expensive experiment.  So at AWS, security is something that we take very seriously. And so all of our services are built with security as job, zero and mine. And again, this service is serverless, which means that you don't have to manage on any of the underlying compute resources, the storage, we take care of that for you. So with Amazon app flow, there's only two things that you need to do as a user. So the first thing is authenticate to the source. So what I mean by that is if you are, let's say, again, Salesforce user, and I keep using Salesforce because that's definitely one of the most common ones I hear from my nonprofit customers.  And the second thing that you need to do as a user is just tell them, tell them what you wanted to do. How often do you want data to be ingested? What type of data do you want it to ingest? What columns do you want? Do you want just the donor names? Do you want just donor amounts? Do you only want donor information who is donating this amount of data, this amount of dollar amount, or do you only want donors who came to this event, right? You configure the flow. So after you do the authentication and configure what you want for the data injection, you're done. How flow takes care of everything else for you, the compute, the storage, the execution, everything else is taken care of for you. So to really drive home the point of how easy it is to do this, I have a couple of screenshots here to show you. So on the left here, that's how you can configure a flow. As you can see, it is a simple drop down menu where you select the source of the data and then you select the destination of the data where you want that data to go. And then on the top right and then bottom right, the flow trigger and filters are just some examples of how you can set up your data ingestion customization. So you can add filter, like I mentioned, maybe only a subset of data that you want to ingest. And then flow trigger, do you want to run this on demand? Do you want to run it on a schedule? Or do you maybe want to run it any time a specific data is updated, right? So you can get that real time data ingestion data analytics, if that's something that you're looking for. Or if not, right, if you're just trying it out, then do it on demand. That way, you're only ingesting data when you want to. And so I hope this view shows you how it's simple, the UI really looks and how easy it would be for your business analyst to go in and get this set up. Because after you click through these data comes in, no codes needed. So I know I keep saying Salesforce just because that's the one I get asked the most often about. But here's a list of all the connectors that AppFlow supports today. And we are continuously adding additional supported softwares. And so I've also highlighted some of the ones I hear the most in orange to see if any of these sound familiar to you. So Facebook ads, Google analytics, MailChimp, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey are definitely some of the ones that I hear of the most. So just now I took you through how we can ingest donor data using Amazon AppFlow. And once that data is ingested, we typically recommend customers store it inside Amazon Simple Storage Service. So just like its name, Amazon Simple Storage Service is a storage service that we offer. It is a cheap storage service that we have where you can store a large amount of data. And so by cheap, here's what I mean. So with storage, with Amazon Simple Storage Service, we have different tiers. So you have your most frequently used tiers and then you have your cold data tier. With the most frequently used tier, that's obviously going to be the most expensive. But even with that tier, we charge at .023 cents per gigabyte. And so if you're like me where rates are something that is a little hard to comprehend in the head, that will mean that if you're storing one terabyte of data, which is a lot, a month, even in the most expensive tier, it is only going to be $26 a month. Now, like I mentioned, Amazon S3 has the capability to tier your data depending on how often you're using it. So if you are done with the data analytics and you are ready to archive the data, if you move that data down to an archival tier and let's still use one terabyte as an example, it will only be $1 a month for one terabyte of data in our coldest archival tier. And so S3 is a good place to put all of your data. So that is the first part of the data life cycle. Next thing we want to talk about is stage 3, which is data cleaning. So data cleaning, we have a visual data preparation tool. Again, no co-needed. Again, it is also serverless. It has a simple UI for you to use for you to clean your data, transform your data, and that service is called AWS Glue Data Room. A couple of things that I can do. First is that it can help you analyze your data quality. Does my data have any missing values? What is the pattern? What are the outlier values? What type of data is it? And it makes the data cleaning process much easier, especially if you have a large volume of data. And of course it provides capability for you to clean and normalize your data. So it has over 250 built-in transformation. So think about it as a more advanced Excel. So it even kind of looks like an Excel sheet in terms of its user interface. So it has a lot of transformation that you can use. You can join columns together, split the columns, etc. And the cool thing about it is that it will remember what you did. So the steps that you take to clean your data, let's say I drop a column or I change the capitalization of this specific column or I add a calculator field. It will remember all the steps that you went through and create a RUM book. And what that RUM book will be able to do is next time you ingest the same data set, but with updated values, it will automatically apply that RUM book. So you don't have to go in there and clean those data again, which allows you to automate at scale. So if you have donor data that is coming in from Salesforce every week and you want to provide a weekly report, well, now you can do that. You just have to go through the first week of setting it up, setting up that RUM book. And then after that, all the cleaning will be automated for you, which takes away the burden and allows you to provide more reports and more frequently. So again, to drive home the point of how easy it is to use, I've included a screenshot of glue data proof here. So as you can see from the screenshot here at the top of each column, you get a little graphic view of the data, how your data is like, so you get a better understanding of your data and your data quality. And then as you can see from the example transformation on the screen here, this is to join two columns together of long two and large two into just one column of a coordinate. And so there's more transformation beyond that. And on the right side, you can see it's recording all the steps that this business analyst is taking. So then next time they don't have to do it again. So that's on a high level of what glue data group can do. It provides data transformation, which adds to the next step of the architecture that we're building here on how to analyze our donor data. So now that we've done the transformation of our data, the next step we want to do is to be able to analyze this data and visualize this data. And that's where Amazon QuickSight comes in. So QuickSight is our business intelligence tool. It has a unified business intelligent dashboard. And what I mean is that with your dashboard, you can embed it into your website. You can create reports, you can create emails where it automatically sends dashboard as an email to the subscribers. You can export the dashboard as a PDF and print it out if you would like. And the other thing about QuickSight dashboard is that you can add filter. And you might be wondering, okay, like why is that important? So remember in the beginning, I mentioned that a lot of the challenges that I hear from customers is that we'll have the marketing team that they want this report, but then the programs team wants this report, but then my board of director wants this report. And so instead of building out individual report for each team, you can now have a generic dashboard but add in filters so that each individual team can go in there and change that dashboard to accommodate to what they're looking for. So maybe a filter for the communication method. So marketing team can go in there and filter and only see the results of people who responded to emails. Or maybe your board of directors are there to analyze last year's donation compared to this year. So maybe they can have a filter based on the month. So I'm comparing January to January or May to May. You can, they can have a filter where it's filtering down to the date range, for example. So you don't have to build individual dashboards anymore.  So with QuickSight, just like all the other services we talked about today, there's no licensing fee. You only pay for what you use. So in the case of QuickSight, it is pay per user on a monthly basis. And you can say this user is just a reader user or this user is going to be an author user so that you can only pay for what you need or probably pay for what you're using. And it is serverless, auto scaling and provides you with high performance. You don't have to take care of the servers. You just worry about how to use it. And last but not least, it incorporates with machine learning. So if you tuned into our big conference that just happened two weeks ago, AWS re-invent, we released this new service called Amazon Q. Basically, it is our generative AI chatbot. And if you go, if you're using AWS today, you'll go to the console, you'll see the chatbot, or even if you just go to AWS documentation, the chatbot will come up as a gen AI chatbot. So Amazon Q actually integrates with QuickSight. So you can actually directly ask it questions like, you know, how much donation did I garner in the month of May, or generates me a dashboard on, you know, how many people responded to my email campaign, right? So that's something QuickSight can do at all. Which brings us to the end of the architecture that we have. So we started with data ingestion, then we went to data transformation, and now we end up QuickSight, where we're visualizing that data, donor data. So the next thing I want to do is go ahead and show you. And I'm only going to show you Amazon QuickSight out of the three services I've talked about. And the reason why I want to show you Amazon QuickSight is because I saw that earlier, we have quite a few people who are not yet on AWS. And QuickSight, the nice thing about it is that you don't need the first two pieces to get started, because you can directly upload your data to QuickSight and start generating insights. And it has capabilities for you to clean data a little bit too, you know, not necessarily at the production scale and not at the scale that data group can do, but it can do a little bit of data cleaning. And I think it's a great place to start the three services. This is a great place to start because you can build dashboards, see if this is a good investment for your company, see if this is what you're looking for without building up an entire end to end workflow. So with that, I am going to switch my screen share a little bit. All righty. So let me adjust this window so that's real quick. All right, so here you can see a dashboard that I have built. So I'm going to pretend I am a nonprofit organization that is based in Denver because that's where I am based. And I am a business analyst for a nonprofit organization who provides afterschool programs, family-friendly activities for intercity students and their families. And after this past Giving Tuesday, I got the donation report, donation data, and I've built a dashboard out of it with Amazon QuickSight. And so in this dashboard that I've built, you can see on the top left, I've included our logo to make it look more professional. I've added some filters so that, you know, my board of directors, my team, they can filter this dashboard based on what they need. Maybe they want to analyze which geographic region, which communities give the most, and which communities have the most participation rate. Or maybe they're trying to understand which type of donors participate the most, right? Their year membership within our organization. On the top, I also have inside staffs was generated, directly generated automatically by QuickSight. So I have the top three zip codes for total donations so I can see the communities that are the most engaged. I also have the top three donors named who provided the most donations, so maybe it's time for me to send a thank you card to them, right? And on the right, I've also included the sum of donation from this year compared to last year. And as I can see from this key metric that was generated automatically by QuickSight, that compared to last year, we increased our donation generation by 136%. And I made sure to put this at the top so that my leadership can see that right away. And so coming down here, I created two different graphs that are split based on the method of giving. So on the left here, this is a pie chart that's count of method of giving. So how many people gave during Giving Tuesday through each method? So I can see that 246 donations were generated by people clicking on the email link, and that's about 31% of the total donation that was generated. But on top of that, I've also paired with a bar chart where it's telling me the donation amount. So the total donation sum gathered from email link was $43,000. And so this tells me that for this past Giving Tuesday, it seems like my donor, they're most engaged through emails and second by social media and direct website contribution. And it looks like text link is the one that generated the least donation, only 17 of them. So maybe my constituents, the populations that I resonate with, they don't really give through text for some reason. And so coming down here, I also used QuickSide's GeoMap to automatically create a dot map. And so basically the larger the circle, the more donations we were able to garner from that particular area. And so I can see that the spread of my donors came mainly from central to central west of Denver, and quite a few up here in the Boulder, Longmount area. And so let's say, you know, hey, earlier I saw from my insight that the zip code A0228 was one of the top region of donors. So maybe I want to go ahead and investigate, okay, what do we know about this area? So when I built into filter action where when I click on that, it filters the entire dashboard based on only the people that's from this particular region. So if I come back up here to the method of giving, you'll notice that now social media is the number one method of giving in this region. So in my most giving zip code, social media is the way that reaches the most people or garner the most donation. So maybe I can use that information to target that specific area more on social media, right, for my Lakewood region donors. And so let's say I don't want that filter anymore, I'm going to click on that and make it go away. And then coming down here, I created a dashboard for my marketing team too. So we're comparing the newsletter, how well did people donate, did the people who donate, are they the people who also subscribe to our newsletter? So on the left here, we have number of donations throughout the year that were garnered on average and true versus false, did they subscribe to newsletter? So as first glance, we see that for people who are subscribed to the newsletter, they donate about four times a year. And so do the people who are not subscribed to newsletter. So maybe my newsletter's not working. But if I look to the right here where I'm working on the sum of donation instead, I will notice while the number of donation did not really affect based on these newsletter, the amount did. From people who subscribed to newsletter for this year, we got around $94,000 as opposed to $50,000. And to make it more readable, so where you don't have to hover over it, I added a metric here at the end of the bar chart to make the people, my readers easier to read this dashboard. So now I've identified that our newsletters are working. People are donating more dollar amounts as opposed to people who are not subscribed to the newsletter. And then down here, I've just added a couple more charts here to showcase to you other graphs that QuickSight is capable of. You can include a table with raw data, if you would like, additional line graphs, additional waterfall graphs, and additional histogram. So you get the idea with Amazon QuickSight. There's a lot of graphics that you can generate and a lot of insights you can start visualizing, right? Because data numbers, it's hard to see what they mean. It's hard to see the trend until we put them on a graph to see what's going on. And so last thing I want to point out here on this view is on top here, this is the search bar for Amazon Q. So let's say I want to ask it, what method of giving generated the lowest donation? And what it will do is it will generate me a graph to showcase me that, right? So you can ask it questions using natural language, and it will be able to either generate you a graph or it will be able to give you an answer. And you can give a feedback on whether this, whether this answer was correct, what you're looking for or not, and to help it learn and become more accurate. So in the last bit of time we have together, I just want to quickly take you through setting up this Amazon QuickSight. Because you might be wondering, okay, Angela, this looks great and this looks beautiful, and I would love to have this, but how much time did you spend on this, right? It looks like it was a lot of effort to put these together. And I'm going to show you in the next couple minutes. So this is the author view of QuickSight. On the left hand side, I'm going to go to dataset. To create a new dataset, you simply click on the top right where there's new dataset, and as you can see here, there's the upload file. So if you're someone who's new to AWS, you're trying this out, this would be the easiest method to get started. I'm not going to upload a file just now, just for the sake of time, but I'm going to show you the donor data that I did upload here. So when I come into this dataset, it tells me a little bit about my data, how many rows are there, what is the size. I'm going to go ahead and go to edit dataset here on the top right, which takes me to the data preparation view of QuickSight. From here, there's quite a few things you can deal. On the bottom left here, you'll see excluded fields. These were the columns that I dropped. On the top here, there's a plus sign, and you can add calculated fields or predicted fields if you have a time series data. And in the middle here, you'll see actually in this dataset, I have two files that are joined together. And when I click on that, I can see that I joined them together based on donor ID. And so my two datasets are actually my donor data from this year compared to last year. And that's how I was able to compare the two different years' donation. And here in the middle of the screen, you will see a preview of your data where you can change the column name, change the data type.  So this is the transformation screen. I didn't do too much other than dropping a couple of columns that I know I don't need and pairing these two together. So going back to the visual, so coming in here, this is the exact same dashboard that you saw earlier, except from the author's perspective. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new sheet and start from scratch, just to show you how quickly you can start building your graphs. So when adding a visual on the left here, you'll see a list of the fields that I have in my file. I'm going to go ahead and click on the last participated event as well as donation. And boom, immediately, it gives me a bar graph where it tells me, hey, people who last participated in the bake sale, they donated $45,000, close to $46,000. So maybe because that's the most recent event. And so, you know, our organization is still on the top of people's mind. That's why that event, people who went to that event came back and donated the most. Now let's say I don't like the graph that Quickside suggested for me. On the left here, here's a list of different graphs that you can do. So maybe instead of that, I want a donut chart where it shows me the total donation in the middle to help me get a better understanding. If you don't want Quickside to give you a suggestion, you can also directly add a visual right here and directly select the type of graph that you like. So let's say I want to build a horizontal bar graph. And again, let's use last participated event as an example. And then let's use donation as the value. And now maybe I want to group it by years of membership. And now I have each individual last participated event but broken down by how many years have they been with our organization, thus further giving me insights. And from here, I can add more graphs. I can add actions to be able to filter it. I can have filters. And as you saw earlier, it's as simple as dragging and dropping the fields into these specific places. And it will create a graph for you. All right. So the last thing I want to show you within Amazon Quickside is the interaction. So let's say I want to have an interaction where if I click on this, it filters on the right hand side here. That's how you do that. So if I go to interaction and then under action, I can add the action of filtering. I'm going to leave everything as default and click on save. So now when I click on the holiday big sale, if I come to the right hand side of my graph, you'll notice now the other graph was filtered too. So that's how easy it is to add the action in. So within three minutes, I showed you how to build two, how to ingest data, how to clean the data and how to build two very pretty good looking dashboards. And so as you can imagine, the one that I just show you now, it really didn't take me that long. So that's it with Quickside.  But if you're someone who wants to do a little more and wants an intense solution like what we talked about today, one of the ways that we help our customer is by providing these guidances. And within these guidances, a lot of times we'll give you an architecture. So if you'll notice this architecture is very similar to the one we stepped through today. And if you come down here, you will see a link to GitHub where from that GitHub, you can actually launch this exact architecture in your own AWS account without you having to build it yourselves. So if you're one of the people who are already on AWS, have familiarity with the cloud, and want to actually start building a full-blown architecture, this would be a great place to start. All right. So with that said, I am going to share some wrapping resources with you. Let me see here. Finishing thoughts. All right. So today's conversation, we talked about how you can use analytics to generate insights about your donors. We talked about how that's really important and how, why we want to analyze donor data. And we also talked about the challenge of doing that and why it hasn't, you know, a lot of businesses despite wanting to do that has not been successful. But then we also talked about how some of the AWS services specifically today, we touched on the no-code services for data analytics that can help you easily get started. And so as a finishing thought, I want to share with you some resources that we have. So on the left here, you have some blogs and some video demos, some getting started guides, as well as the guidance that I shared with you, screen showed you earlier, the links to them, as well as the QR codes. And if you are ready to get started, or if you want to have a conversation with us, or if you have any questions, feedback about the conversation that we had today, feel free to reach out to us at the email that you see on the screen here, or scan the QR code and submit a contact form. And we are happy to meet with you and learn about your organization and see how we can support you. And so those are the technical resources that we have, but we also have a lot of resources dedicated to nonprofit customers, such as credits that I know a lot of you were asking about earlier. So Mike, do you want to talk a little bit about the credits and other stuff we have? Sure. So first, let me just say, Angela, thank you so much for that demo. It was a really powerful information. We definitely practiced what we preach. We actually use QuickSight really heavily on the program side as well. It's an awesome tool. And like you said, it's really kind of easy to implement. Also, I wanted to address the 10-page menu at a restaurant. If I went to a restaurant with 10 pages as a menu, as long as they have chicken tenders, I'm good to go. I literally get that everywhere I go. So I just want to say thank you all for joining us today. We'd like to invite you to connect. Any questions that you might have, feel free to reach out. In terms of engaging with us, we have multiple programs where we focus on things like partners and marketplace, cloud training, events and educational experiences, and of course, grants and credits. I've actually dropped a couple of links directly into the chat there. If you click on that last link there, that'll take you to the AWS site on the TechSoup page and it'll give you some more information for you. Also, just want to plug, we mark your calendars March 20th, 2024. It does mark our annual eighth annual Imagine conference. That's being held at Amazon's HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia. That's a chance for nonprofit organizations to get together, connect directly with AWS as well as with other nonprofit leaders on how technology can really just help drive impact for your organization and for your mission. With that, again, just like to say thank you, Angela, for joining us today. Again, I'm Mike Yoon. Thank you all for being here. And of course, thank you for your interest in a TechSoup and AWS. And I hope you all have a great holiday season. We'll see you all soon. Thank you.


loss. I mean it's as tough as any other one. I think it will be scaled up a little bit because of the the subway series right they saw it's great to this atmosphere this time of the year they're really good have been playing really good all year and same with us so I think it'll be a little blown up but it's just like every other loss you guys have run the bases really well this year and grown out and I think it's picked off is that just yeah I just know it's who for us you know for me at least I can't get thrown out there just you just can't happen but yeah we've been aggressive all year and we'll probably continue to be aggressive so was that your call to go well you just follow you follow judge judges lead there and he stole double steel and you just can't get thrown out.


The challenge of the Yukon It's Yukon King Swiftest and strongest lead dog of the Northwest Placing the trail for Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted Police in his relentless pursuit of lawbreakers Gold gold discovered in the Yukon a stampede to the Klondike in the wild race for riches Back to the days of the gold rush With Sergeant Preston and his Wonder Dog Yukon King as they meet the challenge of the Yukon It was shortly after the Northwest Mounted Post had been established at the top of Chilcute and White Pass That Sergeant Preston drove down from Dawson with a load of mail from the sourdows in the Klondike His final destination was the port of Skagway But he also carried dispatches for major ward the military governor of the territory Who was making his temporary headquarters at the White Pass customs post He found the major in his office I have dispatches from inspector Conrad in Dawson, sir Sergeant Preston, I didn't recognize you at first in those trail clothes. Welcome to White Pass Sit down make yourself comfortable. Thank you, sir What kind of a trick did you have? Well, I made fairly good time Trail wasn't broken below the Stewart River. We ran into a lot of ice jams in the 30 mile But we made it in 16 days. That's excellent You're the first man to come out of the Klondike since the freezer. Yes, sir The mail was piling up in Dawson and the inspector decided something should be done about it I'm carrying nearly a thousand pounds My orders are to deliver it to the american post office in Skagway And then what?  Yes, sir. At least a week. That should be long enough You know sergeant your appearance gives me an idea. Well, uh, I'll be uniform on the sleds, sir I can change into that before I head down into American territory. No, no, no. I'd rather you didn't That's part of the idea You've noticed the stream of prospectors coming through customs. Yes, sir For the first time with these new posts We're in a position to check every person who comes through either Chilcourt or White Pass At the border a great improvement over the last year, sir. And the necessary one This rush this stampede is growing every minute And the best way to preserve law and order in the territory is to make sure that no criminal crosses the border I agree There are plenty of them in Skagway from competence men to killers And we only know a few of them by sight We need more information about them And I believe you're the man to get for us. I'll do my best, sir. You look like a sourdough a professional dog putcher Such people are popular in Skagway now men who know the territory well Every door will be open to you I suggest that you spend the next week in Skagway They want a list of the undesirables that should be stopped at the border. Exactly. I'll get it for you, sir. Fine And so it happened that sergeant Preston was dressed in a fur cap and parker Caribou shirt reaches and mucklucks as he drove down the white pass trail to Skagway The town was crowded with men from every walk of life and from every part of the world Cowboys and clerks lawyers gamblers merchants thieves There was no law and the dregs of the san francisco underworld preyed on the innocent The sergeant found that the best place to observe these unsavory characters Was in the notorious 303 cafe One afternoon he was seated in the corner when he noticed a young Texan talking to one of the entertainers at the next table The sergeant recognized the girl a singer named sally lee and he had met the young man the night before It was impossible not to overhear their conversation There are the two men I mentioned Tex. Well, just coming in the door. Oh, will you ask him to come over here? I'm not sure that I ought to why not? Well, the friends in a way, but I've only known him for a few weeks. Don't you worry about me, honey? When it comes to business deal, I can take care of myself I told you how much I got for my ranch. Yes, and you shouldn't have You mean I shouldn't trust you. Oh, no, but Oh, what's the use Tex? You just talk too much.  All right But Yeah, they hurt you they're coming. Mm-hmm. Hello sally. Hi Hello Bart kirt This is tex quarry. Mr. Adams and mr. Miller. Glad to know you and sit down. Thank you Sally's told us about you tex Says you're interested in buying a claim. That's right. Well, I think I'll leave you. I stick around sally You're going to talk business. I stick around All right, you have a lot more sense than most of these tender fee tex How do you mean? Well, they won't take the word of sourdough's like kirt and me that most of the ground has been staked already Got the only thing to do is buy a claim. Oh ben clark to him at that Give me less the cricks that I should look in it. Oh What would you say to a claim on the bonanza? I'd say I couldn't afford it claim like that would be worth a fortune Well, uh, you have 20 000 dollars Why? Yeah, I do Not in cash, but the great northwest company here will honor my draft for that one here. Take a look at this deed Bonanza Number 47 above discovery.  Oh, I mean I'd have to make sure this deed was authentic, of course I just can't understand anyone letting bonanza property go for so little Well, man, I don't want to cheat you you could get a hundred thousand for that claim Yep, that used to be our prize didn't it kirt. Yeah, try and get it No one in skagway has that kind of money. Well, if you can't get it, why do you sell? Why don't you work to claim yourself for two reasons tex the country's too rough for kirt Now I've got a family back in the states. They need me I want to go home. We want to sell and get out of here. I don't like to take advantage 20 000 means more to us than 200 would a year from now You wouldn't be taking advantage of us tex sure looks that way to me Oh, you might not even get your money back From a claim on the bonanza. Well, I'll admit that charlie trains washed out close to half a million from number 46 next door downstream Still there's no telling about gold hasn't the claim been proved We've worked enough to hold it how much you get to pay about a hundred dollars It should be a good investment at 20 000 you honestly want to sell as soon as we can for cash tax I can get my draft cashed. Well, then we could close the deal tonight sure Except for the business of checking the deed. I couldn't tell you if it was genuine or not. Oh Just who are you? I know him Hello bill. Hello tax. This is 40 mile bill He just come down from the clondike and he knows the bonanza from one end to the other I'll take his word about the deed. Good enough. Good enough. Here it is bill. All right Do you happen to know the claim? Yes That's telling the truth about it tax. It's only been worked a little and the deed's okay Yes, that's the gold commissioner's signature. I know it as well as I do my own There's nothing wrong with the deed. Thanks. Well, not at all. Will I bring the money here? No, tax. I I wouldn't like anyone here to see me putting 20 000 in my pocket. Oh, sure One of you through here sally at midnight How about sally's cabin tax? Well, that suits me fine. Sure. You're all welcome Anytime after midnight. Good. It's all settled then. We'll be seeing you tax You're sure you'll be able to get the cash or cash or gold. It doesn't matter does it? No Yep, we'll be seeing you I have to change my dress tax It's nearly time for me to sing. You don't think I'm making a mistake. Do you sally? About the claim No, tax You're not making any mistakes. I'm glad to hear you say that Yeah, I'd better get over the great northwestern office right away Tax went to the great northwestern office and cashed a draft They were able to give him the 20 000 in large bills and he returned to his cabin After supper he decided against going to the 303 with so much money on him and spent the evening reading At 12 o'clock he put on his parka blew out the lamp stepped out into the dark street Oh He had only taken half a dozen steps when a man stepped from the shadows behind him and brought a blackjack down on the side of his head Tax dropped in his tracks. Got him Joe. Good work. He must have the money in his inside pocket But the sergeant and king had been waiting across the street and as joe bent over the fallen tax The sergeant stepped in pulled him upright and drove a solid left to his job Joe stepped back and the sergeant drew his gun now get out of here both of you the two men ran The sergeant knelt beside tax he hasn't hurt badly king This is bill tax What happened?  That's safe. You better go back inside and lie down for a minute. No, I can't I know all about your engagement. You can wait a little while. Go on. All right Inside the cabin the sergeant examined tech's head and decided no serious harm had been done. You'll be all right Just rest easy for a minute. Who was it that hit me? I don't know There were two of them probably members of soapy tanners gang lucky you were around bill. It wasn't accidental I heard you tell adams and miller that should be at sally's cabin tonight with $20,000 And if I heard you there was no reason why other people couldn't People who might not be so friendly The 303 is filled with soapy's men. Yeah, sally told me I talked too much. She was right You may have talked too much to her. Oh now wait a minute. I can't stand how long have you known her About a week and you told her all about selling your ranch for $25,000 And that you had the money on deposit at the great northwestern bill. You don't understand how I feel about sally Of course, I do I'm not sure how she feels about you though Well Neither am I exactly tax. I'm not saying that sally may not be perfectly all right. The man has to be careful There's absolutely no law enforcing agency in this town not even a marshal If your money had been stolen tonight, there'd have been no way in which you could have gotten it back No one to turn to I happen to have a gun on my own bill I better carry it from now on not a bad idea, but You're not suggesting that Sally might have No, I won't believe that sally might have what well that she introduced me to adams and miller No one I'd want to buy their claim That it was all a trick to put me on the streets after dark with $20,000 in my pocket There's one way to find out go to her cabin see if they're waiting for you there. I intend to It's a wonderful bargain bill that claim for 20,000. Yes almost too wonderful Well, you saw the deed you said there's nothing wrong with the deed What do you mean before you pay your money tax make sure you get the same deed Have a confidence man as well as gunman in this town tax and one of their favorite tricks In sally's cabin the girl was putting a pot of coffee on the stove while kurt miller played solitaire and barthadams paced the floor Your friend is late. It's only a quarter past 12. Let's make sure you've got everything straight Oh, how many times do we have to go over once more won't hurt Uh, he's sitting at the table where kurt is now We're sitting on either side of him. I show him the deed let him get a good look at it Then I put it back in the envelope place the envelope on the table with my left hand on top of it And hold out my other hand for the money as soon as I get the money in my pocket I spill hot coffee on him. Well, what could be simpler? That isn't the tough part All right He jumps up you and bart get between him in the table and I switch the envelopes Where have you got the other envelope in the pocket of my dress underneath my apron Here showed you where I was putting it. Let's try to switch once Here's the real deal I'll go ahead and do it.  I circle the table so Putting down the coffee pot. No, I switched the envelopes Not bad. That's okay I could do it in my sleep. Well, just because you wait. Here he is now Hello tags. Howdy, Bart. Come in. Come in Hi, Sally Get those cards out of the way Kurt. Yeah, sit down right here. Thanks.  Yeah, right here. Good and I have the deed If you don't mind, I'd like to take another look at it. Sure thing All right, yeah seems to be I'll just put it back in the envelope It's yours as soon as you can count out the dough. Yeah, let's see 1000 Tex counted out the 20,000 Sally watched him closely and just as he was placing the last bill in Bart's hand She picked up the coffee pot and walked toward the table How about a little hot coffee, gentlemen? Kurt hand me those Tanks, I spill it. My hand. What's the matter with you anyway, Sally? That coffee must be scalded. Oh, I'm sorry, Tex Your hands burnt. You got any grease to put on it, Sally? Yeah. Well, hurry. My hands. All right. It was just Here, this will make it feel better. It'll take the sting right out of it There Doesn't it? Sure. That's fine. Well, at least you didn't spill anything on the deed You'd better put it away to I'll take that envelope if you don't mind bill. It's got a gun Yes, and over that envelope, adam This doesn't belong to you. I said hand it over. Shall I take it? Why you keep them covered? Well, I take a look at this, Tex Thanks, I warned you that if these two men weren't honest they might try to switch deeds I was watching through the window as I said I wouldn't I saw Sally spill coffee on you I saw Adams and Miller get between you and the table I couldn't see sally on the other side of the table But I had an idea that while you were thinking of your hand she might be sally You didn't know she didn't Very happy to say she didn't This is the deed to number 47 on bonanza. What I must apologize to you sally and to you two gentlemen Well, that's the 47 the bonanza. Yes, and you're surprised Sally you double crossed us. That's right barter. There's nothing you can do about it You sold a claim that's worth a fortune for $20,000. You won't get away with it. Go on Tex Get out of town get up to Dawson as fast as you can and have the claim transferred to your name I'm not going anywhere sally. I'll find out what this is all about. I'll tell you Tex I'll tell them too. I've been waiting for this moment My name is Sally Lee Carter. Does the name Carter mean anything to you barter? I see you remember And so do you too Kurt six months ago an old man my father The trick work with him didn't it you took his last $10,000 and When he realized he'd been swindled and there was nothing he could do about it He shot himself But he wrote me a letter first and he told me what you'd done to him and how you did it How you murdered him sally I swore that I did even then Tex I I had no idea how but I came up here They were looking for a new girl to help them with their swindles. I qualified I managed to persuade them. There was nothing I wanted in this world, but easy money So they took me on Tonight was my first and my last job though We can call it quits now. Oh, no, we can't I want that deed back. Tex.  You've thrown away a portion. We'll attend to you later But I warn you Tex you'd better take your money and forget the whole business Soapy Tanner's a friend of mine If you try to get out of town with that deed, he'll put a hundred men on your trail You'll never get to the top of the pass alive. Give me your gun Tex. I'll keep them covered until you're across the border No, you're coming with me. Good idea. I'll come too and sally can ride my sled You'll never get to the top of the pass alive.  No anything to tie them up An old blanket you could tear it up. All right. Let's have it All right Well as the sergeant found and gagged the two men part continued to threaten them even if you do get across the border You won't be safe There's 20 of soapy's men who are going to force their way through chilcoot pass tonight. Oh, that's interesting news I'll get word to them somehow They'll catch you on the trail of Dawson. You won't be talking until you're found and that may be a long long time Bart was silenced as a sergeant stuffed a gag in his mouth already sally without the lamp takes right Yeah, I got it. Let's go The sergeant and king Tex and sally headed down the street in the direction of the sergeant's captain They had only gone half a block. However, when they heard voices behind them, they looked back There were two men standing outside sally's door. They began to pound on it Um, bad luck that cuts down our time. We'll have to run come on As they ran down the street one of the men in front of sally's cabin continued to pound on the door The other looked in the window. It's dark. There's no one here. There must be sally from nobody else There's nobody on the cot. Well, where could they be sally and barton kurt? They were supposed to meet Tex here Yeah, we were supposed to get his cash as soon as he left his cabin Hey, he probably didn't show up here. They've gone to his place. That's it. We'll go there. We'll wait for barton kurt outside Hey, wait a minute. I heard something Somebody lying on the floor it's barton kurt. Come on. We got to force this door At that moment the sergeant was harnessing his teeth. Get them quiet king I'm going to take king with me tax Teams used to working without him. You won't have any trouble. Aren't you coming with us? It's time.  That's all it matters to me. The name's preston sergeant preston northwest mounted police They're not left mounted. What are you doing in american territory? Checking on the undesirables We don't want in the ucon. They're only two places. They can cross the border. Yeah, white pass and chillcute. That's right Our main headquarters and most of our men are at white pass There are only two or three on duty at chillcute The soapy's men try to force their way through there tonight. There's a good chance they'll succeed Once they're on the far side of the mountains, we'll have a hard time tracking them down Now here's what I want you to do The break in the mountains called white pass was almost directly above the town of scagway to the east Chillcute was much farther to the north It was the sergeant's idea that tech should drive straight out of town and up the white pass trail to the northwest mounted post at the top In the meantime the sergeant would be heading north through american territory To warn the men on duty at chillcute pass and help them defend it Well, the major will try to hold out until reinforcements arrive, but he better get them there fast Climb on board selling. Thank you. Good going takes right sergeant As techs and sally headed out of town the sergeant and king returned to the main street There was a crowd of men in front of the 303 and at least a dozen dog genes In the light from the cafe the sergeant caught a glimpse of barred space He was talking to sopey, but techs and sally were out of reach now It was only the men at the top of chillcute who were in danger. Come on king The sergeant started to run with king at his side. They left the town behind The trail to sheep camp at the bottom of chillcute pass stretched ahead Hard packed and glistening under the northern lights The coastal mountains the boundary between american and canadian territory Rear their snowy heights to the east Only a man hardened by days of running behind a sled could have maintained the pace the sergeant set At five o'clock he reached sheep camp and for the first time he turned toward the mountains At the foot of the ascent he stopped for a moment In the distance south towards scagway. He could hear dogs. They're coming king up we go King and the sergeant started to climb The trail twisted back and forth up the side of the mountain steep icy and dangerous It took the sergeant nearly half an hour to make the ascent and now sopey's men were at the foot of the mountain But the customs house was nearly reached and someone hailed the sergeant from the opening of the pass What's left of us jim notice you're coming up the trail. What's the matter? What's the hurry see those men down below Yeah, they belong to sopey tanners gang they intend to force their way through the pass Who's here with you carry barns? He's sleeping. He won't be for long Do you have anything to build a barricade across the trail or sled some packing cases? But can three of us that looks like a small arm 20 or 25 I sent a message to the major asking for reinforcements.  All right cross here where we'll have the best field of fire The three men the sergeant and two constables worked with friday haste By the time sopey's men were nearing the top the barricade was completed When the gunman saw it they took to the cover of the boulders on either side of the trail and opened fire The defenders of the pass fired back After the first exchange sopey's men started working their way upward moving from one point of cover to another There's open ground in front. They'll have to show themselves before they can reach escape at it The gunfight continued without any let up and sopey's men crawled closer and closer The bullets ripped into the wooden barrier and barns was hit Constable downy carried him back to the shack while the sergeant held the pass alone Downy returned with more ammunition and the fight went on One hour two hours and the guns were blistering hot before there was a lull We've wounded half a dozen of them sergeant. You think they've had enough? No What time is it nearly eight o'clock? It'll be light in another hour They'll charge us before then they may be getting ready for it now The matter king something behind it you'll see it could be the reinforcements from white pass. I sure hope so The reinforcements had arrived But there weren't many the major and half a dozen men enough to beat back any attack perhaps But not enough to take the offensive The major and the sergeant held the console of war. It's too bad. They didn't have more men available Those crooks are in Canadian territory now. I'd like to move out and round them up We could let them move in sir How do you mean take cover in the cabin in the customs house on either side of the trail Let them break through this barrier and walk into a trap. It could work. I think so, sir Down the slope another conference was being held Bart was urging an immediate attack. There were only three of them to start with We know we got one of them. Maybe two maybe Bart's got something Joe There's only been fired from one spot during the last 10 minutes. There isn't any firing now. All right. Let's go. Come on. Let's go get it The men charged up the slope to the opening of the class There were no shots from behind the barrier. Maybe they're cleared out of their dead. Come on. I'll break it down The packing cases were tossed aside and the outlaws ran on into the pass and then a sharp command rang out From the customs house from the cabin from the cover of rocks on either side of the trail Members of the force opened fire Half a dozen of the outlaws dropped to the ground wounded panic sees the others Their first thought was of escape the next instant they realized it was impossible to survive.  The victory had been won We'll leave the wounded here with a comfortable downy and two other sergeant You may assign the men. Yes, sir. We'll march the others back to jail at white pass I think this is the last time any of the scagway hooligans will try to force away in the uconn Round them up Three days later while a sergeant was going over his report on the conditions in scagway with a major King rose from the floor beside his master and walked to the door of the office But when the sergeant opened the door, he found tex and sally standing just outside. Well, hello sergeant. Hello Texan sally's We don't want to bother you if you're busy. Come in. Come in. All right You uh Said something about a letter to the gold commissioner major. I have it written tex. Here you are Thank you. I'm sure there won't be any difficulty in establishing a clear title of your claim. It isn't exactly my claim It certainly is what I mean is Well, after all I think I know what he's trying to say major I saw these two heading in the direction of the mission this morning. That's right. We've just come back And now your mrs. Corey. Yes sergeant. Well, congratulations my very best and mine And kings with adams and miller and 20 of soapy's gunman in jail. This is all we needed to make our report complete Major, I'm happy to say this case is closed In our next adventure in a cabin on keno creek sergeant preston is speaking to a minor jone I'm hoping you can give me some information about what's going on here at keno creek I I don't know what you're talking about. You know well enough what i'm talking about Blackjack tully and his hired thugs are conducting a reign of terror among the miners Listen sergeant you you don't realize what you're bucking up against If I was to tell you anything against blackjack tully my life wouldn't be worth a plug nickel neither would yours Take my advice and clear out while you're still healthy Yes, a reign of terror is going on among the miners on keno creek, but not a single minor dares to talk Sergeant preston will be facing one of his most difficult cases And his own life may soon be at stake when he sets out to break the power of the king of keno creek Be sure to hear this exciting adventure Next saturday These radio dramas a feature of the challenge of the uconn incorporated are created by george w trendle Produced by trendle campbell enterprises Directed by fred flower day and edited by fran striker The part of sergeant preston is played by paul sudden They are brought to you every saturday and sunday This is j michael wishing you goodbye and good luck until next saturday This program came from detroit Today's most popular heroes of outdoor adventure are heard every weekday afternoon from five to six o'clock Monday, wednesday and friday mark trail roams the wilderness Clyde beady defies the beasts of the jungle and victor borga entertains with five minutes of musical labs Tuesday and thursday there are the indian hero straight arrow riding to uphold justice sky king zooming to supersonic action and bobby benson the cowboy kid entails a western daring Listen to mutuals hour for fun with mark trail Clyde beady victor borga straight arrow sky king and bobby benson over most of these


Hello, my name is Nicole Peters, and I am with Whitney Huffman today. We will be exploring choice boards with hyperlink It is a way to allow your child to show what they know about content in their own words or product Before we get started Don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell to enable notifications for our channel by clicking our logo during the video Also, leave us a comment or check out our related videos by clicking the pop-up cards in the upper right corner Here's how to get started with choice boards with hyperlink Your child's teacher has developed a choice board for them to have options in their learning These options are for your child to get the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of previous or new concepts Using a variety of activities These activities have been created with your child in mind and will help them feel in touch with what they are learning First log on to your child's Google classroom Go under class work Look for the day of the week To see what is expected for them to complete that week Every Monday your teacher will put a new choice board up for the week for you to complete Every Friday you should have completed that choice board Some teachers allow you to pick up to three activities to do for the week and others will have you choose from a column Or a color for that day Once you have read the Instructions for that day of what you are to do For that assignment, then you will click on your choice board and Decide which activity you're going to complete Once you have decided then you click on the link In that box this could bring you to a video or a reading passage or an organizer to complete Please follow the directions on what you will need to complete for this activity You do not need to email or share this with your teacher. Do not turn this in daily You will submit your assignment on Google Classroom once you have completed this Usually on a Friday Be sure to email or go on to your teacher's Google means to ask any questions about logging on or about the assignment Thanks so much for watching be sure to like comment or reply to one of our other videos or share the playlist below Subscribe to our channel and enable notifications that you don't miss out on the next episode Don't forget to check out our other resources like this cast podcast and see what else is going on at Ori County schools Be sure to follow at dear dis is on social media or contact us via email or our blog


Today we're going to review the new Mortal Kombat film available in cinema and for a limited time on HBO Max And we're going to compare it to its predecessor from 1995 to see exactly which film did Mortal Kombat better Major spoiler alert if you have not watched the film yet I am going to be talking about occasional plot points in a little bit more detail So if you haven't seen it yet go watch it come back and enjoy this video Otherwise if you want you can just skip to the timecode on the bottom If you want to jump to the end for a mostly spoiler-free general summary of the film So let's get started Anyone watching this and anyone familiar with 1995 film who got ramped up at that opening sequence when the first thing we heard was Mortal Kombat New length in the logo flying in the Mortal Kombat metal logo flying around the fire and in the titles it set the tone That sequence gave us a taste of things to come and we knew immediately What kind of a ride a movie we were in for this new movie does something similar now Well, it doesn't have the you know the EDM electronic dance music Vibe and beat that the first film had this film goes in a different direction. It's darker. It's grittier It takes itself more seriously and we see that we feel it in the opening sequence in which we go into the background of Scorpion and Sub-Zero's conflict and speaking of gritty That's one of the main differences between these two movies see in 1995 It was criticized for not having the gore and fatalities that are prevalent in the games But the problem though is back in 95 who was the core demographic 13 14 15 year olds They couldn't go see an R rated film So if they made that movie rated R it would have tanked because the core audience couldn't see it but fast forward to today where we're like what 26 27 something like that years later and That audience has grown up so we can handle it now. So this movie I think made the right choice going in that direction I mean there's fatalities ripped right out of the game. It's gory. It's bloody It does not hold back and it makes absolutely no apology as to what it's referencing. So as far as tonality goes I think both films were a fantastic job of Setting up our expectations the beginning and delivering and following through so in terms of tone both movies this round is a draw Story okay when it comes to the story, let's let's call this what this is We're talking about a movie based on a video game that was based on a series of movies The original Mortal Kombat is kind of a blend between Enter the dragon big trouble little China and blood sports all kind of mixed up into one So made into a game and not a movie space in the game So it gets kind of wiggy right there and I want to point out that it was an interview with the director He said that a lot of video game films They're afraid to commit they're afraid to pull the trigger on keeping faithful to the source material And when studios tend to break away from the source material you're breaking that connection with the audience So when I read this interview I was very hopeful thinking yes because that's what we need And that's what the first movie was and we needed a film that was faithful I feel that maybe we have a different definition as to what faithful to source material means There's a lot of changes that I felt were unnecessary Character backgrounds were written some of them the whole overall story doesn't quite congeal And it totally goes off the rails of the main plot of Mortal Kombat to the point where it almost serves as a Spiritual prequel of sorts I mean you have this film that's built around this core concept of the fate of the earth being determined in a Tournament between two different realms that is awesome Except when you consider the fact this film never gets to the tournament the story is more focused on Stopping the bad guys who are trying to cheat from preventing the tournament from even happening to begin with and that's just not what the game was So they cut I give them credit for trying to do their own thing But in my opinion they didn't retain enough of the original story to be all that faithful to Mortal Kombat far far too much Of the film went into justifying the character moves It was all about the characters finding their arcana their special powers when they get that Mortal Kombat dragon symbol either by birth Bright or by defeating somebody who has a symbol the thing with that there was so much in the film It's devoted to the main characters trying to learn their powers It kind of feels Harry Potter ish and starts to fly a little too close to mortal combat annihilation with the animalities And it really isn't necessary. I mean we're talking about a property of Mortal Kombat You don't have to explain the magic to us. You don't have to justify it We're going into it already accepting the fact that there is an interdimensional tournament with sorcerers and guys who can throw Spears from their hands and freeze people the magics are given we don't need to be spoon-fed or justified with a reason as to why it exists in their world and When that was special moves are done. They looked like they ripped it out of the game I'll give them that credit, but to be totally honest the movie feels a lot less of Being faithful to the story then it does the instruction manual It's just all about their special moves and almost feels apologetic as to why those moves are in the film and Realistically so they try to come up with this whole system to explain their powers. It's unnecessary It's got shades of midichlorians in Star Wars. We don't need the magic explained and just unfortunately It doesn't really dive into the mythos that much I mean those who know or are familiar with the entire Mortal Kombat storyline of the 11 main games It has a pretty deep and intricate story There's a lot they could have worked with and this time around this film pretty much feels like they give us all the Exposition that we need in that first title card. It doesn't really develop far past that It's still a good martial arts film and I still recommend seeing it but overall I think a lot of the meat is missing so if you're a Mortal Kombat fan You're not gonna find the the meat of the story that you would probably hope would be there So I have to give this round to the 1995 film because they nailed it They captured the whole feel and essence and story of the game as simple as it was The special effects all right now when it comes to special effects We have to be honest that when the first film came out in 95 CGI was in its infancy I mean we're only talking two years after Jurassic Park and this movie had a very limited budget of about 18 million dollars and Yes, well CG is new. They didn't have the Jurassic Park budget to back it up So it doesn't look great. It has aged horribly and it was kind of cheesy then but now let's take a look at the new Movie the special effects are awesome I would say they're on par with your average blockbuster film the particle effects look gorgeous the fire in the ice in particular Fantastic the CG characters are good enough the overall effects and they hold up And I think these are gonna age a lot better than the original film So this round is gonna go hands-down to the brand new movie. They score with special effects Okay, let's talk about the combat which is probably the main reason anybody played the games to begin with And it's really interested in the movie is all about the martial arts in the fighting We have the 1995 film that really featured actors learning choreograph moves for the movie Whereas this time around they're martial artists that can act and then they're martial artists first So there's a big difference in fighting capabilities. So to crown a victor of this round I have to give it another draw mainly because both films do such a great job Staying within their own lane and the fighting and the action in the choreography Totally fit within the context of what they said Okay, the cast I'm gonna have to condense my thoughts here because I could easily talk for an hour just on this alone For the most part both films to the great job at saying faithful to the characters of the games You have the first movie from 1995 that pretty much sticks to the cast of the first game The main characters with Katana and a cameo by Jacks drawn in and it fits really well within that Those actors completely carry the film. There's great chemistry between the leads We have a very charismatic villain and shing sung played by Kerry who you get to gawa whose presence Felt in every scene that he's in and then we have the animatronic Goro, which even though he's a machine He's got a personality that comes across. He's pretty badass and he's a really fun character Now this new film does a pretty good job with the lead characters You know Sonya Jacks Scorpion some zero very faithful for the most part to their video game counterparts And then we have Kano who while I feel that the casting was better in the original film This Kano does a lot to carry the weight of this movie and he does provide Appropriate comic relief even as dark and gritty when it is he does provide some fun for this film and this film I think handles this characters of scorpions of zero fantastically whereas in the 1995 film They're pretty much, you know, just push off the side as henchmen characters and in the mythos of Mortal Kombat Their story is a huge part of the background and we see that here So we see them as human beings are not just palette swapped characters of each other They have their own personalities their conflict comes across and it carries a lot of the emotional weight of the film So I think scorpions of zero were fantastically represented in this movie, but the villains of Shang Tsung and Goro I was a little bit disappointed in actor Chin Han does a great job at portraying Shang Tsung But he doesn't have the presence. He doesn't we don't see him really do anything He's more of a sideline character He barks orders and observes, but he really doesn't do much here compared to what they you know in the first film And in Goro was in my opinion. He looked great, but he was a disappointment He kind of felt like they just threw him in there as another henchman So he didn't have the weight neither the main villains had the weight that they had in the original film Where the first movie kept to the cast of the first game this time around we have kind of a hand-pick Selection of characters from Mortal Kombat 1 through 5. So some of them kind of feel out of place They kind of feel weird because where we should be in the story. They're not really coming into play yet in those forms So it kind of felt like a lot of those characters were shoehorned in there Even though there are some fun nods to other characters we didn't get to see so there's fan service But sometimes I think they went a little bit too far with the fan service to include characters That didn't necessarily need to be in there and this includes Cole Young He's a brand-new character and he serves as the connection for the audience and he's the main character of the story Which is a weird choice because in a world of Mortal Kombat where you have a plethora of characters to choose from Why make a brand-new one and I know the director said that the whole idea was to give an audience Connection to a character who learned and we got to learn along with them the whole rules of the tournament I get that that's valid, but they did that with the first movie with Johnny Cajun, Sonya We learned through them and there's enough characters to choose from we could have done that with so might not have been that Necessary to create a whole new character, but that being said The character felt underdeveloped. He didn't have a whole lot of weight that he carried it for being the main lead It was a little bit bland of a character, but he's got potential and I would like to see him flesh out And maybe even see him show up in some future games Sadly characters like Natara, Molina, Raco, Cabal, Reptile, and even again Goro were just dropped in this henchman And they really feel the role and they completely feel like they were just there for expendable characters Which just flies too close to Mortal Kombat in isolation So when it comes to the cast the victory has to go to the original 95 film because even though they had less to work With that it was solid They stayed within the context the characters felt fully developed whereas this time around we had some really well Developed characters, then we had a whole bunch that were just kind of there taking up space We're just used as expendable characters, and I think it kind of weighs it down because of that Locations, okay This is one of my bigger gripes of the film too to be quite blunt The locations of the new film are dull and bland the first movie takes place on an exotic island just like the video game and They built these fantastic set pieces even on the limited budget and those set pieces feel like they came from the Universe of the game you can go into just about any single fight in that first movie and take a screenshot And it looks like it was ripped right for Mortal Kombat this time around the movie was filmed in Australia And it looks like it was filmed in Australia, and absolutely no disrespect to Australia I love you guys, but you don't look like outworld it doesn't feel like Shang Tsung Island And at no point did the set pieces really feel like they came out of that Mortal Kombat universe Most of the fights take place in rocks Desert or dirt they do change it up sometimes You know we do get a trailer park we get some urban settings and we get a mobile home bathroom because that was everybody's favorite level from the game Right, and then there was one fight one scene that did take place in the Mortal Kombat Environment, and it was the pit. I saw it come on screen. I was like, oh, okay. There we go It felt like Mortal Kombat. It looked great beautifully designed. It had the whole you know the pit with the spikes in it I was excited. I'm like, okay. Here we go Mortal Kombat, but they didn't use the pit They had a fight on it and they did a fatality, but nobody went down the pit And that just seems like a weird choice because that's the whole gimmick of that level in the game Is that at the end of the the loser gets knocked down into the pit And they didn't even do that although the last scene with the frozen MMA ring was it was a nice touch So overall locations the victor hands down Mortal Kombat one because it just feels and looks like Mortal Kombat This looks like Mortal Kombat in Australia When it comes to the music, I think that both films have great soundtracks that fit within their context That first film no one can deny that when you hear that Mortal Kombat yelled out with the New Line Simon logo and then we saw the metal Mortal Kombat logo in the fire and the electronic dance music kicking in with techno syndrome It was an experience in itself and it set the tone for the movie and that whole first movie's got like a rave You know the electronic dance music vibe, but it worked for it at its time That's not appropriate for this film. This film has more of a traditional score, which fits it much better You know, it carries the emotion better. It sets the tone better because the movie is darker and it's grittier But that being said though, they still pay homage and respect to the the techno syndrome original MK song and We get a whole new pretty cool remix version for the end credits and you hear a little hints of it throughout the score So I think both films did a tremendous job with the music But even that being said I still have to crown winner of the original film because the music was so iconic in that Original movie is that it was almost a character in its own right Okay, so in a nutshell Mortal Kombat 2021 Overall, I think it's a pretty fun martial arts film. It's got great fight choreography It's got some pretty strong lead characters for the most part. The special effects are really impressive and they're fun to watch So it's still a fun viewing experience But that being said I do feel that it suffers from wasted characters bland scenery And it was a really good effort and I still think it hits the dartboard, but it's more along the outer rim It's just that for those who are Mortal Kombat diehard fans I don't think they get into the midfills enough And there's not quite enough meat there to be satisfying in my opinion when it comes to the story and unfortunately in the end I think it comes down to feeling like what it actually is a Stepping stone to set up a franchise. So when it comes to the victory I have to crown the original 1995 film mainly because I left that theater feeling pumped I was excited. I felt like I'd watched a Mortal Kombat film this time around It was still a fun movie was still a fun experience But I felt like I was watching Mortal Kombat characters in a generic martial arts film It didn't quite capture the same spirit So I have to give that to the first movie for being truer to the source of feeling more like a Mortal Kombat movie But I do still recommend seeing this new one It is a far far cry better than Mortal Kombat Annihilation is by by light years But I just don't think it quite hits the elevation of where the first one hit So what did you guys think of the film if you haven't seen it yet as of the release of this video? It's still available in theaters and also on a premiere on HBO Max until May 23rd And it's my understanding that after that day it'll go away But then come back when it's released for home home release So if you haven't seen it, I do recommend it is still a fun martial arts film But let me know what you think did you agree with my analysis or do you think I'm totally full of it Either way, let me know in the comments down below Thank you guys so much for watching and if you're gonna talk about the plot just put a spoiler alert So just be courteous to others. So thank you so much. We'll see you next time


What are your thoughts on inflation and the hike up of the gas prices? Do you think it's it'll ever go away? It goes away when we get rid of these world economic forum puppets that are ruling over the Western world and they need to be dealt with, right? So for example, in Canada, gas prices are going to go up 14 cents per liter. It's starting April 1st, I believe, and tax on Alcohol is going to go up 6 6 and a half percent starting April that includes small breweries So small breweries in Canada, and there's a lot of them, right and distilleries in Canada They're going to get screwed because government wants more money.  People need to understand these large Governments these large governments and these beer crafts these government employees these leeches on humanity They are completely annihilating our economies Why they're annihilating our economies because they want more people dependent on the government to live, right? They want more people dependent on the government to live Why because that gives them more power, right?  One way is function outside of their control systems Many people are right for example in Greece. They say unemployment is you know unemployment is 50% Yeah, right be honest fool. Thank you very much for a follow. So in Greece they say unemployment is 50% You can check the numbers. I don't know back in 2008 or 2010 I looked at what was going sometimes I'm going with really old data, right? But take your favorite country and say unemployment is 50%. Oh We need to make more taxes because a lot of people don't aren't working stuff like this. No unemployment is not 50% Employment on the books is 50% and there's a huge on the ground economy, right? Which is why which is why which is why they want to bring in central back digital currencies because they don't want That on the ground economy from Functioning right they want to take everything.  Who does that? That's mafia. That's mafia, right? And What do you think is going to happen? What do you think is going to happen as soon as Dave's introduced central back digital currencies the economy is going to come to a grinding halt Right and alternate currencies are going to pop up local currencies are going to pop up Okay, not only that they're going to siphon off so much money from the real economy to put into their coffers Meanwhile while in Canada tax is going up gas prices are going up 14 cents per liter Right in there's how many liters in a gallon. I forget it's like four liters in a gallon 3.75 liters in a gallon check on it, but there's three four liters per gallon So for those in the United States multiply 14, let's say 15 by four, right? That's 60 cents more four liters per gallon. Thank you very much. So 60 cents more per gallon going up in Canada because government says so they need more money co2 Greta is Appault how dare we how dare we drive to feed our families, right? So they're kicking up that much. They're raising taxes on alcohol Meanwhile, the liberal government is giving themselves bonuses, right the MPs, right through those salaries going up like 10 grand, right?