Welcome everybody to TechSoup. This is our new member orientation and the time you get to ask Q&A. A lot of times people join TechSoup and they click on one thing and they buy one thing, but they really never know what TechSoup is all about. So I'm excited that you're here and ask us anything you wanna know.  But if this is your first time here, let me show you how you can engage today. And would you do me a favor?  So you know you on mute, right? But you're gonna get the recording of this within 48 hours. So you'll be able to gain some more insights once you hear all the things that Nick has gone over today. And we have Shamir in the background and Kelly will be joining us as well. We're excited that you're here. If you need the closed caption, tap on that CC button here at the bottom of the screen. Oh, Michael's been here a year. Thank you, welcome. And so we're doing this, welcome to TechSoup new member orientation because we think it's something that you should know. And again, welcome on behalf of TechSoup members. Nick, I'm gonna turn this over to you. Great, welcome everybody today. Thanks for joining our new member orientation and Q&A for TechSoup. Just a quick thing before we get started. If you wanna ask a question, please go ahead and use that Q&A icon in your Zoom bar there as you see. And after this webinar is finished, we will send via email to you, a recording of the webinar as Aretha was saying, and a copy of the deck that we're sharing as well. And without further ado, welcome to TechSoup. Let's talk about what we can do for you. Today, as you've met already, Aretha is our webinar host, I'm Nick Finn, a director of marketing here at TechSoup. And then we have Shamira McNeill and Kelly Garrett who both work directly with the non-profits TechSoup serves on technology issues. And we're gonna turn to the two of them towards the second half of this webinar and they can introduce you a bit to our customer success program and our TechSoup client services. Before we get started, I wanna knock a couple of buzzwords out of the way. Technology is incredibly quick in terms of the new words it throws in front of people and expects us to all understand. And sometimes lots of that vocabulary becomes part of what is in our daily work, but I don't wanna assume that everybody thinks the same things mean the same thing. So gonna go over a couple of quick terms here. You will hear sometimes about digital transformation, that's just becoming a more tech savvy nonprofit. Really think of it that way, like how are you using technology to do a better job at your nonprofit? Civil society is another term that gets thrown out there. And really what it is, is it's the people who aren't the government. It's the people who work in organizations, nonprofits, NGOs, other organizations around the world who are working to make the world a better place. That is civil society. And then people bandied the term cloud adoption around. It's almost old school now. Everybody uses the cloud in one way or another. We're using it right now. And so don't get overwhelmed by the notion of cloud adoption. It's really just using more modern web-based tools at your nonprofit. With that said, let's get to the fun stuff. Starting with what is TechSoup? We all probably have been asked in our work roles to give an elevator pitch on our nonprofit. And I have to tell you, I've been at TechSoup for over seven years now, and every time somebody asked me to give the elevator pitch on TechSoup, I remind them that the elevator sometimes needs to go up 36 floors and my elevator pitch may be a little bit longer. But TechSoup is, first of all, in the United States, a 501C3 nonprofit organization. We are not a for-profit company. And that's one of the first things that really sets us apart from a lot of other places where your nonprofit could get technology. TechSoup has a mission. Our mission is to support other nonprofits as they use technology. And we think that we can do an excellent job at that because we are a nonprofit ourselves. And because we're a nonprofit and because we have that mission, we can stay focused on you and making sure that you get what we can help you with and that then you can execute your mission, support your community, look after the people that you look after and hopefully technology can be helpful to you in some way in doing that. We host a catalog of technology products and services, meaning that even though we're a 501C3 a nonprofit ourselves, when you go to the TechSoup site, you will see there are products there, but they are coming from a nonprofit and they are intended for you. But let's talk about what those products are. So first of all, we form partnerships with big tech companies and we negotiate with them and we try to help them understand what the needs of nonprofits are. We provide specialized pricing in our catalog for some of those products. That includes software and hardware. And then more and more, we also provide services to nonprofits because we know it's not enough to get a technology product. Once you have it, the question is what do you do with it? How do you implement it? How do you make sure it's set up correctly in your systems? How do you educate your staff, your volunteers or the consumer of your services to use that technology properly? We'd like to think about it holistically, not just take money, give product, there's the exchange and it ends there. Our feeling is much more that we have to support nonprofits in using the technology itself and in learning how it works. And so that regard, we also provide specifically courses and training opportunities to help nonprofit staff develop their technology skills and their expertise. And that's a core part of TechSoup's mission. Again, going back to this notion at the top that we're a 501C3 and we really care about the communities that we serve and we try to go that extra mile. So at the very end of all of that, we are also a grant-based programming provider. Like most nonprofits, we accept and apply for grants that allow us to execute specific projects. And so once again, we understand what it means to be a nonprofit because like you, we have to rely on those grant-based programs to deliver our mission and to fund the organization. So let's do a deeper dive now into the catalog that I mentioned at the front here. You get to it very easily by just navigating to techsoup.org and in the top navigation, you can see, I've circled it to call it out here, product catalog. And then if you scroll down the page a little bit, you'll see that CTA or that button, the orange button that says browse catalog. The catalog is one of the main things that we provide benefits to nonprofits with. And there were a lot of offers in there and they apply to nonprofits of all sizes from very, very small one-person organizations to huge multi-billion dollar nonprofits that serve a global audience. We work with all of them. One of the major brands that we partner within that catalog is Microsoft. Microsoft was a very, very early partner of TechSoups going back over 20 years now. And it used to simply be that when Microsoft was providing windows or office on a CD-ROM, remember, you would get it on a CD or if you're even older than that, a disc and you would load it on your computer. And so we just moved every, we moved those CD-ROMs and those discs to nonprofits that are reduced rate. But today in the modern world of cloud adoption, most of that activity happens online, right? You're downloading software directly from vendors. And so when you wanna use Microsoft software in today's TechSoup, probably what you're thinking about is called Microsoft 365 or Office 365 Enterprise. I'm just gonna call it Microsoft 365 because that's what the branding is really about now. And Microsoft 365 is the online cloud version of the traditional office tools that you think about using, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and many, many others, but those are the four that most people think of initially. And they're cloud-based, depending on the plan that you have, there's also versions where you can download that to your local computer. But it is really the most secure and probably the best system for collaboration, especially in the modern world where we're a distributed workforce, everybody's working remotely in different locations. And so Microsoft 365 is the place where that work can happen. If you're a little more old school and you still want just the local computer version of Microsoft Office, we do have that. The code word to think about there is what's called on-premises, right? On-premises meaning it's local. There's not a cloud version of this, it's just on this one computer. Now, it's tempting to feel like that's all you need, but I do wanna say that, again, it is the cloud-based version of these technologies that really are the most secure and best for collaboration. So we really urge nonprofits to go that cloud direction. And the Windows full professional operating system, Windows 11, although we don't even call it that now, it's just Windows, that's also available through TechSoup from Microsoft. Another brand that we do a lot of work with and who have been huge supporters of nonprofits is Adobe. Now, if you are particularly working on nonprofit communications, for instance, maybe you have to design websites or you have to do brochures, pamphlets, some kind of fundraising materials, if you have a communications department or perhaps you work with a designer on staff, then you know about Adobe. Adobe have really pioneered how communications and graphic design can work online. And the product you probably have heard of before is Creative Cloud, which is available through TechSoup. Acrobat Pro DC is another offer which is available through TechSoup. Creative Cloud provides you with all the digital tools for managing graphics like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop. Acrobat Pro DC is sort of like the all bells and whistles version of how you create and manage PDFs. Adobe invented the PDF. So it makes sense that they would have the best platform for being able to edit and control it in every way. But one of the newest offers that I'm actually most excited about from Adobe is called Adobe Express. Adobe Express is sort of a simplified version of Creative Cloud. If you've worked in Creative Cloud before, you know that there is some training and education you have to go through to really understand how to use those programs fully. Adobe Express seeks to help people who don't have all that training and education to still be able to produce graphics and communications materials. But they have a lot of templates available to you, simplified workloads. And at the moment, Adobe Express is available through TechSoup because Adobe is very generous with nonprofits at no cost to your nonprofit. So if Adobe Express sounds like something you wanna check it out, check it out. It's cool stuff. Another place where TechSoup gets a lot of engagement from nonprofits is with Intuit QuickBooks. Those of us who made it through the pandemic working at a nonprofit know that when it went to the moment that we had to go to a remote distributed workforce, there were some paper and pencil systems that lots of nonprofits were still relying on that suddenly became worse than obsolete. They became absolute blockers to a nonprofit's effort to function. And that was very, very true in the area of finances. We for years have advocated that nonprofits move to a digitized financial environment. Adobe QuickBooks is a fantastic platform for nonprofits to conduct and maintain their books on. It's in the cloud. It gives you the ability to know what's going on without having to make sure that you get into the one physical office that has that one notebook where somebody's keeping the ledger on paper with a pen or pencil. QuickBooks is really one of the most popular parts of the TechSoup catalog. And so if your nonprofit is thinking about how to digitize that financial flow of information, I strongly recommend you take a look at Adobe QuickBooks. The QuickBooks online offer really is where most nonprofits go at this point. There are other versions of QuickBooks available in our catalog as well. I encourage you to take a look at those and see if they can be helpful to your nonprofit. And then as I mentioned, we'll share this deck with you after the presentation. And this FAQ specifically does have some details about QuickBooks that you may well find helpful. There are lots of other brands in the TechSoup catalog. And here I've highlighted just a few more of them. And I'm gonna call out one in particular, GrantStation. GrantStation is an online tool that allows nonprofits to search a database of organizations that are accepting non-solicited grant applications. Let me say that again, non-solicited grant applications. So what that translates to is usually if a nonprofit is trying to get grant funding, you need to have a relationship with that funder. You need to already be engaged in the conversation with them about what you do, what they are trying to support, and then you make a grant application to them. But there are funders out there who really just are interested in hearing from nonprofits doing work that they fund. And so if you don't have a relationship, GrantStation still allows you to gather the information you need about a grant funder and submit an application to them. There's something like 9,000 different funders in that database. And twice a year, TechSoup runs a very special promotion where you can get that GrantStation year-long membership. It goes for a whole year. You've got a whole year to do your research and work through the GrantStation offers. It's a full year's membership for $99. And guess what? Today is day one of one of those promotions. It goes today and tomorrow, and then it will likely repeat in September of this year. But GrantStation is usually a $699 item.  And if you're a small nonprofit, GrantStation is one of the most popular things we have in the catalog for small nonprofits. So if you're looking to expand your grant funding capacity in the next year, I highly recommend taking a look at GrantStation and seeing if there's something in there that really fits your needs. And I think, yes, thank you. Aretha just dropped the link to GrantStation in the chat. So please go ahead and click on that. Of course, wait till I'm done. No, click on it whenever you want. Go and check out GrantStation. It's a great offer for nonprofits. So as I said, we do more than software though. TechSoup also has access to some great hardware offers for nonprofits. And again, oh, I see that somebody is getting an error message on GrantStation. It might be that that dash at the end, you see how it says 3051-, make sure that that dash is in your URL, otherwise it will not work. The hardware offers through TechSoup are again, as I've said, specific for nonprofits and priced accordingly. And we work with a number of big name brands on that front. And we also have refurbished hardware offers. And the major partners we work with are Dell, Lenovo and HP. And then if you want the refurbished offers, there's a whole special place on our catalog where you can go to see those refurbished offers. Hey, I'm seeing still some folks in chat having trouble with that GrantStation link. I can tell you that it is really popular in today's day one. I am wondering if maybe our server is getting a little backed up. So I'll make sure that we include that URL in the deck when we send it out. And like I said, it does run today and tomorrow. So don't give up. If you're not able to get in there right now, we'll make sure you have the link can try again later. To get to the hardware section of the GrantStation, sorry, to get to the hardware section of the TechSoup website, you have to click into the product catalog, which I've highlighted here. That's where my mouse is. And then you go over to hardware here. It's a great design, but not everybody sees that link to hardware there. So I just wanna call that off for folks, okay? Now, as I mentioned at the front, TechSoup does more than just provide access to software and hardware. In fact, more and more nonprofits are coming to TechSoup because they want access to the services that we provide. And the catalog of services we provide is growing all the time. Let me talk first about how you find the services we offer. So again, on the homepage of the site, there's a services tab there, and you can just drop right down there and pick some stuff. But let's talk about what some of those specifics are because some of it may be helpful to you right now. We have a help desk service. And the help desk service is $35 monthly. There's an annual version. And it's unlimited support for one device. So case example I've heard before that I think is a cool way to think about is like say you've specifically got this printer, maybe it's been problematic in the past, you could get a help desk subscription to help you just deal with that printer. And there's lots of other hardware examples where that could be. But more often what folks are really interested in is services from TechSoup to help implement and administer complex platforms. So I'll go back to this Microsoft example again, Office 365 or Microsoft 365 as it's now called. When you adopt one of these platforms, there's some backend work that has to happen to configure it for your nonprofit, to move your old email or legacy emails into that new system. So you're not losing your emails, it's just in a new system now to make sure that the security and administration of that platform is set up correctly because not all of us are equipped to do a deep dive into configuring a complex platform. So that's a service that TechSoup can now provide. And in fact, in the case of Microsoft 365 specifically, you can now get that through TechSoup and a basic service and support package is automatically included. And at the base level, it's $1 per license per month. $1 per license per month. Very affordable and super helpful if you need help getting Microsoft 365 set up. We can also help with office standard and professional installation support. Again, if you choose to go that route instead of going to Microsoft 365 route, we also have bigger offers. If you're a medium-sized nonprofit, you might be curious about managed IT. Managed IT is really where you partner with an outside organization to help you manage your whole IT stack. So instead of just like that one printer that gives you trouble or making sure that Office 365 just gets installed, managed IT is a broader suite of services and it happens over time and it's a real partnership. And then finally, the first item in that services catalog is an interesting one. It's called the digital assessment tool. The digital assessment tool is something TechSoup built to help nonprofits assess and understand where their nonprofit is on that journey of digital transformation. It works across several different functional areas of your nonprofit, but let's pick one, for instance, finance, right? The digital assessment tool walks you through a series of questions around how your nonprofit currently deals with finances with a specific focus on the tech that you use and it will help you understand if there's a place for your nonprofit to grow, to do better or maybe you're already doing an A game in terms of how you have digitally transformed your finances. This tool is great, especially if you're an executive director trying to understand where the organization you're running needs to grow or perhaps you are trying to help your board understand what are some specific things that they can fundraise around? So maybe you can make the argument to board members that, hey, we really need to raise some money so that we can up our game in this particular area or that particular area. The digital assessment tool is a really helpful tool to just understand that lay of the land within your nonprofit. You do have to like sign in and create an account to do the digital assessment tool. It does not cost you money to use the digital assessment tool. Another really popular service in the past two years is our foray into websites and digital marketing services for nonprofits. We have a lot of different ways that we engage with nonprofits on that front, but we have a consultation and development around your website. There are digital marketing services that we can offer to help nonprofits figure out their email and advertising stack. We're launching a Google ad grant service specifically, which is helping nonprofits that use the Google ad grant to maximize that Google ad grant. If you don't know what the Google ad grant is, you should know about it. Essentially, Google will provide nonprofits with up to $10,000 a month in grant funding for you to use their search advertising functions. But again, like most things in technology, it's not enough to just get that product. Using it is really the tricky part and that's where TechSoup can help. That brings us to another point here, which is sort of the broader educational mission at TechSoup around the use of technology and nonprofits. And I wanna highlight what we call TechSoup courses, also available in the services dropdown menu there. TechSoup courses exist as a standalone website. It's different than the techsoup.org website. So again, unfortunately that means you have to set up another login and password account there. And on the courses platform, there's a mix of some courses that cost no money and there are some advanced courses that do cost a little bit of money. But these courses are all custom developed by TechSoup. They are designed specifically to speak to a nonprofit audience and they cover a range of topics. A lot of it, stuff that we've already talked about in this presentation. But if you have staff or volunteers who specifically need a little bit of help and coaching around their digital skills or perhaps you yourself feel like you could use some of that, I do all the time. I encourage you to go check out the TechSoup courses site and see if there's some things on there that could help you either move your own body of knowledge forward or some staff and volunteers who need that help as well. Oops, sorry, popped through there. You know, some of the examples of courses available are there's tech planning, there's a whole Microsoft digital skills center in the TechSoup courses platform. You could do something on email marketing or Google analytics, great resources if those are things that you need. And just a couple of quick stats on that. Yeah, we've had over 70,000 learners use that platform already. There is both English and Spanish options for some of those courses, although in all honesty, not every course on there is in Spanish, but there are definitely some available options there. As I said, they're all specifically designed for nonprofits. And here's one cool thing. Remember I was saying that we only serve nonprofits, right? And what that means is when you use our catalog, those products and the hardware we looked at earlier, you have to be a 501C3 to use those offers. And in fact, you have to be authorized to act on behalf of your nonprofit to use those offers. But TechSoup courses is more open. We let anybody use it because, hey, education is kind of like the beginning level of becoming tech savvy. And so any staff member, volunteer, et cetera can sign into TechSoup courses and do that. I mentioned the Digital Skills Center from Microsoft again. That's a great resource on that TechSoup courses platform and worth taking a look at. This is an example of what we call a track on that courses platform. These tracks are a way that we string together multiple specific courses to build a larger piece of awareness here. And so this foundational skills track, walks you through a series of different topical areas, project management, Excel, remote working, fundraising, grant writing, email marketing. It seems like sometimes the list of topics we could study is endless. But the foundational skills track is really there to help you get started if you're trying to figure out what's a series that you could just do to bring you up to speed on several different things. So with that, I am going to, first of all, beg your forgiveness because I didn't update this slide. It has the wrong name. We're gonna be joined instead by Shamira McNeill, who is a customer success manager with TechSoup. And the customer success team at TechSoup is really here to help folks who have chosen to use a product that they've gotten through TechSoup. A lot of it is Microsoft oriented, but it's to help you come up to speed and use that product properly. So if Shamira is there and wants to come off camera, I invite Shamira Ford to welcome our TechSoup attendees today. Take it away. Thank you so much, Nick. As Nick has said, my name is Shamira McNeill. I'm one of the customer success managers on a team with Kevin, who we are on the customer success team together. So I'll be glad to be speaking with you all today to explain a little bit more about Microsoft. So for those of you joining us, you may not have heard all about the customer success team, but that is completely understandable because we are possibly a year or so being made today at TechSoup. So, but before I begin though, I would like to start with a quick poll question. Is your organization currently using Microsoft or Office 365? There's no obligation, of course, to answer. We give it about half a minute to fill the results, right? Thank you for those that answered. As you can see, it looks like a lot of people are using Microsoft or Office 365 at their nonprofit organizations currently. That's wonderful. Thank you for answering. So next slide, please. All right, thank you. On this, I'm sorry, can you go back one slide? Sorry, Nick, I didn't realize you had already switched it. Thank you. On this slide, we have a breakdown of pricing between the various 365 subscription types, beginning with web-only offers such as Microsoft Business Basic and Office 365 Enterprise E1. If you have volunteers, for example, you may need licensing for using Microsoft F1 or F3 licensing, which is available specifically for those supporting your organization in that capacity. For the sake of time, however, I won't be diving into this chart, but I do want to know as part of follow-up to what was just mentioned regarding the web-based subscription licensing. In order to access the traditional offer, sorry, in order to access the traditional office standard or professional plus suite, many of you are likely familiar with in your organization, you would need to request what's called a hybrid license. Some examples of this subscription type are Office 365 E3, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Microsoft Enterprise 3 or 5 offers. I also want to draw quick attention to the last item on the slide, which is Microsoft Azure. Azure, for example, is Microsoft's cloud. For those interested in furthering your use of Microsoft Cloud, there is a 3,500 or 3,500 yearly grant for nonprofits if you are eligible for it. With over 200 different services available, as a part of Azure, it is definitely something worth looking into. Next slide, please. For those interested and ready to begin the journey towards accessing Microsoft Cloud Solutions for your organization, it is a three-step process. First, you'll need to create an account at the Microsoft nonprofit portal. Next, you'll need to have that account validated. Validation service is provided on the back end by TechSoup and Microsoft, so you don't have to worry about that. However, it does take typically about five to seven business days to process the validation, and then the final part will be introduced in what we refer to as the Cloud Manager or the Cloud Manager tool. This tool is authorized to specific individual accounts. That's why it's very important, to make sure you're an authorized agent on your nonprofit's organization account with TechSoup. The CSP or the Cloud Service Provider Introducing will allow you to access the storefront where you are able to purchase licensing. If you find yourself stuck in any part of the process, we do have a team ready to assist you via the chat as shown in the bottom right corner. Next slide, please. Understanding and move to the cloud can be a challenge for organizations, and we do offer free consultation services. During your session with us, we'll be able to assist you with registration, choosing the appropriate subscription licensing, and provide recommendations for services and courses, license implementation and ongoing support to you. Next slide, please. As promised, I was going to give a quick overview of what customer success does. For the sake of time, I've broken it down into five general bullets. We're a smaller team dedicated to assisting customers with technology review and planning, organizational strategy, identifying opportunities for potential, financial and vendor support, and providing quotes and invoices for both products requests. Thank you so much again for joining me. Back to you, Nick. Great, thanks Shamira. And yeah, I just want to say the customer success team is one of the real gems of TechSoup because, you know, not every for-profit technology corporation out there is easy to reach on the phone or via email or chat when you have a question or a problem. But again, going back to this point of TechSoup being a 501C3, we have a social mission, and part of that means that we are available to nonprofits when you have an issue or a question or a problem. And that's what Shamira and her team work on. And so thanks for being here and I appreciate your time. Next, I want to bring in another wonderful team member. This is Kelly Garrett, who is an associate manager of our client services division. And before Kelly comes up, I want to explain just like a quick but super important difference, like what do these two teams do that's different? Kelly's team works with you to help you interact with TechSoup. How to do stuff with TechSoup? Whereas Shamira's team works with you to deal with how do you interact and figure out how to work with a product you've gotten from TechSoup. So it's an important distinction, but I'll let Kelly go into that in more detail. So Kelly Garrett, come on up. Hi everybody. Hope everyone's morning or I guess afternoon if you're on the East Coast is going well. Thank you for that great introduction, Nick. Yes, I am Kelly Garrett. I'm the associate manager for client services. Client services is basically it's account, we do the account management and we also provide a customer service to our members. So that's anything from how to register, locating a product on our website. Things along those lines is what we assist you with. We do currently have a contact us form, a phone line and a chat line for you to speak to a person in real time. Always going to be a real person when you contact client services at TechSoup. So something to keep in mind, even if you're on chat, it's not a robot, it's us. Next slide, please. Perfect, so one thing that I like to go over with new members because it's not always obvious is where to find product information. So you don't have to sit on the phone waiting to get in touch with us. So you don't have to wait for a response to the contact us form you submitted. Really want to try to help you all be able to self-serve so that you can get in and get out and get what you need without having to wait around talking to somebody. So when you do locate a product that you are interested in, you will click on the product and it will pull up this product page or offer page and it has three different tabs that you'll see are circled right there in red. It's got description, description details, rules, eligibility and restrictions. So those three tabs usually cover almost all of the questions that our members have. They can be a little hard to see just because it's gray on white. So it's something to keep an eye out for that. There's always going to be these three tabs of information on every product page. Sometimes that middle tab will have a different name. It might say system requirements or subscript as it says here, subscription details, couple of different versions that we'll have but you'll always have these three tabs and it'll have a ton of information covering what functionality comes with the product. What subscription limitations are there and rules and eligibility is a great place to check for eligibility requirements. Since not all or no one organization is going to be eligible for all the offers on TechSoup. Our corporate partners like Intuit who provides QuickBooks online here and the other partners we have will basically put some eligibility restrictions in. That can be your budget, it can be location, it can be what your organization does. It's called an organization type. So if you ever run into something you're unable to check out, check the messaging. It might be that your organization type, budget, location, et cetera might not be eligible for that product at this time. But a great place to get started here to see the admin fees listed right there in bright red. You'll see the donor partner listed above it. Category, there's platforms. So if it's Windows only, it would say Windows only. Things along those lines. So just a great place to get started and highly recommend reading through all of the information before you take that time to contact us. The admin fee, I just also wanna ask is the admin fee your price? Yes, the admin fee is what TechSoup charges. It's basically what helps keep us going. It pays my salaries. It pays for managing the products and the programs. It's always going to be the lowest cost on the commercial market. So if you go and check into its website we will always have the best price for QuickBooks online. And that's compared to any reseller that they work with. It's guaranteed that we have the best offer to ensure that our nonprofits are getting access. This particular product is an annual fee of $75 instead of it being a one-time fee. And you'll see that it described again in the product page if you're like, well, how would I know that? Make sure you're reading through the whole thing and you'll be able to see what it says about is it a perpetual license? Is it a subscription? Is it an access to discounted rates? Which means you pay TechSoup to get access to get a discounted rate directly from the partner. Things like that really important to make sure you're reading and checking before you check out. Most of our products have no refunds, no exchange policy since we a lot of times can't recoup that license. So it's something to keep in mind that there's a pretty strict no refunds or exchange policy. So make sure you're getting what you need to get before you fully check out and you've provided that payment. Perfect. Next slide, please. And I do see someone has asked, is it auto-renewal? So some of our products are auto-renewal products. Some of them you have to come back and re-request from us by checking out again. And some of the products are, you're actually renewing directly through the donor partner. So for QuickBooks Online, for the plus and advanced versions, that is a donated subscription, meaning the Intuit donated it and they're not asking for any fees from you all. The only fee you have to pay is the admin fee to TechSoup. It's once a year and it will be an automatic renewal. And with automatic renewals, we automatically put a request on your TechSoup account 30 days before the renewal is due. And at that time, you can either edit payment, cancel the request, or add payment if you didn't opt in to save your payment from the year before. So QuickBooks Online's auto-renewal, you're always gonna renew through TechSoup. And that can vary between different partners, you know, Intuit and Adobe are not connected, they're not the same company. So they're gonna have different policies, different eligibility. So it's something to keep in mind that, you know, each program is going to have their own eligibility, their own renewal process, their own products, all that good stuff. So if you do need any help, we've actually been going through a massive overhaul of our FAQ and help support pages. So we're really making it much more robust and trying to make sure we're hitting all the top, all the top questions and things like that. So if you ever need support, I do also recommend, if you're not seeing anything on a product page or in any, you know, kind of poking around the website, go into that help section, which is listed in the top right corner, next to where you log in is help. And then you'll be able to come in here and you'll see that there's some contact information listed there. We've also got some help topics that are popular. A great place to check your eligibility is you'll see, it says, check your organization's eligibility, it's like one of the first options right there. And we actually have a little quiz and if you're logged in already, it will just automatically tell you what you're eligible for and give you a list of all the programs you can access. So great place to start is here. I'm also clicking the FAQ tab, so it's the top there. Right now we're on the screenshot showing help topics. If you clicked on the blue side, it said frequently asked questions, it would pull up the FAQ for you. So a great place to go. So yes, and once you're here, this way you can kind of navigate. I do see, I see someone's asking about eligibility for professional organizations. If you do require any support for your, why am I ineligible? I wanna talk to somebody about stuff. That's when you wanna maybe use, you're gonna wanna contact client services and this next slide's gonna show you how to do that. So next slide, please. So this is our contact us page. This is where you can fill out the form to send in like just basically you're letting us know what you're interested in, what issue you have, and then client services will respond. Usually we're aiming for three to five business days to respond to that form inquiry. But right now we're experiencing extremely high volumes due to the new year. We usually have everybody kind of rush it at the same time, especially when tax season coming up and things like that. So if you're looking for a quick response, I highly recommend using our chat feature, which is in the bottom right corner of most pages. You'll see it's outlined there in the screenshot. That is going to a real person. You will get some automated messaging first. It says, hey, thanks for waiting for us. We'll be with you in a second. Here's some FAQ links, but you will be talking to a real person that's not a robot. Some of our members sometimes think that it is a robot. It's not. It's a real person. You can also call us. We have been experiencing long wait times for calls, but it is another option. And you'll see it's listed there calling customer service. One thing to keep in mind is because we are very backlogged right now and getting a ton of contacts is our phone line is now open from Monday to Wednesday. It's going to be closed Thursday and Friday. So Monday through Wednesday, you're going to have a phone line available Thursdays and Fridays, it's going to be closed. That just started this week. And we hope to open it back up to the full business week in the future. But right now we just want to make sure we're getting everybody. And that includes emails and things like that. So perfect. Next slide, please. Perfect. So right now it says Monday through Friday. That changed this morning. It's going to be for phones. It's Monday through Wednesday. And you'll see our phone numbers listed right there. I highly recommend making sure you're calling this number. If you call our front desk, because Google likes to show our front desk phone number, it's going to take us a couple of business days to receive your voice message. Because it kind of goes around the company and it takes a minute for somebody to send it over to us. So make sure you're calling that 1-800 number. The 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. time is still accurate. It will be from Monday through Wednesday. Chat support still will be available from Monday through Friday. We tend to be available from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific time. We are located on the West Coast, so everything's Pacific time usually for us. And as I mentioned, the contact or submissions, usually three to five business days. We are not in the office on Saturdays and Sundays. But it might take up to 10 business days right now because we're experiencing a ton of contact. So appreciate your patience if you're getting in touch with us. And again, chat's probably the fastest way to get in touch with us if you've got something urgent or you want to get an answer real quick. Something to keep in mind with client services is we can't assist you with your TechSoup account management like what's your qualification statuses, eligibility questions, navigating the products on techsoup.org. What we're not trained to provide is IT support. Client services is just customer service and account management. We do not provide product support like download installation. If you've got really in-depth functionality questions about a product, we can assist with.  So if you were having issues with your QuickBooks online, we'd have you contact Intuit and Intuit's representatives could assist you. Since you've got the same products available on the commercial market, it's not like they're creating something special for these programs. They're just basically discounting or donating the same exact product. So their representatives can usually assist you with working through things. And then of course we have that wonderful service help desk that Nick mentioned earlier. Great place to go that we're partnered with folks to fill that gap of support. Low cost, very effective. And if you've heard any reason you don't use it, you can always return that one. That one's a refundable product. If you don't use it, we can always confirm you didn't use the service. So help desk, I usually recommend members I work with to really check that out because it's a great service for anybody that's not tech savvy or wants someone else to install it. Things along those lines, great option. And then yeah, one last shout out to Grant Station. Just a reminder that it does, the promotion started at 6 a.m. this morning and it's ending at 5 p.m. Pacific time tomorrow. So if you try to check out with Grant Station at 6 p.m. Pacific time tomorrow, you're not gonna be able to. So remember there's a 5 p.m. Pacific deadline and you can access that by just typing in Grant Station into our search bar on techsoup.org or you can always go to the product catalog and use that donor company drop down to select Grant Station. And that is all I've got. Great, thank you very much, Kelly. Thank you, Shamira. And thank you everyone who joined the webinar today. And I just wanna leave you with a reminder that the point of TechSoup again here is to be very mission driven. We are here to serve nonprofits. We think that technology can play an extremely powerful role in your own mission delivery to the populations that you serve, whatever that mission may be. And most of the folks who joined us today are US based but I don't wanna actually forget to remind folks that TechSoup is also a global network. And what that means is that we are active around the world and operate in most countries around the world with NGOs in those countries as well. NGOs being non-governmental organizations because in other countries they're not necessarily called 501C3s, they're not necessarily called non-profits, some places they're called charities, there are lots of names for it. But we do take a very holistic view again of what civil society is, it's you. It's the people who've chosen to work to try to make the world a better place every day. And we think we can help you, we think technology can help you. And so if you wanna reach out because you need help please don't hesitate to do so. As I said, we'll share the recording of this webinar as well as the slide deck with you after the fact. And really appreciate your time and attention today. I know you're all busy people and have plenty to do. And thanks for making TechSoup part of that today. So have a wonderful day, bye-bye.


Straight now to Benway State where Governor Samuel Othom wants the federal government to help stop the invasion of farmland by herdsmen. The governor says this will remove the fears farmers face as they get set to embark on full-scale farming during the crop season. He stated they too are flagging off the distribution of improved seedlings and crops to thousands of farmers. Benway State is known as the food basket of the nation. It's still known by that appellation but the amount of food produced has been badly hit by insecurity and cases of cattle eating up farmland. Governor Samuel Othom is mindful of this and he's here to distribute improved seedlings and crops to 22,400 farmers across the 23 local government areas of the state. Othom says the seedlings and crops were high yielding and drought tolerant. We are going into watermelon production in mass and where the seedlings are here these efforts we have experimented and we discovered that they can do well here and we're not just looking at producing maize for consumption. We intend to massively produce it just like we produce soil grains. The Benway State's Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources Timothy Eger on his spot calls on the private sector to engage in the production of improved seedlings so they can be readily available to farmers. These achievements are coming despite the challenges that the governor and the government of Benway State are experiencing at the moment. This seed program is very timely now that have created an enabling environment for our farmers especially the IGPs to return to the essential homes. Those people that said that was not possible that is what they are doing now. We want to thank you on behalf of the chairman and the management to want to thank you for what you have done. The flag of ceremony had 4666 improved rice seedlings, 230 bags of maize seedlings, 690 tins of melon seedlings and 10,000 cassava stems. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


So, look, there are some things we could be talking about today in regards to Nintendo, right? There's a fake 4chan leak running around for Nintendo Switch 2, talking about the T254 chip or something. I don't know. It's completely made up and not actually in any of Nvidia's documentation. And it happens to pretty much have this pipe dream wishy-washy, pretty much mobile 4090 in your Nintendo Switch 2, kind of a crazy, crazy out there thing pipe dreamy that some people are talking about today. But I don't really want to talk about that because I just, look, it's 4chan and it's so pipe dreamy that it's clearly fake. But there are other things being talked about today as well, such as the fact that, hey, Thousand Year Door has this frame rate halved from the original release. It's running at 30 FPS, not 60 FPS. And while it includes a number of impressive things, it doesn't have anti-aliasing and we might bring that up in a moment. But what I really want to focus on is the future of Nintendo and what this Nintendo Direct to me signified. Now, it's fine if you disagree with me. Of course, we are talking about opinions here and we're all free to put our Analyzation hats on and speculate in many different directions on what this Nintendo Direct meant if anything. Now this was a Direct that was targeted just for Nintendo Switch with games through winter, although they still did that thing where, hey, some of the games are outside of winter, right? Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, notice they dropped Dark Moon from the title. An interesting choice. That's coming in summer. That was outside of the window. And then obviously games like Thousand Year Door that was announced at the end just has a blanket 2024 date probably coming in the second half of 2024. I do want to dive into what this Direct to me signified, why I personally wasn't that excited about the Direct but I am excited for you folks out there that are super pumped. There's a lot of you guys out there, especially for Thousand Year Door. I get it. It is one of the goat of goat games. But before I dive in, I just want to remind you, we are on our road to 150,000 subscribers. So I'd appreciate if you hit that like button, subscribe to the channel and wrangling that dingling to be notified of all notifications. All right. So I want to first look at this from the perspective of Nintendo has new hardware coming. I think this is something that some people live in denial of because Nintendo hasn't made some sort of reveal of this hardware. They haven't even talked about things like NX. They mentioned NX themselves as Nintendo, but Nintendo already actually referenced new hardware back in 2021. It was at an investor's meeting and they talked about the future of Nintendo accounts and how they are going to be forward compatible to the next dedicated gaming hardware coming out in 20XX. You guys have probably seen this chart many times. If you haven't, here it is, you know, it's like definitive proof that Nintendo literally said in 2021 they were working on new hardware. Just no idea when it's coming out. They didn't want to set any expectations. Nintendo has also stopped calling the switch in the middle of its life cycle. They actually stopped doing this almost two years ago at this point. So yeah, if it's been outside of the middle of its life cycle for a couple of years that already tells you, well, that probably means we're on the tail end. And then in addition to that, they have answered questions on hardware by saying, well, we're always working on new hardware, which is the blanket company statement that yeah, they're always working on something new. So if you want to live in denial that Nintendo is working on their next generation platform, working on new hardware, that is your personal choice. But I understand you probably felt burned by all the Switch Pro reports and rumors that existed back in 2019, 2020. And ultimately, we ended up just getting Switch OLED at the end of all of that. So I understand the frustration. But look, we have all the reports out there that are coming from developers, coming from Gamescom. We're likely about to get another slew of reports in about two weeks or so coming out of Tokyo Game Show, right? Tokyo Game Show is coming up. It happens next week. And probably about a week or two after Tokyo Game Show, we're going to get some reports out of there. They'll probably bring, if I assume, the same demos to Tokyo Game Show. But since it will be Nintendo of Japan showing it off, there is that potential of maybe even more information getting out there on this system coming from the Japanese developers. So there is high potential, obviously, for more information on the system to come out. One thing that is very, very clear is that the next system is coming. Nintendo has talked about the fact they're working on new hardware. They have mentioned that Nintendo accounts are forward compatible. We obviously have all the developer reports coming out. And then on top of all of that, stuff for manufacturing was coming out earlier this year as well. And we haven't have like some spec details, right? 8-inch LCD screen coming from Video Game Chronicle and everyone else seemed to corroborate that. The idea of a 3D Mario being the launch game doesn't really sound that far fetched. It's probably what we expect. And then on top of all of that, well, guess what? The Nintendo Switch is declining in sales. It is down year over year in software and hardware sales. And I know you can point it to the Kingdom and point to Mario Wonder and talk about how this software sales are still incredible. And on an individual game basis, even Pikmin 4, that is absolutely true. Overall software sales are down year over year. This is just a fact. It's not something I'm pulling out of a rabbit. You can look at Nintendo's financial reports for yourself to verify, yeah, sales are down year over year. So what does this really mean? It means that Nintendo is transitioning, right? They're planning to release some piece of new hardware, whether you want to call it another mid-gen refresh that we never got or you want to call it their next generation system. They're going to be transitioning to something more powerful and something different at some point in 2024. And to me, that's what this Nintendo Direct signified. This is the first Nintendo Direct that I could find. I went back through the entire Switch era of Directs even and then a little bit before. So some of the Wii U era, bit of the 3DS. And this is the first Direct I could spot that Nintendo did not announce a brand new published game. Now, they announced new games coming, ports and remasters. And technically, if you want to throw it out there, F-099 is not a prior existing game. And yes, they are putting that on Nintendo Switch Online. So you could argue that that is the new game. But they're not really publishing it. It's a free game being added to a service. It is not something that you can actually purchase individually and own. And that obviously means it's also temporary. Those that don't know, Pac-Man 99 leaves in October. This is the replacement game for Pac-Man 99. Why they keep making these 99 or Mario 35 games temporary beats me. The only one that really stuck around because it got released outside of NSO was Tetris. It's whatever. The point is that there wasn't a new published game that we could purchase coming from Nintendo outside of, yes, the Super Peach game. But again, they announced that, you know, the Super Peach game. Why do I call it? It's got a name now. Princess Peach Showtime, right? That game, by the way, looks incredible. Can we just talk about that for a hot minute? Man, Princess Peach Showtime looks way better than I ever expected it to. It still sort of gives me vibes of like a Yoshi Woolly World sort of game in that it's probably going to be fairly easy, but also extremely fun. And I can't wait to dive into that one. But again, it's more of a side dish. I wouldn't really call that a, you know, AAA game from Nintendo. So when we're looking at this, and by the way, that was announced in June. So that wasn't a new announcement. The title was a new announcement, but the game itself existing. That was announced back in June. Mario Wonder made a brief appearance at a sizzle reel. Again, announced back in June. There wasn't anything new announced in this one, which is weird, because Nintendo typically announced two brand new games every September. And they didn't do that this time. It said they announced more ports and remasters. And look, for me personally, I don't really replay a lot of games.  In fact, I think I've beaten that game like three times. It's literally one of them. I'm going to be honest. It's one of the top 10 games Nintendo's ever made. Like, I'm just, I'm going to be frank. The game is utterly amazing. And I am so happy for not only people that do replay games. I'm so excited for people that get to deep dive into this game again, that are really excited for it. And yeah, visually, it looks great. I'm also excited for people that are going to play it for the first time. You know, all the Paper Mario fans that really came on from the Wii on forward, I'm excited that they're going to get to experience this for the first time. I fully suspect this game itself, two, two and a half million, maybe more. We'll have to wait and see. It depends on when it releases and what else is releasing around the same time. Because again, we don't know. It's just some time next year. I am excited for that game existing. I'm not excited for it personally. And if you eliminate an excitement for that, what am I left with? Well, maybe the most exciting new announcement was actually Unicorn Overlord. And that wasn't from Nintendo. It's a third party game. But Unicorn Overlord to me looks absolutely fantastic. If you don't even remember what that game is, it's probably just because you remember this game that at first reminded you of Fire Emblem and it looked really, really good. But you don't remember the name because the name doesn't seem to line up with what you were watching. Like why the hell is this game called Unicorn Overlord? I don't know. It's one of those things you probably have to play the game to understand the context of the title. But I'm just looking at Nintendo and what they announced. And look, we have Donkey Kong. More sorry, Mario versus Donkey Kong got to put it in the direct order. But that's again, it's a remake slash remaster of a Game Boy Advance game. It's not a new game. And they didn't even show off new content in it. So I look at everything that we got. And outside of the port of the, well, I guess the remastered port of the Wii game coming from Japan. We didn't really get anything that tickles my fancy from Nintendo themselves. So for me, it really wasn't that great of a direct. That's why I gave it a grade C. I predicted it was going to be a grade C. Even though I wanted Metroid Prime 4 and stuff to be here, that was in my predictions video. There was my predictions and then there's my realistic expectations. My expectations were a C direct. And I felt like that's exactly what we got. And that doesn't necessarily make it a bad direct. What it did to me is signify Nintendo is transitioning. The Nintendo Switch 2 is coming. Whether you want to admit it or not, whether you want to live in denial or not, it's coming. It could come as soon as March. It could be summer next year. It could be fall. It could be obviously holiday season. The Nintendo Switch 2 is coming. Nintendo is not going to continue to allow their system to lose momentum. They're also not going to just carry the system for years on end with ports and remasters of GameCube games. It's just not going to happen. Nintendo is obviously making a lot of brand new video games, but they are waiting for a platform to put it on. And when we think logically about it, this might be why Metroid Prime 4 wasn't here. Because Metroid Prime 4 could become a cross generation title between Switch and Switch 2. Now no, I'm not saying a launch game. I think it would be a mistake to make Metroid Prime 4 the definitive launch game. I don't think that that would be... It can't do a Breath of the Wild then. I just think it's too risky for Nintendo to risk a series that's never sold more than 3 million... Well, slightly more than 3 million copies with Metroid Dread. I think it's way too risky to make that a definitive launch game for Switch 2. But I do think it'll come out a few months in. I'm starting to agree with my dear friend, I'll just restart. That it'll probably be maybe that Splatoon 2 slot that we saw on Switch. Remember Splatoon 2 came out a few months after launch? I could see this being a few months after launch, except it's also still on Switch. Maybe. There is a small potential that they decided to make it Switch 2 exclusive. I don't know if that's the choice they made. And there'll be a lot of Switch owners really mad, but what are you going to do? Nintendo is going to make whatever decision they think is in the best interest of the game. But I just sit back. And the way this Direct sets up, if you just look at it, we have the another code slash trace memory combo, the WDS combo coming in, what is it? January, right? We obviously have the Donkey Kong vs Mario or Mario vs Donkey Kong, GBA remake landing in February. And then, yeah, we got our only brand new game announced for next year, that is Princess Peach Showtime coming in March. And then it's summer and I don't know. If you look at the Nintendo 3DS, there's a lot of interesting correlations that were happening as they launched Switch and as Switch continued to exist. And that is that there was a high reliance on a bunch of IPs being ported and remastered. Mario and Luigi, right? You know, Mario Party Superstars was sort of a new one. But the point is that they put out a lot of, like, new, but not new games, right? Metroid, you know, was that Metroid Prime 2? Samus Returns? Like, they had a lot of correlations in how they handled 3DS eventually stop being made and obviously assuming everyone who wants to play handheld owns a Switch. I see a similar transition happening here, where Nintendo is just so reliant on ports and remasters that Switch 2 is going to come out before some of the games they showed in this Direct come out. Can we, look, I don't know this as a fact, but if I had to make a bet and sometimes I do like to bet, I would bet a significant chunk of money that the Nintendo Switch 2 comes out before the entire slate of games that they outlined for Nintendo Switch even release. Look, you can call that a risky bet if you want. I don't actually think it's that risky. Thousand-Year Door is just randomly sometime in 2024. There's no hint at when it's coming. I mean, I hope it's not delayed out in 2024. That would be weird, but to me, this is just what's happening. And so if you were let down by this Direct, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I think the first half of next year, a lot of exciting things are going to happen. We're going to still have a Direct, I feel. We're probably going to have the unveiling of a brand new system, a major event for that brand new system, maybe even the launch of that brand new system. So if you were let down by this Direct, I think it's just accepting that Nintendo is in a transitionary phase. And if you weren't let down, then none of this really matters. Whether a new system is coming or not, you're super excited by all the games coming out. You're probably going to buy a lot of them. I've seen people say, oh man, there's like over $300 worth of stuff I'm going to buy out of this. And that is incredible. And I'm so happy for you. For me, it's basically, look, I'm going to get Super Mario RPG because I actually didn't play that when I was a kid. So for me, that's a fun new experience. It's not something I'm replaying. It's something I'm experiencing for the first time. Mario Wonder, obviously, but again, I'm not trying to give the Direct really credit for these games. So it's basically the Super Princess Peach game, which again was a credit to the June Direct. And then I'll probably end up picking up the Unicorn Overlord game. So for me, it wasn't much. I want to though, not just know what you guys think about the Direct, right? Obviously, I want your comments down below. I also know I want to know your thoughts on Thousand Year Door. I have a feeling, and this is something I'm just attaching on the end, that Thousand Year Door may be a cross-gen situation. And what do I mean by that? Well, it's slated to come out sometime next year, right? We don't know when. And the game is halved in frame rates. I have this idea that if they have a version of it on the Nintendo Switch 2, that they're going to use DLSS with it. And that's where you're going to get your full 60 FPS. That's where you're going to get your anti-aliasing enabled. And that's where you're going to see even higher resolutions. And who knows, maybe a ray tracing in that bad boy? I mean, look, the lighting and everything looks incredible as is. Well, maybe it could look even better. So I'm just throwing out there that I have this gut feeling, like just deep inside the Thousand Year Door, maybe a cross-gen thing. Which I mean, look, the system's backwards compatible. It's sort of a mute point if it is cross-gen anyways. But backwards compatibility is still not a for sure thing. And hopefully we get clarity on that when Nintendo announces it. So let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. Again, I don't want to rain on everyone's parade, and I think this is the worst direct ever. Oh my, this is not. I just want to have this conversation on, even though I was a little disappointed, and some of you guys might have been even more disappointed, that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Because something's coming in this direct, to me, was like the nail in the coffin that, yeah, Switch's time's coming to an end, and that next thing's coming much sooner than many of us expected. I am Nathaniel Rovelljans from Nintendo Prime, and I'll catch you in the next video.