It is so great to be here, and the 20th and soon to be 30th get together for an expo that I think bears such relevance for all of us, because it's about certainly stewardship of our environment, it's certainly about innovation in our economy, it's certainly about our national security, and it's certainly about our economic growth as a nation. So hooray, hooray to each and everyone in here. As I walked up to this location, I thought, wow, we should harness the energy from the buzz in this room. There's a lot of excitement and enthusiasm for which I applaud you. I as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and one who serves as Riker on the Environment Subcommittee, and serves on the Energy Subcommittee, one who serves on the Science, Space and Tech Committee, where research is one of those focus points on our committee. And we need that badly. Thank you, thank you for the work you do, for the inspiration you provide. Now is the time for us to get serious about science. It has always been the time, but there's growing science denial. It couldn't come at a worse time. It came so much, it came to be so aggravating, this science denial, that I've authored the Scientific Integrity Act, which will say there will be watchdogs at every federal agency where we invest harder taxpayer dollars on research to make sure that clean research outcome is what's advertised and promoted and shared with the general public. No manipulation, no suppression, no mischaracterization, pure, honest to goodness research shared from the agencies that will be conducting that research. That's what I'm saying to the science deniers in this town, in these buildings. We can't have any more of it. So let's aggressively academically pursue science. Let's share the facts. Now is the time to be those vigilantes when it comes to climate change, climate economy, and certainly the stewardship of the environment. And who does it better than the folks who advance this notion of renewable energy and energy efficiency programs? It is their cutting edge, and not only is it a sound and green outcome, but it's green in terms of dollars because we grow jobs, significant jobs that have a career pathway. The number one job right now out there for society, wind technicians. So what's happening? You know what's happening. Let's make it work in a stronger way. So we need to make certain we underpin the efforts to develop, to incentivize renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. I am distraught at the fact that the president withdrew us from the Paris Accord. It's a scar across our image to the world scene. It's unacceptable. It's saying that the agent that brought the world community to the table is now the agent that is pulling away from a compact of nations around this world, some of the largest world economies that are ratifying that very amendment as we're pulling away. Thankfully, it's a long term process to withdraw, but the statement made by this administration in my opinion is not a welcome one. We need to think outside the barrel. We need to think outside the barrel to make certain that our economy grows in a significant way. And I'm one of those folks that wants to make that happen here. Why? Because we know there are jobs related with these businesses. We know that there's been significant growth in the wind and solar and battery fields with research that's happening, much more affordable renewable energy. It's becoming an economically wise opportunity. And we've also seen, as you know, 2016 was a record year for global heat. The temperature of the earth was a record year. And as you also know, we broke the record in 2014, we broke the record in 2015, and now for the third consecutive year in a row, we broke the record in 2016. So we need to go forward aggressively with the pattern that speaks to legislation and resource advocacy within the budget that underpins these efforts to make certain that research is part of the game, to make certain that energy efficiency programs that are innovative are done with federal partnership so we can shave some of that risk. The answer is not as the President proposed to Congress in his budget, a 70% cut to the EERE division of the Department of Energy. That is simply wrong. It's blinded vision and it is not the thing we need right now. I stand vocally and verbally and strongly spiritually against it because we can do better than that. We do not cut EERE by 70%. Foolish move. Foolish move. And we don't zero out. We don't eliminate our bee. It's been a success program. I've seen what it's done in New York State. I've seen what it's done across the country. That is engineering, that is technology, that is science working in its fullest measure. It needs, it needs in that fullest measure to have the support, the hand-held partnership of federal government. And let's go forward. Let's make certain we underpin everything we do with the vocal support of you and all the efforts you make around this country. Share your message. Let us use that message. Tell us about the voices of success. Tell us about the growth of jobs. Tell us about the environmental improvements. Tell us about the needs for research so we can go there and compete effectively in a global economy. It's a global race like it was for the science and tech field when we were doing our global race on space. I was influenced as a young adolescent by that race to go toward engineering and to go toward politics. It had an impact on a generation that made certain we followed in multiple partisan terms a rather youthful president who led us to be there to fight to be the first nation in the world to place its flag on the surface of the moon. That didn't just happen. It took passion. It took passion and it took investment in technology. We need that same order of investment and passion today as we compete in a global race this time on high tech and innovation and greeting up our thinking. If you don't buy the concept of global warming, of carbon pollution, well then is it so bad to at least drive an agenda that will clean the air that we breathe and more importantly the air that we will share with generations to follow. This is about our children and grandchildren. Their quality of life and you are those partners in that significance of agenda that you've created with your industries. So in closing I would say share your stories. Share your stories with those in this building in these buildings that will be putting together a budget. Share those stories. That anecdotal evidence is absolutely essential to have the right outcome and share it with the administration. Share it with the White House and the significant agencies that need to know there's growth out there, there's potential, there's strength, there's wisdom and there's a passion undeniable. Let's go out and get them. Thank you for the expo. Thank you for reminding us how valuable you are in the American economy.


This systematic review of reviews has identified several key components that are associated with increased effectiveness in interventions to promote dietary and or physical activity changes in individuals at risk of type 2 diabetes. These include engaging social support, targeting both diet and physical activity, and using well-defined, established behavior change techniques. Additionally, increased effectiveness was also associated with increased contact frequency, and using a specific cluster of self-regulatory behavior change techniques, goal-setting, self-monitoring. Longer-term studies suggest the need for greater consideration of behavior-maintenance strategies. This article was authored by Evans Philip H, Rodin Michael, Hardiman Wendy, and others.


All right, good day, everyone. As I said, the topic for today is using the navigation block. And to start with the definition, the navigation block is used to display a menu of links to help visitors navigate around your site. And of course, the navigation block is usually added to a header template part or a footer template part. So let's just have a look at the objectives of today's online workshop. Number one, creating and managing menus. We're going to look at adding a submenu, customizing your menu, adding blocks to your menu, rearranging or removing menu items, and of course, also picking at header or footer patterns. Because, yeah, we add the navigation block to those patterns. All right, so let's go and explore the navigation block. And the first place I'm going to start is, of course, one of my test websites. So let's make our way there. And you will notice if we go to Appearance and Themes, I have installed and activated the 2023 block theme. And of course, today I'll also be focusing on using a block theme, because with the block theme, you have the power in your hands to create and manage your navigation menus in the Site Editor. So let's make our way to Editor. And this will, of course, take us into our Site Editor. Now, where will we be adding our header and footer template pots? We usually add them to our template, right? We add content to our pages and posts, but we use templates to create the structure or design for a page or a post. So we add our header template pots and our footer template pots to templates. So there's, of course, two ways to add your navigation block to a header or a footer template pot. The first place is when you go to templates and you open up, let's say, for example, the page template. And then if we open up the template, we can start modifying the header or the footer. And something else I wanted to point out as well is if I go to pages, let's just go to pages. And let's say we are on our About page, we will notice that we add content to the post content block in a page. We can't customize our header and footer in a page. So let's see what happens if I click on my header. You will notice it says there, edit your template to edit this block. So if you then go to edit template at the bottom right here, it will take us to the page template, in this case. And here, you can, of course, customize your header or your footer. Another place where you can customize your header and your footer is if you make your way to patterns and right at the bottom, you will see template parts. And here, you will see header template parts, footer template parts, and general template parts. But of course, you can also then select a header template part here, open it up, and make changes here. Now for today's example, I have created a custom template to work in. So I'm just going to make my way to templates. I just clicked on the plus icon, and I created a custom template. And I've called it navigation block. So let's open up the navigation block template. And now, of course, I can go ahead and start building my header and my footer. So if I open up my list view, you will notice that my header here already has a row block. And then within the row block, we have another row block. And within that row block, I've got my site logo block. And then I stacked my site title and my site tagline block. So to add my navigation block, I'm going to select the parent row block. And then I am going to click on Add block. And in this case, we want to add the navigation block. Now you will see we actually have two list views. So you will notice I have selected the entire navigation block, the parent block. So you can see that here in this list view. And then, of course, on this side, you've got the navigation list view. Now one of the first things I wanted to highlight is that there is a parent-child relationship between the navigation blocks and the blocks within the navigation block. So of course, if I click on the home navigation item, for example, you will notice that the sidebar settings change. And in this list view, you will see, all right, here's my navigation block. And here are my individual page links that I've added. So this is the parent block. And these are the children that I've added to the navigation block. So let's say, for example, we have selected the home navigation menu, and now we want to select the parent block again. Now there's two ways to do that. You can click on Select navigation in your block toolbar. Or, of course, you could have done that in your list view. So it's always good to have your list view open because it does help you to always see where you are, what you're editing, et cetera. All right. So if you want to see other menus that you have already created, you need to go to the sidebar on the right. And then next to menu, you can click on the three vertical dots. And there you will see other navigation menus that you have already created. And of course, you can create a new menu from here. So let's go ahead and do that just for, for example, so I'm going to click on the three vertical dots, and I'm going to say Create menu. And now I want to start from scratch, building a new navigation menu. So I will click on Add block. And now it's important to remember that there's different things that you can add to your navigation menu. You can add pages. You can add post categories. You can actually add links to other websites. And you can add blocks, but we'll see that now. So for this example, or before we do that, let's say, yeah, for this example, let's just start building our basic navigation menu. And then we can talk about the other things as we go along. So the first thing I want to add is my home page, or my home page link. Now, of course, I've already created this page. Maybe I should jump this side. Just go back to my dashboard, and I go to Pages. So you will notice I have already added these pages. So these links are already created. And if I go to Posts, you will notice I've already created three posts as well. All right, so back here, I've typed in home. And now you will notice on the right, it is a page link. So then I can click on Home. And then I'll click on the Insert again. And this time I want to add, it's a sushi restaurant. So I created a menu page. So another page link, my About page, another page link, and a Contact page. And that's also a page link. And now I would like to add some social icons as well. You'll notice at the bottom, it says Transform. And there's actually three different blocks, or four different blocks that you can add here. But we're after the Social Icons block. So we can add the Social Icons block. And then I'm just going to open up my list view. Make sure you select the parent block.  Select the parent block again, Facebook, parent block again. And let's say WordPress for now. And of course, they are gray at the moment. So let's just add a fake URL. And of course, when you do that, the correct color will appear. So let's just add a XC for now. But now the interesting thing that you can take note of is if you select the navigation block and click on the Insert to Now, it looks a bit different because you've added a different block. Now you can add one of these blocks. But if you click on Browse All, you will see all the different blocks that you are able to add to your navigation block. And unfortunately, it is limited to these only. I know some folks sometimes ask, can you add a buttons block to a navigation menu? And unfortunately, you can't do that yet without code. You can't do it with core WordPress as yet. All right, so let's go ahead and add one more navigation item. So let's say I want to add another page. So then I will select Page Link. But now I haven't created a page that I want to add. So let's see, I want to add a blog page. Let's type in blog. Now as you will notice, there's no blog page yet. So if you go here and if I go to pages, you will see there's no blog page. Now of course you could have done it in the dashboard, but or in the site editor even. But now you also have an option to create a draft page. So let's create this draft page and then press Save. And now we can go to our dashboard. Let's refresh this. There's our blog page now. It's Edit. We can add some content. We are going to Publish. And now we can go back and we can refresh because we've published it now. And now you will notice there's our blog page. Now when you select an individual block within your navigation block, you are able to move in. So there's actually two ways to do it. You can use the mover. So let's for example select the blog page and we can use the little arrows or movers and we can say, oh, we actually wanted to be here. Another option of course is it's a, you use your list view and you can drag it up and say you want it there. It's the longer line. If it's a shorter line, just want to show you. If it's a shorter blue line, sometimes it's a bit clunky. If it's a shorter blue line, it's going to be added as a sub menu. You don't want that yet. So you want it to be a longer blue line. And then of course you can rearrange blocks using the list view as well. And you can even use this list view. So you can even drag and drop it that way as well. Or of course, whoops, wrong arrow. Or you can of course say, I want to use the little arrows or the movers. Right, now the next thing that I wanted to do is I want to add a sub menu. So what you do is you select the relevant navigation item and then in the block toolbar, you will see an option that says add sub menu, this little icon. So I'm going to select add sub menu. I'm going to say add link. Now this time I actually don't want to add a page link. I want to add links to three of my blog posts. So we can do that. So I'm going to type in sushi because you have to type in the name. You can't just merely type in, let's see what happens if you type in post. If you type in post, it says create a draft page. So we can't do that, but I know the name is sushi in my title of my post. And now you will see it says post there. So these are the posts that I've created. And now I can say, okay, the first one I'm going to add is sushi etiquette. I'm going to press enter, type in sushi again. Making sushi, enter again. And the last one is the sushi ship. Now you can even go further and build out your sub menu even more. So if I select this navigation item, I can click on sub menu. And of course you can just keep going and keep extending your menu items or your sub menu items. All right, but I don't want to do that. So I'm going to say undo and there we go. We've got our sub menus below blog. All right, now let's talk about customizing our navigation block a bit. Okay, so if you select your parent block, of course, you will notice there's a settings tab and a styles tab. So if I go to settings, you will notice below display, you can decide if you want the hamburger menu, if you want the hamburger menu to display on mobile or not. So at the moment I've selected mobile. So that means that the hamburger menu will come up on a smaller device. You can even select always, then it will always be a hamburger menu. Even on a desktop, but let's select mobile for now. If you click on the hamburger, there's two different icon options. So there's one with three lines. So we can even select that one. And let's talk about sub menus as well. Here below settings, you will see there's a sub menu option at the moment when I hover over blog, my sub menu appears. But if I select open on click, we will see that if I hover over my navigation item, it does not appear, I have to click. And if I click, then opens up. So I also wanted to mention, if I'm here and my list views open, the way to go back to our parent block is selecting the select navigation icon. So let's say select navigation that will ensure that I select my parent block and I can go back to settings and say, okay, no, I actually wanted to open up when I hover. So let's put the open on click off and show arrow. And then it will open up when you hover. Then next to settings, you've got styles. And now, for example, you can change the text color, the background color, even the sub menu text color and the background color of your sub menu. So let's do a bit of, let's make some changes and let's see this in action. So if we go to topography and let's say I want to change the appearance, it's like appearance. And then let's say we want this to be light. We can also change the size. So let's say we want this to be medium. Can even make a large, but let's go for medium. And the other thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to change the color of the text of my sub menu. So let's do that. So if I go to sub menu and overlay text, let's select that. And I'm going to add a custom color, the same red as you will see in my site logo. So here you can customize if you click here on the top, you can add a hex code. So you can add or you can use the slider here, but I've got a color already and I know the hex code. So it's EB1D27. And now you will notice that if you hover over the blog page, your sub menu has got a different color. So there are many options to customize your navigation menu. All right, so I'm gonna click save for now. And let's turn our attention to our footer then. As you will notice, I've already started building my footer, but I have not added page links to my footer. So let's open our list view and let's see our footer. We've got a roadblock as well. We've stacked the site title, the address and priority part by WordPress. And then on that side, we've stacked a paragraph and on this side, we've stacked our social links. So we're gonna select this paragraph pages and we're gonna click on the three vertical dots and say add after, great. And now we are going to say, we want to add our navigation block. Okay, so we've added our navigation block, but that's not the one we want. So we can easily change that. Of course, you go to the three vertical dots and we can now select the footer navigation, the one that we've already created or you can of course create a custom footer. So let's select footer navigation. That's the one I have already created. But now of course these items are displaying horizontally. I want them to display vertically and that's also an easy fix. And we've selected the parent block. If we go to settings, you will notice next to justification is an option orientation. And at the moment it is horizontal and we can say we want it to be vertical. And now we have some quick links to our pages in our footer. And of course we can add our new blog page if we wanted to, et cetera. I wanted to show you an example of a university website, Georgia State University. And in this example you will notice this type of header. And of course this is achievable. This is actually something easy to build by just adding this is one, two, three, four, five, six different navigation menus or navigation blocks that they've added. Now of course we changed this so we can go ahead and customize, we can customize this as well now if we want to. All right, so that is the first example, the first two examples I wanted to show you. I'm gonna jump over to my other test website. And now I'm actually going to use a pattern to show you how that works as well, a header pattern. So of course I have installed the 2023 block theme again. We're gonna make our way to the editor. And this time we are going to customize one of our proper templates. Our page template. So I'm going to select templates and I'm going to select the page template. And then I'm going to open it up. And now of course we can start modifying our header and our footer in our template. Now you will see there's already a list of all the pages on my site. Now the reason I wanted to show you this as well is because I have not created any, I've not created any navigation menu yet. So when you start a new website and you will see this actually happening, you'll see a page list. So let's just open up my list view and let's open up and select the navigation block. Now at the moment you will see if I even open this up, you will see it's a page list. So at the moment I can't manipulate any of the individual blocks within the parent block because they are all part of a page list. So we can't do anything about it yet. I can't, you'll see the movers are grayed out. So what do we do? Well, of course you can just select edit. Yet the bottom on the right in the sidebar it says edit this menu. This menu is automatically kept in sync with pages on your site. You can manage the menu yourself by clicking edit below. All right, so let's say edit and there we go. Now we can actually start saying, okay, we wanna move these around. Okay, we're gonna look at that in just one sec. For now I'm going to select the header though and say, okay, I don't want this header. I want a different pattern. And of course in WordPress they provide you with different types of patterns. You can of course get access to different types of patterns but when you select your header you can look at some header patterns that come with your theme or some of the core WordPress patterns. So I'm selecting my header. Then I'm going to select the three vertical dots and say replace header. And now you will see I have some patterns to choose from. So all the hard workers have already been done for me. And these are of course core patterns that's part of WordPress. So I'm going to select this one. Full width header with Euro image. So let's select that. Great. Now the next thing that I wanted to do is I want, I'm just selecting this header. I want to focus on this header without any distractions. So I'm going to modify this header in focus mode. So if you select your header and you click on edit you will go into focus mode or template editing mode. And now I can edit this header without any distractions. I won't have to edit it right within my template. We could have stayed in the template and we could have edited there but now you can do it without any things that or anything that might distract you. Okay, so let's select our navigation block and say, all right, it was a page list. I have changed it so that I can edit it. So now I don't want some of these pages. Some of these pages were just added because they were part of my website. So I can select test two, we want to delete that. So I'll select the block, click on the three vertical dots say delete and the sample page select three vertical dots, delete. And now I'm actually going to quickly make some updates to my header to show you what is achievable and when using a pattern. So I've already added a site logo or logo to my media library and I've already added a euro image to my media library. So I'm going to click on the site logo block and I'll select this image that I'm going to use for my site logo and I'm going to select the euro image or the cover block say replace, open media library select. And now the next thing I want to do is at the moment my site title says support. I'm going to say this is Penguin Palace. It's my site's name or my company's name or non-profit's name and there you go. I've created this header using a pattern in a few minutes. So, yes, patterns are, are wonderful ways to build headers and footers. All right, so I am going to click save and I'll show you another example. You can, for example, go to... So this is when I worked in a template and I decided I'm going to actually focus on this template part in focus mode. But if I go to template parts now and I click on header, you will notice my header is available here now. And of course, if I click on it from here, I can edit it. All right, so if I select footer, for example, here in below patterns, I can click on the plus icon and say create template part and say I want to create a footer template part and let's say we call it test footer and create. And now you can start creating it from scratch, but let's use a pattern. Now, I'm not going to use one of the patterns that come with my theme or core WordPress. I'm actually going to go to the Patterns Directory. So if you make your way to the WordPress.org site and you hover over download and extend, you make your way to patterns and you can click here on footers and here are some footers that come with core WordPress. You will notice they all say WordPress.org or you can click on curated and select community and I will see patterns that's been added to the Pattern Directory from community members. And if you like a pattern, you can say, okay, let's copy this pattern, let's make our way back. Now you can just paste. So I'm going to say command V and now we can just paste this pattern. And now we can of course edit the pattern and modify the pattern according to our needs, but I wanted to show you where to add your navigation block, of course. So if I select this block, you will notice this is just a placeholder, right? The pattern doesn't have any page links. This is just a placeholder to show you, oh, we can add our navigation block here. So I'm going to delete this, click on the three vertical dots and say delete that, click on the three vertical dots and say add after and now we can type in navigation and let's open styles and say we want the text to be white. And then of course we need to go to settings and say we want this to be vertical. And there we go. And now of course you can modify it so that it all looks the same. So yeah, I just wanted to show you those two examples where you can use patterns to your advantage. The next example that I wanted to show you was a website I created using a cover block and adding a row block and adding a navigation block to my cover block. So I created this website, a photography website and you will notice I've added my navigation menu here and I've added a sub menu, the one where you actually have to click on first. So let's click on galleries and let's select one of the galleries, action sports and you will see a different header. And yeah, so I wanted to show you how you can quickly create this type of header using a cover block and of course your site logo block and your navigation block and a row block and a spacer block. Okay, I'm just gonna quickly show you how you can do this. So let's make our way to appearance, click on editor, let's go to patterns, let's go to headers. Now of course here you will see the ones that I've created but we're gonna say we wanna create a new header template part. So create template part. We wanna create a header template part. Let's say, let's call this navigation block example and say create. Okay, now we can quickly build this from scratch. So first up, I'm gonna add a cover block and I'm gonna select the image that I wanted. So this image and I'm gonna change the opacity. Moment is a docker opacity. Let's just make this a bit lighter. We can change that now if we wanted to. Okay, let's make this a bit larger. All right, so now we're gonna add a row block and on the left, we are gonna add our site logo. All right, let's make that a bit larger. Make sure you select your row block again and on the right of that, we wanna add our navigation block. Now that's not the navigation block I wanted right. So I'm gonna click on the three vertical dots and say, oh, I want that one, navigation. There we go. Okay, select the row block. Let's press enter and now add a spacer block because we wanna push that up. So we can enlarge this spacer block. There we go. Okay, so now let's select our row block, almost there. Let's make this wide width. But now you'll notice that my, let's just enlarge this slightly as well. Now you will notice that my navigation block is right next to my site logo. Now the way to fix that is to select your row block, open up settings and below justification, there's an option called space between items. And when you select space between items, it's gonna make some space between the logo and the navigation menu. Great. And now we can even add some padding. Let's add some padding around there. Let's select our navigation, whoops, undo. Select our navigation block and say, okay, we want to change the font family. So let's typography, appearance, sorry. And let's also say we want this to be light or even extra light. And let's make that medium or large. Or you can click on set custom size and say, okay, no, let's make this 1.6 or 1.5. Let's enlarge that a bit. And there you go. Let's say we can even say, let's say that's full width. That might look a bit better. So we've made the row block full width. So there I've created a new header using a cover block. If you open your list view, using a cover block, a row block, and then within your row block, I have my site logo, my navigation block and a space of block. So something else that I wanted to point out to you, this is a new feature that landed with 6.3. So I'm going to just make my way to this test website again and let's make our way to the site view sidebar. So when you open your site editor, you will notice you've got access to navigation, styles, pages, templates, patterns. Now we haven't spoken about this part of the puzzle, but you can make simple edits to your navigation block or to your navigation menu from here as well. You won't be able to style it, et cetera, but you will be able to make some simple edits as mentioned. So let's see how that works. If I select navigation here, you will notice I've got four of my navigation menus here. So let's select the first one, hit a navigation. Now here you will be able to, of course, rearrange items. You can delete menu items here. And if you click on the three vertical dots next to the name of the navigation, you'll be able to rename or duplicate or delete this navigation menu. So of course, if you click on the three vertical dots and say rename, I can let's say, I want this to be called main menu. And now I can save. And now, of course, it will be saved as main menu. You can also click on edit here and it will take you into focus mode and you can make some simple edits here, but please note you can't style it here. If you open your list view, you will see that the navigation blocks is actually locked here. So you will see you don't have your settings or your styling options here. It is only for simple edits. To, of course, style your navigation menu, you have to go to template parts or to a template and do it right from within there. All right, so again, if I wanted to now style something, I've got to go, let's go to our example template. It was the navigation block template, open the template and I can style my navigation menu from here with settings and styles. All right, so those are the main examples that I wanted to show to you today. And I'm gonna end the recording here, but then we can hear if there are any questions or things that you want me to clarify or other examples that you wanted to ask about. So yeah, thank you for joining us today. We'll see each other next time.


All right, let's go ahead and jump into things because I know everyone's time is super valuable. Hello again and welcome to a webinar with TechSoup and AWS to understand some best practices in terms of using AWS in general, as well as using your credit. My name is Jayman Gluck and I am accompanied by Angela as well as Oscar and we're gonna be talking throughout the next six years or so minutes about why organizations big or small and all different types of mission areas can find value and using Amazon web services. But I wanna make sure you understand that this is absolutely meant to be engaging. This is not a one-way monologue, but it's really meant to help answer any questions you might have. There is no such thing as a bad question. So please, we'll ask you throughout this webinar to participate. You're already doing a great job by telling us where you're from, but if you have a question, no matter if we're in the middle of presenting, please do put it in the chat and we'll be sure to get to it by the end of this session. So with that in mind, I wanna kick off a little bit about what programs might be available as it pertains to using AWS for your organization. The first thing that I love to emphasize is for any conversation that we have with organizations, again, big or small, is that you're absolutely not alone. We get it, I have been here for eight years and I understand that navigating AWS and understanding the concepts associated with using cloud technology can be really challenging at times, but the good news is that there's an entire team both on this webinar as well as behind the scenes dedicated to supporting your organization and its use of Amazon Web Services. So in the spirit of that support, I wanna highlight a couple of different programs. The first one is the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program and we are so proud to be able to be partnering with TechSoup on a global scale to enable organizations of all sizes with promotional credit to help them start and grow their use of AWS. By merely navigating through the AWS marketplace, your organization can access $1,000 in promotional credit immediately through TechSoup. Additionally, I wanna showcase the AWS Partner Network. In addition to working with AWS directly myself and Angela and our entire team, we have a robust bench of partners that can help your organization get started as well as grow. So we really ask that you come with an idea or a challenge and then our partners can really help you solve for that goal on AWS. Additionally, we have a technical hub which is made up of a variety of different free plan solutions to help your organization get started and grow. So one of those examples could be a call center. If your organization might be exploring using call center technology, then we have solutions already prepackaged to help you deploy that type of solution in the cloud. And then the last is just journey help, really understanding where you are on your cloud adoption journey. Because if you ask me and a lot of my peers, it's really about when organizations, nonprofits, get started on the cloud, rather about if they get started. So even if you're in the infancy of your journey to using AWS, we wanna help you, help you understand what's out there, help you understand what questions to ask, what questions you might not be thinking about. So again, by engaging with this journey help, we can help you no matter where you are on your journey.  Angela, over to you. Thanks, Jamin. Hi, everyone, my name is Angela and I am a solutions architect at AWS. I am so excited to see you all coming from all these different places. I'm originally from Austin, Texas and I did see a couple of people from Austin. I even saw someone coming in from Lubbock and that's where my family is and you don't see people coming from Lubbock every day. So I'm super excited about that. So like Jamin mentioned, I am a solutions architect and I work primarily with nonprofit customers such as yourself. And so today I'm excited to have this opportunity to share with you how some of my nonprofit's customers are taking advantage of AWS and how your nonprofit organization can innovate with AWS and what that cloud journey can look like. So if you're someone who, you know you don't really know much about AWS and that's all good. That's why we're here today. And in fact, I'm gonna start with that, right? So let's start a little bit about what exactly is AWS? So AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and how we started was a couple of years ago, you know, we were amazon.com and after operating amazon.com for decades we realized we got very good at one thing and that is being able to operate technology at a massive scale. So we thought, well, why don't we take this knowledge and this technology that we've developed and share that with other customers with other businesses and organizations such as yourself? And that's how AWS was born. So at AWS, we provide cloud computer technology and essentially what that is is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet with the pay as you go model. And this is very similar to how you get electricity in your house, right? So in your house, you have a light switch.   You just consume it and you only pay for the amount of electricity that you're consuming and nothing more and you don't have to manage any of the infrastructure. And that's very similar to how cloud technology works. So traditionally, right? You might have hardware zone premises for your storage or your servers for your databases but with cloud technology you are now able to access these IT resources through the internet and no longer having to manage the physical resources yourself because we take care of that. You just worry about consuming the technology through the internet and you are only charged for the amount that you're using, right? You're not charged for anything that you are not utilizing or over provisioning you're only being charged for whatever it is that you consume. So in a nutshell, that is what AWS is and what cloud computing is. Now, what I wanna start how I wanna start this conversation is by sharing with you how some of the nonprofit organizations are utilizing cloud and some of the benefits that they realized from utilizing AWS. First one I want to share with you is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So back in 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame they embarked on a project of a librarian archives where they want to digitize their archival content for better preservation. So some of the contents that they have are physical articles or it's tape recordings of ceremonies or artist performances. They are B rules or audio recordings. And so as you can imagine these performances these are very unique footages and assets that they want to make sure that it is very securely protected and well preserved. Well, they were using hardware that was becoming outdated. It was becoming expensive to maintain and not only that it was prone to failure. And so they decided to turn to AWS instead. They were looking for a centralized digital media repository that can handle all sorts of different types of format of their digital assets. That's not reliant on data technology. So they started utilizing our storage services as well as our archival services. And with that they were able to preserve over 2,000 files that total up to over 300 terabytes of unique digital media. And with that they were able to not only securely preserve their digital assets but also this allowed them greater access to their archival content and has facilitated better internal efficiencies because they're no longer having to worry about the outdated physical technology that they have on-premises. The next one I want to share with you is code.org. So code.org is an organization that provides three K through 12 computer science curriculums to students so that they can make the computer science education more accessible. And every year they have this event called the hour of code where over 100 million students from 180 countries log on to their website to participate in this event. Well, as you can imagine, this one week of event brings on a lot more traffic than what they typically see on a day-to-day basis. So they were looking for a solution that not only offers them the scalability to be able to meet the demand of this event but also the high availability so that the students who are participating in this event has a good experience and do not encounter any disruption. And they were able to accomplish that with AWS. They specifically took advantage of a feature that we have called auto scaling. And just like its name, it can automatically scale your resources based on the demand. And so with that, they were able to scale up to meet the demand of the hour code event, but not only that, after the event, they were able to scale back in so they're not paying for the idle resources that they no longer need because the event's over, which traditionally they will have to do on premises. They will have to over provision for the peak demand. And for the rest of the year, those resources are sitting there not being used. And because of that, they saw a $1.3 million in terms of savings, operational cost savings after running their platform inside AWS. The last customer case study here I wanna share with you is the Los Angeles LGBT Center. So the LA LGBT Center, they had a health program and they wanted to spin up a contact center for this specific health services program that they were offering to their community. Well, they were evaluating the different options and they decided to look into our offering of a virtual contact center. And they found out with our contact center, they were able to build a basic contact center within just a matter of minutes. And within the week, they had a fully operational call center taking live calls from their community for their health and services programs. And to show to you the scalability and the capability of this contact center, they use the same contact center during COVID-19, which as you can imagine, their call volume increased by a lot, right? Being the health services programs. But during COVID, they didn't have to add any resources or any additional agents. They were able to handle the increased volume of calls with their existing staff because of the help of our virtual call center. And so they really realized value from this project and they had another project where they had a telethon event that they needed a contact center to take in calls from the TV viewers who were calling in for their donations. And because they had that experience first time around with the contact center, they were able to spin up this special event telethon contact center with a minutes again and able to handle the call volume and had a very successful event for that fundraising event raising to nearly $1.3 million. And so I hope these three cases really showcase to you the different aspects and different benefits that our customers are seeing from running their workloads in CYATV-US. Now, before I dive deeper into some of the benefits of the cloud and tools that we offer, I want to see where the audience is. So put a one in the chat. If today is the first time, one of the first times you've heard about cloud and you're here to learn about what is the cloud, right? Put a three in the chat. If your organization is actively running workloads in the cloud, whether that be AWS or other cloud provider, and put a two if you're somewhere in between. You know what cloud is. Don't quite really have workloads in the cloud yet, but we're working on that and that's why we're here today. So just help me gauge the audience a little better. Thank you. I am seeing a pretty good mix of one, two, then three, and I like that 1.5. All right, that's really good to know. Thank you for that. All right, so it looked like we have a good mix of audience here. That's exciting. That's exciting. So hopefully, you know, if you are someone who's new to the cloud by the customer story, you were able to kind of see where cloud can come in to be beneficial to you. And if you are a two or three, you know, hopefully that gives you some additional ideas of what you can launch in the cloud for your next workload. So the next part, I want to dive a little bit more into benefits of the cloud. So in these organizations that I showcase to you, right, we talk about how they found value with AWS, whether it is migrating or launching new workload inside AWS. So basically what they did is in this very technical world where technology is advancing so quickly, they realized that there's a need for their organization to innovate with the technology. But rather than becoming a tech company themselves, they simply look for ways where our AWS existing technology match what it is that they're trying to accomplish and utilize our existing technology to help them achieve that mission. So in the beginning, I mentioned that I'm a solutions architect. Now, how I typically explain to my customers, what that means is that I am here to understand your organization's mission, right? What it is that you're trying to accomplish, what challenge, what goal you have. And I'm here to help see where AWS technology can fit into your goal. And as part of my solutions architect job is for me to learn the ins and outs of our AWS services, right? Which we have a lot of them. We have services and tools and technology that can support virtually any technical workload. We have some more building block services that you would typically see in on-premises environments such as servers, databases, storage, file systems. But we also have more fully featured services that you can take advantage of right out of the box. So for example, we have machine learning services that maybe you want to have a more personalized email campaign or maybe you want to be able to take your physical documents and scan them and digitize them and extract information from them. We have tools for that. Maybe it is virtual desktop that you want for your organization rather than issuing our physical laptops, or maybe you want to do analytics on your data and display some sort of dashboard for any analytics, right? So we have lots of tools and resources and features and services to be able to help you with that. And the possibilities, I mean, they are endless. And that's part of my day-to-day job, as I mentioned, is see what your mission is and how these technology can match the goal and the mission that you're trying to accomplish. So with that, I want to share with you the five most common benefits that I hear from my customers of how they have benefited from the cloud. Now, first one is being able to easily experiment with new ideas. So let's say that you want to do something with your old data, right? You have a lot of data. You want to do some sort of analytics on it and do a dashboard. Maybe it's donor information, right? Or maybe it's member engagement information. Well, with the cloud, you can easily turn on the service, try it out, see if it works, see if it's exactly what you imagined. If it is, great. Let's expand on that and move forward with that. If it's not, no worries. You can turn off the service and no longer have to pay for it, right? As long as you properly take down the resources, their new contract, no commitments, you stop paying for it. And the other thing is like the credit programs that Jamie mentioned in the beginning with $1,000 from TechSoup, a lot of times we see that that's generally enough to cover organizations that are experimenting in the cloud and try out anything that they want to see if it works, right? And a lot of our services also offer free tier, which allows you to try it out. And basically it's like a little bit of a free trial, right? To try out, see if it's what you need. The other benefit is the ability to scale, to meet your demands. So like the example that we gave earlier with code.org, if your organization has a special fundraising event or maybe it's a special community event or maybe that you really only need your resources from nine to five because that's when people are in office and we don't really need it after work hours or on the weekends. While with the clouds, you are able to scale out when you have increased traffic and scale in or turn off the services completely if you're when you're not using it. And this scalability allows you to quickly meet the demand without having to go through the physical, racking the servers, ordering new servers that you probably have to go through in a traditional on-premises environment. And that also leads to the third benefit which is cost saving, right? So if you are able to scale out only when you need to and scale in when you no longer needed, you're not paying for idle resources that are sitting there or over provisioned resources that you're not really using. And so this allows our customers to see a cost savings, right? And with the cloud, there's no upfront cost there's no contracts, there are no commitments. You really only pay for what you use. The next benefit that they see is innovation. And this really comes in two different ways. So first is at AWS, we're constantly innovating. We are listening to our customers to hear what they need and what is needed in the field currently. And we are putting out new technology, new features and improving on the existing ones for our customers. And what that means for you is that you get to take advantage of the fact that we're constantly innovating and take advantage of the innovative technology that we have. On top of that, because you are taking advantage of the existing technology that we have rather than reinventing the wheels yourself that allows you to save time to redirect that time maybe you are, you know building a new dashboard from the scratch, right? Saving that time to focus on projects that you've been wanting to take on but your team didn't have the bandwidth to or some innovative new project, new ideas that you've been wanting to do but you simply did not have the time to. The last benefit is global footprint. So at AWS, we allow our customers to go global in minutes and that is not an exaggeration or a metaphor. From where you're sitting right now you can turn on the server that's on the other side of the globe in Australia and Asia and Europe. And this is really beneficial for our customers who have a global audience, global members and allows them to bring their application closer to their end user no matter where they are so that they can all have the same great experience. Now, I talked a lot about cloud benefits, right? How great cloud can be but that's not to say it's going to be easy and that there's not going to be challenges along the way. So some of the most common challenges I hear from my customers on why there's blockers about them moving forward with the cloud. First one is cloud sprawl. So this happens when there is no one leading the charge or to their defined best practices and that's when you run the risk of sprawl. So a lot of the organizations that I've worked with they use a lot of third party solutions or software as a service product in their organization. And it makes sense, right? Because it's easier to have those software as product solutions rather than having to do it yourself. But what happens is when you have many different products there is a lack of consistency and that leads to a sprawl. And so when you try to bring it all back together it becomes a little bit challenging because we have so many different standards, protocols that we have to follow.  And it's hard to innovate when your IT team is already overwhelmed as it is and they don't really have the bandwidth to take on any additional projects at this time. And the last one I hear a lot is limited funding. So the perception of having not enough funding to get started or to make significant progress in the cloud. So if you are someone who resonates with one to or maybe all three of these challenges just like Jayman at the beginning and wants to let you know, you are not alone. We have experiences with thousands of nonprofit customers just like yourself and you will be surprised that the resources that we can provide or the ways that we can get around some of these challenges or other unnamed challenges that you may have in mind, right? So to name a couple, we have the TechSoup credit program Jayman mentioned at the beginning the partners that can come in and help you build if your IT team is overwhelmed, right? We also have special teams within AWS that handles migrations or data analytics solutions that can come in and help you, trainings, webinars, and I can go on and on about the resources that we have. And so the bottom line I'm trying to get to here is, you know, I understand that there are challenges but reach out to us, let us know. We have ways that we can help you address this and we are ready to get started whenever you are. So in this next part, what I wanna share with you is how do you get started? So with the challenges, right? Cloud can seem daunting and what I find sometimes is helpful for some of my customers is have a little bit of a structure, right? If you can see where you can potentially go, you can see the next step then it's easier to move forward rather than having no structure and not show where to go next. So this right here is a cloud transformation journey that we've identified. Now of course, every customer's journey is going to look different but through working with multiple customers, we were able to distill these four phases that we see most customers go through. So starting on the top left, we have the envision phase. This is where you are identified what it is that we are trying to do and why. You want to identify your goal, your priorities, what workload are we trying to innovate and what project do we want to take on? After you have the what and why of you want to go to the cloud, we move on to the align phase and so this is where you are identifying who's going to work on this project, how is it going to get done and when is it going to get done? You align all the stakeholders that are involved and then we move on to the launch phase where we are testing it out. We're building a proof of concept inside the cloud, trying it out, does this meet our expectations? If not, let's try it again. This is where you're testing and building and doing more testing and more building. And once you feel like you've reached an product that satisfy the goal that you set out to do, then we move on to the scale phase where you take that proof of concept and make it into a production level application and then we go back to the drawing board, see where are there are additional opportunities for us to learn and grow and innovate. Now, one thing I want to make clear about this is that it's an iterative approach. You, to be successful in the cloud, this kind of cycle will continue to go through because there's always some place for improvement. And so being okay with an iterative approach like this is essential for being successful in the cloud. So with that, I'm going to take a quick pause and see for the audience. So I know we have quite a bit of a diverse audience between new to cloud versus you already have the workload in the cloud. I'm interested to see where are you in your organization in the cloud journey? Do you think you are maybe a one where you are in the envision phase where we are starting a new project, where we're trying to identify the what and the why or two, you're in the align phase, you are identifying the who and how we're going to get it done or three, you're in the launch phase where you're currently testing and building it out the proof of concept to see whether it matches your expectations or you are on the four scale phase where you are now ready to turn that into a production ready environment before we go back to the drawing board. I like the point ones, one, three to four, okay. See some choose. So we have some ideas about what we want to do, okay. All right, now see some threes too. All right, thank you all for participating in the chat. So let me know a little bit about where you stand. Again, I see a pretty good diverse audience. I do see quite a bit of ones and choose a couple of fours and a very unique point one. All right, so what I want to do in this last kind of bit of the presentation is to go through each of these phase a little bit more and show you, well, if you're in, let's say in vision phase, how are we going to move to the next phase where what are some questions we should be asking ourselves and in each of these phases where can AWS come in and help? So in vision, like I said, this is where we are identifying the what do I want to do and why is it that this is what we want to do, right? So that can be maybe we want to cost optimize, maybe we want to have better efficiency, maybe we want to increase member engagement, right? So if you're in this stage, let's take a step back. Let's say you haven't quite really identified the what and the why yet, what can you do? Well, there's really two things. So first I would encourage you to look at your organization's mission, right? Because at the end of the day, that is what your organization is all about and that's why you're here. So look at your organization's mission and let that drive your goal. So giving you an example, let's say that I have a local foods bank, nonprofit organization where I deliver food and I want to set out to improve the food and security in my community. Well, that's my mission. Well, some goals I can potentially have is, well, maybe I want to educate my community about food and security, right? So that I can have better support in terms of resources or donations. Maybe it is have a better, more efficient kind of delivery route, right? If I'm delivering food to the homebound individuals that are in need of our services, right? So now that I have a goal, those are some of the projects that I can work on because of the mission and the goal I'm setting out to achieve, right? So maybe I can work on having a better way to reach out to my community, whether that is having call centers that people can come in and ask questions or it's a chatbot, right? Where they can come to our website and learn a little bit more about what it is that we're trying to accomplish or maybe it's having better website in general, right? That can better inform the public or have volunteers sign up. And so that's one way to approach it if you're not sure on the what or the why is to look to your organization's mission. The other method that you can take is identify some of the manual processes, some of the annoying tasks that you have to do that's taking time away from you to put into your organization. So what I mean by that is, maybe you have a database, a volunteer database that you have to manually back up or maybe you have event pictures that are from events that you host and you have to back up those pictures manually to a tape and ship that off to a third party provider, right? Or maybe it is important documentations that you also have to do that for. So those tasks that take time away from you dedicating those times to maybe come up with a better website and incorporating chat box into your website or building a dashboard to do analytics, right? So find those manual processes as taking time away from you to dedicate towards your organization's mission instead. So how does AWS fit it if you're someone who's in this state? Well, there's not a one size fit all solution, right? So nonprofit, the space of nonprofit is so great because there's so much diversity. We have organizations who's working on healthcare, research or membership engagements, right? Or we have volunteer organizations, we have zoos, you name it, right? It's such a diverse space. There's really no one size fit all solution because everyone is so different. And so what we do here in this space is we have a working backwards session. So at AWS, we embrace the concept of working backwards where we look at the end goal of where you want to be and that is the what and the why of your project, right? And we work backwards from there. We retrace the steps. How can, where does AWS fit in? Where does AWS tool fit in to help you get to that end goal? So that's the envision phase. Let's say you are in the aligned phase now. So this is again, how you're going to do the work, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done, right? So if you're someone who is here, what are some questions you can ask yourself, some items you can address and how does AWS fit in? Well, if you're here, we want to first of all, identify a leader who's going to drive this project, right? This is somebody who's going to bring everyone together who's going to ask the hard question and the right questions to help drive the team forward. And you also want to identify the who of the project. And that's not just the people who are going to be working on the project, but also the end user, who's going to end up consuming this product, right? What is it that they need, right? Getting all these different stakeholders together and have everyone voice out their fears, their blockers and their hesitation because getting these fears out, voice them early and get everyone on the same page is really important to have a successful co-journey because we want to make sure that everyone is committed and ready to start. Now, the other thing that we want to make sure to do in this phase is have goals and success criteria. So, is it that our success criteria is we reduce the cost by 30% or is it that we improve our delivery time of the product by five minutes, right? What is that success criteria? How do you know that you've succeeded at the end of this project to what you set out to do? And so where AWS can come in and help during this stage is for what we can help with the blockers, right? So the special programs I mentioned, we can help with migration. We have teams that come in to help you architect data analytics solution. We have partners who can help you build. We have credit programs, right? That can help you with the blockers. And so voicing your fears, your hesitation, blockers to your AWS team and allow us to help find ways to work around that. And a lot of the tools that we offer are also free to you, right? So for example, I am here, like I mentioned, to help you see how AWS technology can fit in your mission. While me and my team are solutions architect as well as specialists solutions architect to dive into specific domains, we are free resource to you and your team. And so really the ways that we can help in this stage is endless. So just reach out to us and let us know what your concerns are. So we address the concerns. We have identified the success criteria. Now you're in the launch phase where you're testing and building and putting the pilot project together and see what it looks like. So the question to keep in mind here is how will you know if you were successful, right? So some of the items that you can address or think about here is, first of all, identify what you want to build in your approval concept. And if you are not sure, well, how do I know what features I want to include? Look back to your initial goals, right? Remember the working backwards. What are you here set up to do? Don't get sidetracked by the technology and the services, focus on the big picture. Your pilot, your features should have a clear goal and a metric to demonstrate the value and on how it maps back to the success criteria that we've set out, right? And this is where you want to iterate and build and test. And you should always be asking yourself during this iterative process of testing and building, where is the value lie, right? And identify what technical constraint is blocking you from realizing that value. And reaching that success criteria. I mean, reaching that success criteria, yeah. So how can AWS help here? So AWS can come in and help you understand your goal and project and help you identify a approval concept to build, right? We can help you sit down and talk through, you know, what are some features that we think it's good to put in and what are some good success criteria that we are measuring and remind you of how to map back to that, right? We also have credit programs to fund the POC as you tried this out in your AWS environment. And we also have partners who can come in and build for you and help you identify some gaps. And that leads us to the last phase, which is the scale phase. So again, this is where you're taking that proof of concept and you're scaling it out to a production environment. Now, this is where we want to ask ourselves, do we meet the goal? Do we accomplish what we set out to do? If not, no worries, right? There's still time and opportunities to reiterate and improve from that. And this is also an important part where you want to make sure you train the other teams who may not have been as involved so far, right? So for example, the finance team, right? This is an important phase where you want to make sure they understand how AWS billing works, how to access the billing console and how to see what they're getting charged with or maybe your operations team on how to reach out to AWS support to troubleshoot if something would happen. Things like that to make sure that, you know, everyone has a good handle of what their role is to continue to make this project successful as you manage this and... And... Angela? Yeah. I think that's a really good segue. It's perfect actually, right? And to hearing a little bit about how this is actually taking shape in real life, first and foremost, thank you. That was incredibly informative, really well done and well spoken. So thank you so much for giving us that overview of what organizations are doing and how those on the video and webinar can get started. I want to invite now Oscar to join either video. Okay, wonderful. So as we discussed at the beginning, we, you know, there's a lot of resources out there through AWS and we just discussed about what value AWS, turning on my camera would be helpful, what value AWS can offer your organization. But instead of just hearing it from me and Angela, we want to hear directly from a technology decision maker that is working in an incredibly important nonprofit. So I want to welcome to the conversation Oscar from the Indonesian American Association. Oscar, how are you doing today? I'm good, how are you and Damon? I'm Angela. You're doing well. Yeah, doing well. Thank you so much. So to kick off this conversation, I'd love if you explain to the audience a little bit first about who you are, what your organization does, and then we'll jump into about how AWS is adding value to your organization. But to kick us off, if you don't mind introducing yourself and IAA. Okay, thank you very much. My name is Oscar Zaki. I'm originally from Indonesia. I'm a board member of Indonesian American Association. I've been president, chairman since 2015. And by profession, I'm also a solution architect. So I've been playing around with AWS and cloud and whatnot. By background, I'm also a CMS consultant when earlier in my career. So when the AWS have this nonprofit program, what I did is at that time I was the IAA technology person, like what Angela mentioned is the, who's gonna do it me? Who's gonna create the content me? Typical nonprofit, right? Everybody's doing the same thing. It's that guy against that guy again. But anyway, so I applied for the free account for AWS that offers the free resources to be used. And I set up a website for IAA on, it's a service called LightSale. It's basically, it's just a service. But IAA is an Indonesian American nonprofit that surfaced the Indonesian American diaspora in Washington DC area. That's for starting. We're wonderful. Thank you. And incredible work. And one thing that comes to my mind and I think that might be on the minds of some of our viewers is you spoke a little bit about your technical capacity, right? You are a solutions architect, but the reality is not everyone has that technical capacity. So if you were speaking to some people on the line today, on the webinar today, who don't have that solutions architect experience, what are some things that you can explain to them that might be valuable in helping them begin their journey to the cloud? Again, if they're not so technically savvy today. Yes. So AWS have free training resources on the aws.training website. Anybody can join for free, create an account and explore what services that AWS offers. And then from there, again, it's a wide variety of services, but based on what you need, like what Angela mentioned, maybe it's just as simple as creating a website. There are trainings there how to create a website. You can create website in different ways on AWS. Just to get something, I think the training website is very helpful. That's what I guess I started to. Wonderful. So yeah, if I can just kind of repeat it, alluding to the free training, that's wonderful. There's a ton of free training, even Googling it. And also what I hear from you is starting small, right? Even the website is a step in the right direction, hosting your website on a service called LightSale that you alluded to. So thank you so much for that information. Another question that I'd love to hear from you is, what was it like from your perspective to have conversations with other team members at IAA to help them understand why moving to the cloud or using AWS is valuable to the organization? Can you speak a little bit about your experience doing that and some best practices that you can share with the audience? Sure. Yeah, so we were a small organization. We didn't have a lot of funding. So to get started having a free cloud resources from AWS as a nonprofit, you can apply for a nonprofit account, you get a $1,000 credit to get started with. And that you can use to set up your own website. Typical website, if you sign up with some other cloud hosting provider, it probably costs you $20, $30 a month or something like that, right? With the credit that you have, that should enough to cover your hosting. So basically your website is free. And then this is what we did at IAA. Last year, because of the website that we have and then we were able to help people during the COVID, put everything on the website, create webinars and all that we did everything online, we were able to apply for some grants through the countries, to the local nonprofit grants, et cetera. So when our credit from AWS expired, we applied for additional funding to support our cloud operation, our website operation. So then we get another one. And also TechSoup of course, offers that the credit, right? Where you pay, I think $95 to get another $1,000 credit. That's what we have right now. Wonderful. Okay, so what I'm hearing then is the resources, I guess being inquisitive and thinking and exploring about the resources. I think that's a really good takeaway that I always like to make sure audiences know is that oftentimes the answer to your question is out there. It's just a matter of finding the right people to ask and going to the right resources. It's the challenge having kind of resourced and support overload because I think when I'm hearing it's hard to sometimes navigate and I think you did a good job. Thank you for explaining that of maybe just sticking with the basics to get started and sticking close to TechSoup with this credit program. So one more question I'd love for you to answer. Again, understanding that we have nonprofits of all shapes and sizes, big and small, and you are someone who has successfully leveraged AWS for your organization. If you could boil it down, and I know this is a really challenging question, so we won't hold you to this on the record, but what might be your words of advice or words of wisdom that you can inspire the organizations listening today about, or that you've learned on your journey at IAA using AWS for your organization? Yeah, I think from our experience is always exploring the possibility. When we started the website, we were a small organization, less than $5,000 budget. After that, we were able to get grants and all that in the last years, our budget was close to $200,000. Incredible, wow, that is an incredible story. I didn't even know that. So again, exploring and taking advantage of the resources out there. So, Oscar, thank you so much for joining us today and for the incredible work that you do for your communities. It's inspiring, it's encouraging to know that you have been able to grow alongside your usage of AWS. So really appreciate you joining us on the webinar today. And then the spirit of resources as we begin to close out the remaining part of this webinar, I'll ask Angela, if you don't mind going to that slide one more time that showcases that QR code and the resources, exactly right. We'll remind you before we open up for questions right now to ask questions, to be inquisitive, to challenge your preconceived notions about what you might think the cloud is and really take us up on our offer. Angela and I and our entire team are dedicated to understanding what your goals are and not just providing you the solution on a platter for you to go and build, but instead going with you on that journey to understand how exactly the unique value of AWS and the cloud can support your organization. So definitely take a picture of that scan. I'm also gonna put in an email address right here, but I wanna open it up to questions. I know we have a couple in the queue already, but let me kick off with one that I read and that I think might be for you, Angela. Give me one second. I'm just gonna open it. Okay, I'm with you coach Jay. I hear you, we'll get to that question. I'm just gonna answer them in the order that they kind of came in. Okay, so Angela, this is an example of someone who might be in their later stage that they're in the fourth stage. Can you talk a little bit about what an organization has access to to make sure that they're using the right solution, the right technology for their chosen solution? So I guess another way of putting it is, in addition to helping organizations get started, can you speak at a high level of what value and support your team provides for those organizations already using AWS? Yeah, of course. So one thing that I do pretty often with some of my customers is to sit down with them and look at the architecture and what they have, right? And then we work through them and we look at, okay, are these following best practices? Are there areas of improvements? And like you said, are we using the right technology here for the right tool, for the right job, right? And so we sit down together and we look through those things and wait our options and really make sure that the solution that they have makes sense for whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish, right? And so that's one thing that, you know, an exercise I tend to do quite a bit with my customers there. And the other thing I would say we do quite a bit there is I provide resources to them, you know, they're like, hey, we know we're about to manage this and this is about to go launched but I'm not quite sure how I would manage this piece, how I would, you know, handle this piece of technology, right, and providing them with this resources to upskill their team to make sure they can manage that successfully. Wonderful, thanks so much, Angela. Additionally, we have a question from Alpha and Alpha's asking what, I'm sure a lot of people are questioning is are these resources free or are they paid? And for the most part, what we've described today is totally free. Working with someone in Angela's role as Solutions Architect is absolutely at no cost to your organization. Planning, strategizing, again, comes as a benefit of working with the AWS nonprofits team. Now, once you get into using specific services, there are different pricing structures to using those services. We won't go into them all at once, but for the most part, they're all pay as you go. And what we mean by pay as you go is that you really only pay for the resources that you use. In contrast, the pay as you go would be an upfront fee where you buy something, perhaps with a license and you're locked in and you have that resource whether you need it or not. So thanks for that question, Alpha, really appreciate it. And it actually leads to another question that we just received. And that's asking about the credits that come from the TechSoup credit program. What services do these credits cover? So again, like all answers, there's complexity, but for the vast majority of the services that AWS offers, I'd even go as far as to say 98%, if not 99% are covered by the TechSoup credits. For your information, in case you hear this later, we call these again on-demand services are covered by your credit. For things like reserved instances, if you're familiar with those, or a mechanical perk, those are not covered by credits, but again, that's a 1% or two at max of the overall services offered. Another question I get here, it's to you, Oscar, the question is asking what in your view is next in terms of your usage for the cloud for IAA? What's next on the horizon in your future for technology? Thanks. Yes, so what I did is, of course, I started with creating the website, but there are other projects that we are thinking of, especially for the community. And I also help another organization set up their website, like what Angela said, it's a scalability that was important. This other nonprofit, I started small, within a week, he launched his website and then he needed additional resources. So then using AWS, that helps me to scale up easily. So scalability is important and we do have other options for us to start other projects. Wonderful, thank you, Oscar. And I know we're coming up against time, so I just wanna answer one more question and it's a really good one. Thank you, Regina, for putting it in the chat. And the question from Regina asked about which services or solutions offered by AWS can help nonprofits? Or if I'm understanding correctly as well, what needs of the nonprofits are best aligned with the value that AWS can have? And I only provide this link here in the chat because it does a far better job of explaining it than I can in the next two or so minutes. But if you scroll down and peruse through the AWS for nonprofits website, you'll see the nonprofit cloud outcomes. There's a list, it's about right in the middle of the page, everything that can help you to get started, helping you with your fundraising donor and member engagement, helping you to deliver on your mission, optimize your costs and your finances and much, much more. So that leads me to a kind of closing bits and that's how can we continue the conversation? And again, we are more than available to engage with you given our bandwidth, but if you're an organization trying to get in touch with someone like Jayman, someone like Angela, even someone like Oscar who's currently using AWS, the best and fastest and most efficient way is to start a conversation with the link that I just provided right here, our AWS for nonprofits page right at the top is the start of conversation page. It feels like a form and I wanna acknowledge that, but it's by no means deflecting and in every intention, with every one of our intention, it's the fastest way to get you in touch with a qualified individual to help you navigate these resources. So with that in mind, I again wanna thank you so much for your time, for your attention and wanna invite you to continue the conversation, reach out to us, Angela, Oscar and myself, if you feel comfortable, I'll put our link in as well into the chat and we are real, live human people, you can reach out to us, we will absolutely do our best to support you. But again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.


So Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders appeared on CNN for an interview and the entire interview like wasn't terrible But there's a moment in there like a highlight or a low light to be specific that I want to point out That really demonstrates every single thing that is wrong with mainstream media corporate owned media every critique that I have is Like encapsulated in this one clip because it proves that when it comes to mainstream media There's just no room for nuance everything is presented as you know Democrat versus Republican this false equivalence to where both sides are equal and both sides make you know Equal cases and they're both good-faith actors and you can never actually like qualitatively assess situations you can't be impartial or objective you have to be neutral and present both sides equally when the reality of the situation is that Both sides aren't equal Republicans have gone off the deep end This is a party that isn't just concerned about you know smaller government and gun rights This is a party that is insane and authoritarian and Democrats aren't great as well But the differences between Democrats and Republicans are pretty substantial So basically what the CNN anchor is going to ask Bernie Sanders is Ridiculous because she's going to present two things. She's gonna say look you claim that budget Reconciliation is a bad thing, but you apply this argument curiously so to Republicans When they passed legislation, but now all of a sudden you're saying that we can do all of these things using budget Reconciliation so doesn't that kind of make you I don't know a hypocrite Bernie Sanders response here is absolutely phenomenal because he shuts it down and What should really be pointed out here is what she's referring to and You know that just look at the way that she disregards the actual substance of like when Republicans use the budget reconciliation And why Bernie Sanders wants to use it like when Republicans did it it was in service to their donors when Bernie Sanders does it Well, it is in service to the American people during a pandemic when they need relief immediately take a look So you've suggested that Democrats might need to use a process called Reconciliation which requires only 51 votes instead of the 60 to pass the coronavirus relief plan You just heard Mitt Romney say that Republicans like him have shown that they are ready to compromise So should Democrats move to pass coronavirus relief with 51 votes if they can't get Republicans support say before the impeachment trial Well, I don't know what the word compromise means I know that working families are in living today and more economic Desperation than since the Great Depression and if Republicans are willing to work with us to address that crisis Welcome, let's do it But what we cannot do is wait weeks and weeks and months and months to go forward We have got to act now that is what the American People want now as you know Reconciliation which is a Senate rule was used by the Republicans under Trump to pass massive tax breaks for the rich and large corporations It was used as an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act And what we are saying is you usually for that that's fine We're going to use reconciliation that is 50 votes in the Senate plus the vice president to pass legislation Desperately needed by working families in this country right now if you did it We're gonna do it what we're gonna do it to protect ordinary people not just the rich and the powerful and what's your timeline on that? As soon as we possibly can look down. You know, I know these are crazy times We've got a new president in we're dealing with the horrors of this pandemic, which also have got to be addressed immediately We have not done a good job in producing the amount of vaccine that we need and certainly getting it into the arms of people Before the impeachment trial starts We got to do everything I miss this night You don't have the time to sit around you know weeks on impeachment and not get vaccines into the arms of people You don't have time to worry about vaccines and not be able to fact their children in America are going hungry We got a breakthrough this old Approach that the Senate takes years and years to do anything. We got a crisis right now We can chew bubblegum and walk at the same time the American people are hurting and they want us to act That's what our candidates ran for in this election That's what the guys in Georgia one on and we have got to reaffirm the faith of the American people in government that we can Respond to their pain. You mentioned that Republicans have used the so-called reconciliation process before like in 2017 to try to kill Obamacare You accuse them of abusing the process back then you said quote the function of reconciliation is to adjust Federal spending and revenue not to enact major changes in policy But you alluded to this you are the chairman of the budget committee are going to be you are already talking about using this tactic for things Like paid family and medical leave for universal pre-k and childcare for climate change to wish and free college Eliminating student debt and the $15 minimum wage. How is that not what you criticize Republicans for doing? Well, the devil is in the details about what we want to do and when we want to do it and when we have to do it What we are talking about by the way are two separate Reconciliation packages number one the emergency one right now right get direct checks get those checks into people's Pockets right now so they can feed their families and make sure that people are not evicted from their homes Make sure that states have the funds they need to get vaccines into people's homes That's what we've got to do right now and then as soon as that is done We have to rebuild this economy unemployment is much much too high wages are much much too low There are structural problems that we have had we have ignored for years climate change is a real You're okay doing all of that through this process that you criticize Republicans for using this these are major policy changes These are major policy changes, but the devil is in the details and I criticize Republicans Yeah for using reconciliation to give tax breaks to billionaires to create a situation where large profitable corporations now pay zero in federal income taxes Yes, I did criticize them for that and if they want to criticize me for helping to feed children who are hungry Or senior citizens in this country are isolated and alone and don't have enough food. They can criticize me I think it's the appropriate step forward. So that was absolutely Terrible terrible now. I don't know if that CNN host actually believes that maybe she was Just playing devil's advocate and she didn't actually believe that both of these things are equal But either way the image that this presents to the viewer is that they are equal the implication like what viewers are primed to believe is That Democrats shouldn't use budget reconciliation specifically Bernie Sanders shouldn't advocate for this position Because he criticized Republicans for using budget reconciliation except The difference there is huge Republicans used budget reconciliation to pass things that serve the elites tax cuts for the rich There is a need. This is an objective fact. There is a need right now because we are in a pandemic an economic crisis and For Democrats to use budget reconciliation to quickly pass relief That is different than Republicans passing tax cuts at the behest of their corporate donors why Our mainstream news punnets incapable of pointing out this difference It's not about quantity. It's about quality. And when I say quantity, I mean, well, you know, we criticized Republicans so now we have to criticize Democrats. We have to be equal go straight down the middle That's not the way that this works You have to be Objective these two things are not the same using budget reconciliation to pass policies that benefit people who desperately need it Compared to Republicans using budget reconciliation to pass policies that benefit folks who don't need it. These are very different things so of course to just take Bernie Sanders argument about budget reconciliation that he applied to Republicans as if like Politics occurs in a vacuum. That's just it's nonsensical But Bernie's answer was perfect. He says if Republicans want to criticize me for helping defeat children Who are hungry or senior citizens in this country who are isolated and alone and don't have enough food? They can criticize me and That's exactly it That's exactly it because what Bernie Sanders is doing is trying to use budget reconciliation To help people who are dying who are losing health care When Republicans did it It was because they know they couldn't get it passed with 60 votes And they knew they had to deliver For their corporate donors if they wanted to keep that gravy train going Very very giant difference there. The difference is night and day and what the media doesn't realize is that You don't have to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt You don't always have to do this. In fact, you don't have to give any party the benefit of the doubt, but I mean These are propaganda outlets. They're owned by large multi-billion dollar companies So, you know, they're going to serve the status quo But it's infuriating because they never give the left and progressives the benefit of the doubt like Bernie Sanders He is approached as like this sort of villain who's a hypocrite for daring to use Budget reconciliation after he spoke out against it But that's just like stripping away all of the context from everything that he's saying all to do What some pathetic pseudo defense of Republicans who already think that CNN is fake news Like I just don't understand the point of this. It doesn't accomplish anything. You're not going to win over Republican viewers because They probably don't even watch Fox news very much anymore More they've all like moved on to oan and newsmax because Fox news isn't even As far right as the Republican Party's base wants it to be but all you do by presenting this narrative Is you make viewers believe that both sides are equal when they are not equal Both sides are not equal at all one side does not do anything for the American people And Bernie Sanders does want to do something for the American people He's trying to push Democrats to actually get stuff done And he's using his position as budget committee chairman to do just that using reconciliation So I shouldn't have to say this like I shouldn't have to Explain to people who likely went to college for journalism Uh, how this should work like you shouldn't have to learn about objectivity and impartiality from a youtube host Like we don't care about neutrality. We know this right when it comes to objective facts. We care about actually Saying what is and isn't objectively true And there is a difference like it or not between bernie's use of budget reconciliation And republicans use of budget reconciliation if bernie decided to go rogue and use budget reconciliation to like give amazon attacks credit Then that would be comparable To the way that the republicans did it But because he doesn't want to do that because he's trying to use it for good You should explain that to your audience not present them with this false equivalence that bernie sanders Is as bad as republicans like that's absolutely ludicrous. So I'll leave that there. I think you get the point This was a very very bad segment from cnn And it really it shows why mainstream media Is bad and it just makes people stupid overall